Warm Bodies

 

On paper, Warm Bodies has a premise that sounds like it shouldn't work.  It's essentially a post-apocalyptic love story between a zombie and a human survivor, and how love slowly restores the humanity to the zombie.  And yet, the movie does work, thanks in large part to the clever and witty screenplay by writer-director Jonathan Levine (50/50).  He knows just when to poke fun at the central idea, but he also knows how to reign back, and actually endear these characters to us.  No small feat, considering one of the romantic leads is technically dead, and eats brains.

The movie starts out the same way a lot of zombie movies do, with a virus having wiped out most of the world's population.  The few survivors live huddled in a barricaded and militaristic city.  They live in constant fear of the zombies that slowly shuffle about the city streets, searching for humans to feast on.  We learn that the zombies are not even the worst things out there.  There are also walking skeleton monstrosities referred to as "Bonies", that kind of look like they walked in from one of the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies.  We're introduced to this world, not by one of the human survivors, but by one of the zombies.  He seems to be a young man who was in his early 20s before he became one of the walking dead.  He doesn't remember who he is, or what kind of a life he had before he became a zombie.  All he remembers is that his name started with an R, so that is how he is addressed for the rest of the film.  R (played by Nicholas Hoult) does not lead an exciting life.  He mainly spends his days wandering aimlessly around an airport.  He has a "best friend", a fellow zombie referred to as M (Rob Corddry), but obviously, neither of them are big on conversation, given their limited motor and speech skills.

The only time that R and his fellow zombies leave the confines of the airport is when they get hungry, and must scour the streets for human survivors.  It's during one of these feeding raids that R comes across Julie (Teresa Palmer), the young and beautiful daughter of the leader of the human resistance (John Malkovich).  Julie has left the safety of her father's barricaded city to search for supplies with her boyfriend, Perry (Dave Franco, brother of James Franco).  The humans fight back, but before long, Perry is besieged by R, who chows down on his brain.  We learn that zombies eat brains, so that they can experience the memories of the person they just ate.  It's the closest thing they can feel to living once again.  The memories from Perry's brain triggers something within R.  He experiences the feelings that Perry held for Julie, and they trigger something inside of him.  Instead of wanting to feed on Julie, he finds he wants to keep her safe.  This is only the beginning, as the more time he spends around Julie, the more human he starts to become.  His heart starts beating again, he can slowly form sentences again, and his skin even starts to look lighter and less pale over time.

Warm Bodies is a hard movie to pin down.  It's a teen romance with horror elements, but it fortunately avoids the sappiness and just plain wrongheadedness of the Twilight franchise.  It has a large number of satirical and witty elements in its dialogue, but it's not really a comedy like Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland.  I guess one way to describe it is that it's a likably offbeat story of a young man learning to live again through the woman, but that makes it sound a lot more generic than it really is.  This is a fresh and frequently inventive film with good performances, and a certain bizarre sweetness.  I liked it how R and Julie's growing relationship triggers something within the zombies around them, and they also start remembering bits about their lives before they became undead.  It's weirdly touching.  The movie balances so many elements, it must have been exhausting at times for Levine to keep them all in check in his screenplay.  The film is based on a Young Adult novel by Isaac Marion, and though I have not read it, I hear from others that the film is pretty faithful.  If so, then both the movie and the source novel deserve credit for avoiding disaster, and making this idea work.

We care about these characters.  Even before R meets Julie, he does seem to have a small bit of humanity within him, in that he likes to collect classic albums and play them on an old record player when he is alone.  Once Julie does enter his life, he starts to remember more about what it was like to be alive.  As the film goes on and R becomes more human, they start to resemble a fairly normal couple in a romantic drama.  They even get to share a balcony scene together in a clever nod to Romeo and Juliet.  I also liked that they don't try to make the other humans the villains of the story.  I assumed that Julie's father, the John Malkovich character, would eventually try to violently tear them apart.  And while he does attempt to, he never does so to be needlessly cruel to his daughter.  There is genuine love and concern, and he is even willing to listen to her when she tries to explain that R is starting to become human again.  He's not the gung-ho military hothead I was expecting his character to be when he was introduced.

 

I was quite surprised by how much I enjoyed Warm Bodies.  It has a lot of elements that really have no place being together in the same movie, and yet, it skillfully combines them.  Even the soundtrack seems to have been well thought out, with some great classic songs perfectly accompanying certain scenes.  Is this a great movie?  Not really.  But it is still highly enjoyable, kind of sweet, and much better than it probably could ever be.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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