'DMZ' review: Comic book adaptation never quite gets in the zone

Somewhere in the multiverse, Alma decided to stay and look for her son instead of pointlessly yelling for him – and the TV viewers of that world thanked her for it. Photos: Handout

Somewhere in the four hours that make up the Vertigo Comics-based miniseries DMZ is a compelling tale about a mother trying to save her son from manipulative forces and the toxicity of his environment.

Just don't count on that tale shining through the murk of extremely slipshod world-building, unrealised potential and a dramatic tableau that seems hopelessly disconnected from the big picture of the premise.

Having very little knowledge of the 72-issue comic by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli (hey, there's only so much I could read), I approached DMZ the series with no expectations – and was quite dismayed to find that it did nothing to endear itself to fresh and unbiased eyes.

A second Civil War in America has left the country split into the United States and the Free States of America, two nominal adversaries that hardly get any screen time.

For some reason, Manhattan has been declared a no man's land by both sides and turned into a de-militarised zone (hence "DMZ"). The remaining inhabitants, who failed to evacuate to either side's territory at the outset of the war, have been left to their own devices.

'Sigh, the city hasn't been the same since we loaned it to Will Smith for that movie location.'

Uh, OK, so why is it that in this miniseries, the very turf that was abandoned has suddenly become the centre of an insidious game between the two factions? With little to nothing shown of the USA or the FSA, aside from the occasional glowering walk-on character, don't expect to understand why.

So we are forced to focus on what we do get: eight years after her escape from New York, medic Alma "Zee" Ortega (Rosario Dawson) sneaks back in to look for the son she lost during the evacuation.

This is after, as she tells anyone who never asked in the first place, she trekked the length and breadth of the country (countries?) looking for him. (At the start of the show, I wondered why she didn't just stay behind to look for him right at the moment they got separated, seeing as how he meant the whole world to her. Please, save yourself the effort, because I was no closer to understanding that by the end.)

In the course of her search, she runs into a power struggle for the DMZ between charismatic Parco Delgado (Benjamin Bratt) and "visionary" Wilson Lin (Warrior's Hoon Lee), both of whom she conveniently has history with.

Each man wants to be governor of the DMZ, a place that is surprisingly clean and pretty chill for turf that's surrounded by (so other characters tell us) murder alleys, psychopaths and cannibals.

If that last bit gets you hoping for some Escape From New York-style urban terror, forget it – this DMZ, with its unknown sources of food, proud street culture and clean clothes (even though it seems that water is a commodity tightly controlled by one of the many factions), is just too picturesque.

Well, on the streets, anyway. Inside buildings and in alleyways, it's all murder and squalor. If a city could have dissociative identity disorder, this DMZ is it.

'Nice, eh? Would you expect any less of A-Number-One, the Duke of New York... hey, what do you mean that title's taken?'

I suppose part of the botched product has to do with the pandemic, since Ava DuVernay (A Wrinkle In Time) shot the first episode of what was to be an ongoing series back in March 2020 before everything ground to a halt.

By the time production resumed last year, with Ernest Dickerson (Tales From The Crypt: Demon Knight) helming the rest, it was retailored into a miniseries – and presumably, large chunks of exposition, the backstory of the conflict's key players, as well as any hope of a satisfying story got cut out.

For sure, the resulting product wastes the potential to let DMZ's core premise say something insightful about today's post-truth, every-difference-is-irreconcilable world and how this primes the powderkeg for the postulated Civil War.

It's too bad because this also results in a waste of charismatic performances by the three principal performers, as well as a great conflicted turn by Freddy Miyares (When They See Us) as Parco's vicious enforcer Skel.

And to be sure, some characters get off too lightly given their earlier infractions. But could we have withstood a further episode waiting around for appropriate comeuppances to be handed out? So it is what it is, then.

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All four episodes of DMZ are available to stream on HBO GO/ Astro On Demand.