SXSW Review: Ava DuVernay & Roberto Patino’s ‘DMZ’ Is Thrilling, Terrifying & A Trojan Horse For America 2022
deadline.comThey say the devil is in the details, and that is certainly true for the dystopia dazzle that is Ava DuVernay and Roberto Patino’s DMZ.Having just had its world premiere at SXSW today and set to debut on HBO Max on March 17, the Rosario Dawson, Hoon Lee and Benjamin Bratt-led adaptation of Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli.
comic of the same name can be best summarized in the massive graffiti splayed across a dilapidated Manhattan building – “We’re Still Here.”Yes, in the agile sociological hands of 13th and When They See Us director DuVernay, it is all still here, even more so in a further broken America.
The racial, gender, class warfare and constant betrayal that has been soaked in the soil since before America even became a country is still here in the near future of DMZ and the wound is moist and fresh. ““It’s all about our future now, it ain’t about the past,” declares electioneering gang kingpin Parco Delgado, portrayed by the shining charisma comet that is Benjamin Bratt, late in the four-episode run.
Yet, in America, fictional and factual, it is still always about the past even if some in the winner’s circle don’t know it.Abandoned and walled in as the Second American Civil War roars, bombs drop and competing outside institutional forces maneuver, the resulting vacuum of a demilitarized zone that this POC dominated Manhattan crumbles into a terror that controls even more than it kills.As Dawson’s haunted medic Alma Ortega awakes from a bad dream and nearly a decade after everything fell apart, in the opening moments of the DuVernay directed opening episode DMZ crashes into an even more horrific reality It is the truth of a nation gnawed apart by the very divisions that have long saddled us and have been let
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