Steven StevenYeun

Walking Dead 2 is coming at home

Interviews Video  By Alfonso De Elias

Season Two lead cinematographer Rohn Schmidt’s gritty, hopelessly dour mise en scene is perfectly depicted on Anchor Bay’s Blu-ray transfer. The Walking Dead: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray arrives courtesy of AMC and Anchor Bay Entertainment. The show is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, mixed in 7.1 Dolby TrueHD. The season’s 13 episodes are spread among four discs. An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe, causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of months, society has crumbled: There is no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV.

Rick Grimes finds himself one of the few survivors in this terrifying world. He was a small town cop who had only fired his weapon a couple times but never at anyone and had only ever seen one dead body. Separated from his family, he must sort through the death and horror to try and find his wife and son. In a world ruled by the dead, people are forced to finally begin living.

Shot on Super 16, The Walking Dead is a textured, gritty looking series, often painted with morose, bleak visuals and a stark, apocalyptic palette reminiscent of other zombie films. The Blu-ray presentation outdoes the already staggering HD broadcast by delivering a cleaner, crisper presentation.

It’s probably not a series for the ages, but any genre programming that can both appeal to its base market and still drum up intrigue in other demographics has to have something going on under its hood. Most images are defined by pale colors that yield a gray, bleak, hopeless sort of visual structure that reinforces the themes of despair and death and emphasizes the general end-of-days misery. The zombie apocalypse is not just about mindless nonstop zombie smashing for people with ADHD. It’s more about the loss of humanity and how people interact with each other so this Blu-ray-DVD has English and French languages with English subtitles.