Warm Bodies

Quick Impressions:
I’ve never liked zombies.  Nobody with a brain should date one.  They’ll fall apart on you!

Okay that was zombie humor.  But seriously, zombies do nothing for me.  Vampires are seductive.  Werewolves are tormented.  Ghosts are haunted.

Zombies are gross.  At best, they’re unnatural.  (The living are supposed to eat dead flesh, not the other way around.)  At worst, they’re depressing.  (Seriously.   Mindlessly shuffling around, groaning through dull, soulless, repetitive routines, motivated mainly by hunger?  That’s life!  The afterlife is supposed to deliver something more. Nobody dreams of dying and carrying on the status quo in a body that’s past its sell-by date!  No wonder zombies are a staple of our most horrific nightmares.  They upend the natural order and replace it with something worse (more boring, more ugly, more meaningless)!

No, escapism in the form of imagining hordes of decomposing stalkers trying to eat my brain has never really done it for me.

Still, after weeks and weeks of Oscar-baity prestige films, I was so ready to see a 2013 release, and Warm Bodies looked promising.

The brightly colored movie poster with the playful tagline, “He’s still dead but he’s getting warmer,” tricked me into thinking that the movie was a comedy.  You know, like Shawn of the Dead, but with teenagers?  A high school Zom Com?

In fact, Warm Bodies is not a comedy.  Though it has its share in humor, the movie actually owes more to Shakespeare than to Shawn of the Dead.  It’s not a light-hearted zombie romp, but neither is it typical, mindless zombie horror.  R is not a typical zombie.

Even though the movie wasn’t quite what I expected, in the end, it was a much better film that I had anticipated.  Because I wanted to see something fun and fresh (a non-Oscar contender), I would have settled for less.  But I didn’t have to.  Warm Bodies is a pretty good movie.

The Good:
Voice-over narration (especially as much of it as we get in this movie) rarely works.  On the page, first person is fine because there has to be some kind of narration, but films take the concept of “show don’t tell” to an entirely different level.  Why do we need to hear a character report his thoughts directly to the audience when he could more naturally express them to other characters or act on them as we all sit and watch?

Well, narration does become necessary when the character’s interior life is so different from his outward interactions.  If R didn’t narrate his thoughts for us, we wouldn’t know that he had thoughts at all.  We’ve all seen zombies before.  We all know that they’re mentally stunted (because they’re dead).

But in the first few moments of the film, R establishes himself as an exception to everything we’ve ever taken for granted about zombies.  In a time when there’s unprecedented interest in and awareness of the autism spectrum, various mental illnesses, the anatomy and function of the brain, R invites us to reexamine our beliefs about zombies and reminds us that we should never assume that a person unable to communicate his thoughts has no thoughts to communicate.  In R’s world, zombies are not vacant.  Apparently at least some of them have a rich interior life.  They’re just unable to articulate their thoughts.

So unlike many zombie movies, this one doesn’t demonize the zombies. The people behind the wall may refer to the zombies as “corpses” or talk about “humans versus zombies,” but actually the zombies are humans.  They’re sick humans, infected with a virus that has damaged their nervous system.

Having a witty, articulate zombie narrator is definitely an unexpected twist, but the movie works largely because of the first-person narration.  Nicholas Hoult (who made a positive impression on me as Hank McCoy in X-Men: First Class) does the narration really well, and also does a great job of distinguishing between his character’s thoughts and his character’s actions.  When we see R in action, he’s so different from his interior voice, yet thanks to Hoult’s well-done stares, we are able to believe that the person narrating and the person groaning really are one-and-the-same guy.  Hoult does a lot with his eyes.  How do you play a philosophical zombie?  He does an amazing job creating and selling the character.

The rest of the cast is good, too.  I remember Teresa Palmer from her relatively small role as Number 6 in I Am Number Four (a movie my stepson loves).  When she does an American accent, she seems a lot like a blond Kristen Stewart, which probably means that she has a bright future ahead of her in Hollywood because Kristen Stewart doesn’t have time to play every part that somebody envisions being embodied by a Kristen-Stewart type.

I really love Dave Franco.  He’s like a younger, less pretentious James Franco.  Even though his role is smaller than I would have liked, he gets to break out of his hand-me-down-stoner persona here as Julie’s ill-fated boyfriend Perry and pulls off the transition pretty successfully.

Analeigh Tipton (memorable from her role as Robbie’s babysitter in Crazy Stupid Love) is delightful, too.  She reappears late in the film to get a lot of the movie’s funniest moments.

As R’s best zombie pal M, Rob Corddy gave a performance that I sometimes loved.  (At other times, I thought the character’s lines—and Corddy’s delivery of them—seemed a little forced.)

By the time you get a feel for what kind of movie this is, it would almost be a surprise if John Malkovich didn’t show up as the leader of the free world.  He’s pretty good here, though the role is definitely not difficult for someone of his talents.

