2013. 97 minutes. Rated PG-13.
“He’s different. He’s alive and he’s learning what it’s like to be human.”
R (Nicholas Hoult) has feelings. R has thoughts. This would be pretty typical for a teenager, but R is also a walking corpse. Despite his lack of blood pressure, R manages to maintain interests and keep his sweet bachelor pad–an abandoned 747–in the height of hipster style. He even has some very nice sports cars in mint condition hanging out on his airstrip. Unfortunately, it’s all pretty pointless without a warm-blooded girl to impress.
Enter Julie, (Teresa Palmer) only daughter of the apocalypse’s premier zombie-hunting general (John Malkovitch). After eating her boyfriend Perry’s (Dave Franco) brains, R absorbs Perry’s memories of Julie and falls in love with her himself. He saves her from the rest of the zombie horde and takes her home, where they spend the next few days listening to his awesome vinyl collection and avoiding the rest of R’s undead buddies. But eventually Julie takes off, leaving R heartbroken. He returns to his lonely life only to find that he and some of the other zombies are starting to turn back into humans through the power of love. Unfortunately, the ruling zombie class, dessicated skeletons known as Bonies, are absolutely not cool with this and plan to kill R and Julie–for good. R bravely infiltrates the human stronghold to warn Julie’s father, which goes about as well as you can imagine. Love triumphs, though. R regains his humanity and kissyfaces Julie, who I assume spends the rest of their mortal lives stubbornly refusing to think about where that mouth has been.
Warm Bodies the movie is based on “Warm Bodies” the young adult book by Isaac Marion. In the book, Perry’s personality lived on in R as his conscience, spurring the zombie’s development into a better being. But for the purposes of the film, R is supposed to be independently redeemable, so Perry is reduced to an unlikeable wuss and food source. (though he probably saves Julie’s life by being leftovers). The film conveniently glosses over R’s insatiable lust for living flesh, which was more of a significant factor in Marion’s original work, and really in every single other zombie fiction in history, too (apparently it’s hard to engineer a “nice guy” who sometimes eats people when he’s drunk).
Actingwise, Warm Bodies is a lightweight, but that’s not really a problem. R’s wooden demeanor not only brings out some of the hilarity of clumsy teenage zombie love, but harkens back to another undead cinematic dreamboat (there are a couple riffs on here, though not as many as I would have liked). His human scenes were nothing to write home about, but since he was a zombie most of the time, I didn’t really care. The living kids look appropriately silly with their assault rifles in one hand and their Gameboys in the other. The only odd note was Malkovitch, who overacted badly and seemed to miss the fact that everyone else was just having fun with the thing.
Warm Bodies primarily follows the storyline of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but it’s way more Hollywood-friendly–that is to say, no double-suicide and no secret marriage. So if it dragged a bit, that was probably just because half the freaking story got cut. R and Julie could only spend so long partying in the airplane before I started to drift. Luckily, they hit the road almost as soon as that happened, so boredom was avoided (narrowly) .
True believers may find themselves irked by the softness of R and his buddies relative to George Romero’s undead, but those with saner significant others will appreciate the common ground that this tongue-in-cheek romance offers. (Timely!) Still, I would have liked to see R lose control and accidentally chow down on Julie, then try again with another living girl, and so on. I just think it would have been funny.
Warm Bodies reminded me of Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead in its crossover appeal and unusual (for a zombie movie) upbeat overtones. Zombie fans will enjoy it for the premise, but even Grandma will find it more amusing than scary. That said, don’t bring Grandma, because it’s totally a date movie. Plan it for V-Day.
