Warm Bodies (***½)
Directed by: Jonathan Levine
Starring: Niholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Rob Cordry, Analeigh Tipton, John Malkovich, Dave Franco
Seen: March 21st 2013
***½ Out of ****
Warm Bodies is a zombie movie for everyone, it's the ultimate date movie of zombie movies, it's a zombie movie for non-zombie movie fans, and it's a great ride and extremely enjoyable movie. The movie is so accesible and enjoyable to anyone because under the zombie veneer the allegories pile up without being overpowering, and any viewer can identify with both the zombies and the humans in this movie.
R (Hoult) is a zombie. He lives/wanders around in an airport with a horde of zombies. He is also the narrator of the movie, and he tells of his days, and his friendship with fellow zombie M (Cordry) as the movie starts out. The zombies live to eat brains, as they relive their victims' memories to, among other things, find some reason/meaning in their mundane existence. R wants more though, and he even manages to get a conversation of sorts going with M at times, but grunts are still not quite enough for him. Not until he sees a human girl one day, one that delivers a jolt to his heart, one that could possibly bring him to life again, Julie (Palmer). Julie awakens something in R that he did not know existed previously, and when Julie is threatened by zombies, R saves her, but only after after eating the brains of Julie's boyfriend, Perry (Franco). So now as R starts to actually but very slowly reintegrate into the human race, there is a romantic tension coupled with a tension of R's making when he killed Perry.
Warm Bodies, if you allow it, will creep under your skin as you see a story that parallels so much of our own human existence. People are dead at heart but they want something more, and that something might just be love, as astonishing as it may sound to the world. There are elements of the story pointing to the selfishness of those of us who think we have it all together, those of us who will kill and destroy to protect what we have, those of us who do not want to embrace others into our own existence. There are also elements clearly talking to those who are so far removed from anything resembling life that their only purpose/mission in life is to destroy and murder and maim and drag others down. And then there's evidence of those who want nothing more than to see people fulfilled, free, alive.
Warm Bodies takes on relatively serious subject matter in a subtle and fun way, as you can enjoy the movie without even thinking about it. It also makes for a good few scares and plenty of great laughs. Warm Bodies is without a doubt the most feel-good zombie movie I know of, and I can definitely recommend it to anyone who likes their post-apocalyptic stories with a touch of love and laughter, and even for those who just like their normal post-apocalyptic zombie stories. It's a blast.
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