Based on Isaac Marion’s novel, writer/director Jonathan Levine’s screenplay is consistently entertaining and thought provoking.  Is this movie going to change your life?

No.  Is it treading on completely new ground?  No.  Despite its wacky premise, Warm Bodies working well within a pretty safe formula.  But it’s still fun to watch.  And its ideas are deep enough to seem profound and new to an audience that has never considered them before.  There’s enough visual metaphor and heavy symbolism going on to allow for several non-contradictory interpretations of what the film is really trying to say.  As a director, Jonathan Levine is now two for two in my book.  (Somehow, I never saw The Wackness, but I really loved 50/50 and thought it was criminally overlooked during awards season last year.)

Best Scene Visually:
Any movie that begins with a bunch of zombies milling around an airport is doing something right.  Though not what I’d expected, the movie’s opening sequence is extremely effective.  Even without R’s witty commentary on the situation, the sight of a bunch of zombies wandering aimlessly around an airport works on all kinds of levels (most of them absurdly delightful).  It feels like the surviving punchline that somehow managed to outlive the rest of its joke.

The moment when R eats that final bit of brain and sees something he didn’t expect is also very well done.

Funniest Scene:
Here’s what made me laugh.  R. collects things, and he loves music, but he doesn’t have any mp3s or CDs, just a bunch of old records in a box.  Is this because he’s living in a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland where iPods aren’t available?  No, he just prefers vinyl.  Um obviously.

It’s better.

He may eat brains and bleed a weird brown ooze substance with an odor so powerful that it masks the scent of living humans, but he’s not some loser who can’t appreciate the superior sound quality of vinyl!

Maybe that’s the moment that Julie realizes it’s okay to fall in love with him.

Scene That Made Me Go “UHHHRRRHHHGHH” [Insert Zombie Groan]:
When Julie decided to get some fresh air by walking outside…onto her balcony.

I’m not complaining about the movie, really.  I’m just disappointed with myself for this one.  It completely blindsided me, and usually I can spot things like by the end of the opening credits.  My only defense is that early on, I got so swept up in the unlikely novelty—“That witty hipster zombie is talking to us about his vinyl record collection!”—that I just didn’t notice anything else.

Not coincidentally, this was also the scene that made me realize that R was never going to remember the rest of his name.

Best Action Sequence:
As in most movies involving any kind of action, the most exciting part comes at the end.  But I also love the tension of the moment under the airplane rather early on the film when Julie still views herself as a captive.  All of that zombie sniffing is pretty exhilarating.

The Negatives:
These are really just petty, personal quibbles.

First of all, I really didn’t like Julie.  She was the one I found cold in the beginning, not R.  (Now don’t tell me.  I realize that’s sort of the point.  It’s done intentionally.)  But for whatever reason, it was really difficult for me to warm up to the character.  Well, okay, actually, I know the reason.  I understand that she’s known a lot of suffering, but if your friend were dating a girl and then somebody ate him, wouldn’t you find it a bit off-putting if the girl seemed completely okay with that?  (Well, let’s face it, more than okay.)

I’m glad I never fell in love with this girl.  What’s all this, “Well, you know, I’ve been preparing for it for a long time because he’d started to remind me of my father, so it’s better that he’s been eaten, really, because let’s face it, I need someone edgier who appreciates vinyl and rebellion…”?

Just in general, from the balcony scene on, the movie began to disappoint me slightly.  I’ll be honest, for a long, long time I was secretly holding out hope that R might unexpectedly eat her after all.  The beginning of the movie seemed so different, the premise so novel, but then Warm Bodies concluded in such a formulaic, tired way.  Now, I know that the ending is satisfying and uplifting (although I think it works best on a symbolic level.  On a literal level, it’s all a bit messy and problematic).  But come on, what if R ate Julie?  (I’m not talking about making her his zombie bride.  I mean what if he just went to town and ate her brains.  Then he’d know what she really thought of him!)  I don’t know where the movie would go from there, but that’s the point.

The final act is not as strong as what comes before.  And the conclusion would be more satisfying if the nature of the virus were explained.  (Was the world attacked through biological warfare by an alien civilization that needed our warm bodies to grow versions of themselves who could survive on this planet?  I like that idea.  And it explains why the Bonies are so utterly inhuman.)  I mean, the whole thing works nicely as any number of metaphors, but on the literal level there are a lot of unanswered questions.

Overall:
I liked Warm Bodies, and I’m not into zombie movies or zombie culture at all.  Even though it’s not really a comedy, the movie’s still lots of fun and has something useful to say.  The young cast is very strong (so is John Malkovich), the script is good, and the soundtrack is contagiously delightful.  (It must be the vinyl.  Even zombies know that’s how you get the best sound!)