Let's start with the good. Compelling source material. Classic zombie apocalypse setting. Superb production values. Pedro Pascal, who delivers a compelling and believable performance.

Now the bad. The writing, the writing, and the writing. By far the most tearing-my-own-hair out catastrophe in this whole production is Ellie's dialogue. No teenage girl talks or acts like this. She speaks with the words and cadence of a middle-aged smartass American writer during a cocaine binge, which is of course the person who wrote her lines. But part of basic writing is to write lines that a character would actually say. Her persona is essentially RDJ'd Tony Stark in a teenage girl's body. It's a pathetic, hackneyed, and transparent attempt to give us an uBeR cOoL gIrLbOsS character that we're supposed to love. I doubt many did. Even if the writing was remotely plausible, Bella Ramsay just does not have that sort of charisma.

I'm certain that most people are as bored as I am of this cliche, where they make a child character who is supposed to be precocious or wise beyond her years, but people like that do exist and none of them would ever talk or act like this. It's such a failure on the part of the writer because it breaks your suspended disbelief every time, which could have been avoided.

Unfortunately that's not the only braindead Hollywood cliche that stains this production. We also have the classic 'characters sacrificing themselves for no logical reason whatsoever for a cheap emotional bit', characters who are supposedly survivors but stop and gawp without reacting at all whenever lethal danger comes right at them (so that they can be conveniently saved at the last moment by a cheap plot connivance) and characters running into gunfire to "save" other characters who aren't injured and can walk or run perfectly fine.

Overall the plot spends way too much time going nowhere for poor returns in entertainment value.

So yeah. Could have been excellent. Instead is distinctly average.