- Directed by Gonzales Lopez-Gallego
- Written by Eddie Borey, Chris Borey
- Stars Sharlto Copley, Thomas Kretschmann, Josie Ho, Joseph Morgan
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 42 Minutes
- Trailer: https://youtu.be/WRhZJ4M9E5M
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s a slow burn putting together who these people are and what’s going on. Maybe a little too slow of a burn. But it’s well done and entertaining over all. Good cast, realistic effects, and a decent story.
Synopsis
A man wakes up in severe pain. His bones crack and pop and he’s really dirty. He pulls keys and a Zippo from his pocket, and he sees that he’s been injured as well; there’s a dead man laying next to him. No, there’s a whole pit full of dead people, and he’s trapped down there with all of them. He finds a gun, and then someone finally throws him a rope. Credits roll.
The man makes his way to a nearby house. He goes in and finds several people and a dead body in the living room. The man explains that he doesn’t remember anything before the pit; he doesn’t know who he is. The body on the floor starts screaming; he’s not really dead. We soon learn that none of these people know who they are. They do have a pile of driver’s licenses, so they can figure out their names at least. Our man doesn’t have one, so we still don’t have a name for him. There’s also a mute Chinese woman who doesn’t understand English, but she seems to know who everyone is.
They search the house and find a calendar with the 28th circled in two days. The Asian woman runs off into the woods, and our guy starts having flashbacks. They find more bodies in the woods, corpses tied to trees with rope and barbed wire. Michael and Nathan, back at the house, still don’t have any real memories, but they do have certain skills that they haven’t forgotten.
They find a wild woman chained up in the shed, who seems to know and dislike our guy, who is now going by “John Doe.” The next morning, they search the grounds and find still more bodies.
Michael finds a guy stuck on the barbed wire fence who’s still alive. The man turns the tables and kills Michael. John and Sharon find a huge empty building with a little boy who calls the man “Jonah.” Back at the house, Lukas is having headaches and flashbacks himself.
Nathan goes out alone and finds several cabins in the woods, each with more dead bodies. Each of the characters gets a little screen time so that we can know them better, but it’s pretty mundane and slow-going.
Lukas finds a lab in the basement with four large, human-sized cells that are all empty. He finds a video camera with footage showing Jonah experimenting on Lukas and the Asian woman. Nathan finds another crazy woman, and he knows her name is Helen. She lunges at him, and he barely escapes.
Sharon and Jonah come upon zombie-like men working in the forest with axes who suddenly charge right for them. They come across more dead bodies, and the zombie-men won’t approach closer due to the smell. It appears the corpses were put up to act as scarecrows. They return to the house, where Lukas points a gun at Jonah and explains what he saw on the tape. Jonah freaks out; he really doesn’t seem to know what he’s done.
Lukas dumps Jonah back in the pit of corpses, and thee are a lot of them. Lukas, however, seems to be becoming more and more unhinged; he’s clearly sick. He attacks Sharon and the still-unnamed Asian girl, but they fight back. The Asian girl throws a rope down to Jonah which almost exactly mirrors the scene in the opening credits.
Jonah still can’t remember what happens on the 18th. He finds a camp with lots of photos and maps in it, which triggers some memories. He runs into some more zombie-people who growl and get all hostile. He finds a cooler full of medicine which causes him to remember still more: something about the army.
Jonah remembers. He’s a doctor, and he was trying to cure the others of a zombie plague. The cure knocks out the recipient while it works, greatly slowing their breathing and pulse, and gives them memory loss when they wake. Lukas attacks him, and Jonah is forced to kill him in self-defense. Elsewhere, Nathan finally regains his memories as well; he’s Jonah’s brother.
Zombies attack the house with Nathan and Sharon inside. Jonah races back to the house in his car until it runs out of gas, then he runs on foot.
Morning comes and it’s the 28th. Someone outside shoots the zombies, and Nathan yells for help, running outside. It’s the rescue party! Nope. The soldiers shoot him, and not by accident.
Jonah meets up with Sharon, while the Asian woman evades the soldiers. A crazy woman stabs Sharon, and they end up right back in the corpse pit so they can hide. Jonah injects them both with more cure so they can appear to be dead. Throughout the day, the soldiers throw in more bodies. Before she passed out, Sharon left a note that explains everything; he doesn’t see the note when he wakes up, and his memory is gone again. The mute woman is immune to the virus, and she is the key to a cure. We hear Sharon’s note explaining all in voice over as Jonah and the mute woman walk away.
We see thousands and thousands of dead bodies. There’s a sliver of hope that Johan will recover his memory and recreate the cure, and the mute woman will be with him. But they may already be too late…
Commentary
So if you’re a murderer and don’t remember doing it, can you actually have any remorse for the crime? You don’t even remember doing it? For a while, it was looking like Jonah might be the next Dr. Moreau or something, but that’s not the way it worked out.
It’s a classic group-of-people-with-no-memory story. Who are we? Why are we here? Who did this to us? It’s clear that something very nasty has been going on, but the prime suspect also seems to be the hero of the story.
It didn’t go where I expected, which is good. I liked it more than I thought I would in the beginning.