Movie Review: Warm Bodies
Warm Bodies offers a new twist on the rom-zom-com (you’ve gotta love that term). While the film that the term originated with, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, featured a couple reconciling in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, Warm Bodies gives us the beginnings of an unlikely couple born out of an uprising of the undead. It’s the story of two star-crossed lovers whose relationship is seemingly doomed due to the fact that one of them happens to be dead.
This premise of a zombie falling in love with a girl who’s still alive is a pretty fresh concept that sets us up for some situations that are awkward, sweet, comical, and a bit gross all at once. But it also gives us a film that comments on identity and human interaction. When we first meet our lovelorn zombie, R (Nicholas Hoult), we find him wandering around an airport, narrating the details of his “life” to us. He refers to himself as R because he doesn’t even know who he is, or who he used to be; he thinks his name started with an R back when he was a human, but that’s about all he can remember. But despite the fact that he’s only a zombie, he’s not happy. Unlike the other zombies, he thinks that there’s more to life than just eating brains. R feels lonely, despondent, and desperate for some form of human contact. The only interaction he is able to able to experience nowadays is to repeatedly grunt and groan at his best “friend” at the airport.
This setting of an airport is very telling. A place we normally associate with life passing us by as we wait for our flight serves as the same place where R’s death is passing him by as he waits for something more meaningful to come along. As he meanders through the terminals, he tells us how he longs for the days where people could actually connect with each other; talking, laughing, sharing in each others’ lives. Of course, as he says this, we’re treated to a visual of how things actually were before the zombie epidemic: an all-too-realistic scene of individuals sitting silently, staring intently at their smartphones, and doing anything they can to avoid any form of contact with another person. So is R really missing out on anything, or does he just not remember how much like zombies people already were before they truly started to become undead? Either way, he still feels like he’s missing out on something.
But R finds that something when his he and his zombie hoard venture out of their stagnant airport and out into what used to be society. They come across a group of young survivors searching for supplies. During the ensuing mayhem R devours the brains of one of the living young men (Dave Franco). Upon doing so, he is flooded with a rush of memories and emotions from the boy’s life. We find that this is the only way R is able to feel anything anymore, by living vicariously through what he sees when he eats peoples’ brains, much like how many people today live only through what they see on television or movie screens. But R also starts undergoing a change when he lays eyes on a Julie (Teresa Palmer), a girl in the group of survivors who turns out to be the girlfriend of the unlucky fellow whose brains just became R’s lunch. When he sees her, his heart starts beating and he begins feeling things he hasn’t felt since he was alive. Not knowing why exactly he’s doing it, R rescues Julie from his fellow zombies and brings her safely back to his airport with him.
At this point in the movie, it begins to function as a type of retelling of Romeo and Juliet. However, this is also where the movie begins to falter and drag a bit. Although the it’s clear that a relationship is developing between R and Julie, it never really becomes clear how or why Julie reciprocates R’s feelings. Sure, they have a bit of fun listening to music together and Julie can’t help but marvel at the fact that R is a zombie that can feel, but it still feels as if there is no real reason for the two to connect in the way they do. Later in the film Julie simply seems to realize how she truly feels about R.
However, what is clear is that Julie is to humans what R is to zombies: a dissident who is willing to accept something outside the norm and connect with others. Julie lives in a part of the city in which survivors have walled themselves off in order to be protected from the horrors outside (yet another parallel to people shutting themselves out from society). However, we learn that Julie has grown tired of being stuck within the walls and has taken to slipping through those walls and exploring the world outside despite the danger and the warnings from her overbearing father (John Malkovich),who is also the leader of the survivors. Julie’s differences from her father and the other survivors are exemplified even further when even after R’s beating heart is discovered, and there’s hope for finding a way to return the zombies back to life, Julie’s father is still worried only about the protection of those within his walls, not willing to reach out and help others.
While on a thematic level R and Julie are perfect for for one another we can’t help but feel that the two of them wind up together only because the plot dictates that they should, and not because of any genuine chemistry. Even though the relationship of its two main characters doesn’t feel completely genuine, Warm Bodies still treats us to an entertaining and endearing movie that gives us a fresh spin on a popular genre and still carries a deeper meaning: that simply waiting around for life to begin will leave us unfulfilled, so we need to take the initiative in living life and make an effort to become a part of the world around us.
Grade: B-
Good review Jokain. I think if it had an R-rating, it'd be true cult-classic material but right here, right now, it's a pretty good movie that knows what it is and at least tries to be nothing more or less.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Dan! I agree, if the studio would have gone for an R-rating by putting in some more gore and gruesomeness they probably could have gotten in further with horror crowd and had a cult classic on their hands. But they were definitely going for something more accessible to general audiences, and it succeeds at that. It's no wonder they released it 2 weeks before Valentine's Day instead of 2 weeks before Halloween.
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