Marvel Zombies Review

Marvel Zombies is a 4-episode series that continues the zombie apocalypse story started in Marvels What if… Zombies?! episode. It follows marvel heroes and other characters as they fight zombies and try to find a way to still save the world. 

Truthfully, I’m not a fan of zombies. They freak me out and I’m usually not too keen on watching anything with zombies in it. But I’ve had a few exceptions over the years. Marvel characters dealing with a zombie apocalypse is one of them. I watched the What if… episode in October for Halloween last year and thought I’d do the same this year, considering it just came out in the end of September. 

There are good elements about this series and some not so good elements. The concept itself is interesting, obviously inspired by the comics Marvel Zombies. I really like the idea of characters still having their powers and skills even after they turned into zombies. It makes this zombie apocalypse more unique than others. 

There are some really good potential story elements in this series. I don’t want to give them away and end up spoiling things, so I won’t go into too many details. I enjoyed certain aspects of the story, like heroes working with villains to survive and the creative decisions around certain characters. 

However, there were a lot of plot holes. For instance, why are certain characters who don’t have any powers able to survive over those who do? Why would Kate Bishop last longer than Hawkeye or Riri Williams rather than Tony Stark? There didn’t seem to be any legit reason for it. The show possibly suggested that they hid away most of the time to survive. However, that in itself would cause other plot holes.  

Frankly, the choices of who survived and who didn’t seem to be based solely on someone wanting to push certain characters over others. And to be honest, I’m a bit on the fence about that.  

On one hand, seeing some of the newer MCU characters makes sense and gives us something new. We’ve already seen a lot of the old Avengers’ characters, after all. On the other hand, I don’t know anything about a majority of the newer characters. I didn’t even know who some of them were, and it took a while until a character finally mentioned a name for them. Some weren’t even named at all, and I had no clue who they were until I looked it up after finishing the series. 

And with not knowing much about any of the characters, it made some of the story choices confusing to me. I know nothing about Kamala Khan, so the significance of her power in the story made absolutely no sense to me. 

Now, to get back to my point a few paragraphs ago when I said, “potential story elements.” I added the word “potential” because while the concepts were interesting, and they touched on them a bit, it wasn’t nearly enough. They had so much more potential in these ideas but fell a bit short in really bringing out these interesting concepts. 

Personally, I think the short length contributed to that. A longer series with more episodes would have allowed the writers to really dive deeper into a lot of the intricate details. I also think they wasted some time in areas that could have gone to others. For example, if they cut down some unneeded extra parts in the first episode, they could have added that time onto the fight with Thanos.  

The art and animation looked good. It’s crisp and clear and there was a lot of detail in the background and scenery of each scene. The fight scenes were nicely done as well. They were honestly the best part about this series. Seeing people with powers and excellent combat skills fight zombies is just really cool. 

However, I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t get more of them. For some reason, the writers chose to have a lot of the surviving characters not even have any powers at all. There’s nothing wrong with seeing people shoot at zombies, but that’s what we get all the time. This was an opportunity to see something more unique, and while we did get fights with powers, I would have loved to see more. 

The final battle in the last episode was the best part of the whole series. There are some really cool fight scenes in there, like one of Spider-Man you can see in the trailer. There’s also another particular part that really makes the final battle fun to watch, but I’d be giving away a spoiler if I added any details about what it is.  

I did enjoy watching Marvel Zombies. I was compelled to keep watching more to see who would and wouldn’t survive because you just truly didn’t know. It makes you want to know what will happen next and if the remaining survivors would win.  

The zombies were creepy, and they did a good job at portraying that. The darker tone made it more unique from other Marvel projects. They even did a good job adding some emotion to certain deaths that did make me a bit sad. However, Marvel really needs to tone down their comedy.  

Comic relief is good and needed to lighten up the tone every so often. But the switch was jarring. It’s like Marvel can’t ever let a scene stay serious anymore. Not every character needs to be a comic relief character, but lately that seems to be the main personality of most Marvel characters. And this is coming from someone who doesn’t even really like dark and serious themes! 

There are too many comic relief cooks in the kitchen. I liked some of the comedy, like what came from Spider-Man, for example. But some of it wasn’t needed and was misplaced. There needed to be a few more serious characters added to the mix of survivors to add a better balance of personality. 

Overall, I did find Marvel Zombies interesting to watch. I liked the concepts it dabbled in but wish they focused on those a bit more than some of the story elements they did focus on. The action was great and would have been even better if we could have seen more of it. The writing could have been a bit better, especially if they cut back on some of the comedy and peppered it in better, but there were certain story elements that were really good. 

It’s a short series and can easily be watched in one sitting, so if you’re a Marvel fan I do recommend watching it. It’s especially perfect for October. But it will definitely confuse someone who doesn’t watch a lot of the MCU. There are a lot of plot holes, but if you turn your brain off, it’s still enjoyable to watch. It ends on a cliffhanger, but it’s a tad confusing how it’s done. Depending on whether they end up making more will really affect how the ending is received.  The series could have been better, but I still enjoyed watching it.

Check out some of my other Marvel reviews as well.

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