Warm Bodies

It’s adapted from a book, and tries to be a different kind of zombie movie. I respect it for that, and it actually succeeds in some ways. If only it paid as much attention to being logical, and properly dramatic, and less sexist, as it does to being different. Then I wouldn’t be so dissatisfied.

Zombie flicks have a ton of leeway when it comes to logic. It’s easy to ignore any questions about how the world came to be in this state or how the zombies function, and just accept it all. The problems arise when the story doesn’t support its own properties, and isn’t told in a way that makes any sense, and the characters do stupid things for no good reason.

The main character R - a walking dead guy who doesn’t remember the rest of his name - meanders around an abandoned airport with thousands of other corpses, and at one point comments (through voice over) that he feels lost, literally; he’s never been in this part of the airport before. We then see him shuffling across the tarmac to a plane; inside is a hoarder’s paradise of found objects, among which he sits to contemplate his existence...oh, okay, this is his home, of sorts...but wasn’t he just lost? How did he get to the plane? This sequence plays out like he’s discovering something new but really it’s where he feels most comfortable. Not good storytelling.

And regarding that plane: later, when real live living girl Julie is there with him, because he dragged her there to prevent his fellow dead folks from eating her, they listen to vinyl records on a player with what power source, exactly? She’s there with him for several days, where there is certainly no working plumbing? Earlier he smears his own blood on her so the others won’t smell that she’s alive; he only puts a little bit on her face and this masks her entire scent? They decide it isn’t safe for her to leave for several days, she asks what there is to do around there, cut to them taking a joyride around the runway in a convertible...um, if you have access to a FUCKING CAR that FUCKING WORKS then you can FUCKING LEAVE the airport in relative safety! Fucking duh!

And guess what? That’s exactly what they do! But only later, after they’ve bonded...early on, through his narration, R laments his trouble speaking, how he’s barely able to manage one word in conversation with his corpse friend M, but as soon as he meets Julie he manages short phrases pretty well, almost immediately. Yes, part of the premise of the movie is that he gets better, gradually, but this first leap is a bit farfetched. Yes, I know it’s silly to use the word “farfetched” on a zombie movie, but every movie needs to establish the rules of its world and then adhere to them. It has to make sense within the context it’s created. This movie fails in that at every turn.

Then there are the sexist issues. It’s borderline pass/fail on the Bechdel test, but this is a version of Romeo & Juliet, which would probably fail as well, so we don’t have to get too serious about that...however: Julie, and her friend Nora, are supposedly portrayed as capable young women who’ve learned to survive and kick ass in the apocalypse, yet need to be saved every time they’re in trouble. R sees Julie from across the room as his gang of corpses attacks her gang of fully armed teenagers and twenty-somethings (who fail miserably to protect themselves despite the earlier implication they are well-trained) and is immediately smitten. Now, he really only falls for her because he kills her boyfriend (whom she never mourns for even a moment) and eats the dude’s brains, which in this movie means acquiring his memories and feeling his emotions. Again: zombie movie, leeway, notion accepted. But that isn’t a good reason to be in love.

It gets worse, though, because of course, she spends time with him and sees he’s a nice dead guy and falls for him as well; her love actually helps to heal him and he stops being dead anymore. I’d say sorry for the spoiler but it really isn’t one, as the whole movie leads up to it and is not a surprise nor is it meant to be. But anyway - this is another example of the abhorrent boy-sees-girl, boy-wants-girl, boy-gets-girl storyline that’s been prevalent in movies for, say, several decades, if not a century or more. What about her? What does she want? No, she is never forced to do anything against her will or even mistreated in any way - but the focus is always on him and what he wants, and she consistently views things from his perspective without manifesting her own. She isn’t even slightly perturbed by the fact he killed her boyfriend, which she supposedly didn’t know at first but simply concluded and quietly accepted at some point without discussing it until she’s in her underwear and wrapped in a blanket and alone with the cute zombie.

So, yeah...the movie has some great concepts but everything falls apart because it isn’t smart enough to support them with logic and realism. It may be a world of zombies, but it’s supposed to be a world we recognize, plus zombies. If the drama is structurally weak and people are doing stupid things, it ain’t gonna hold up.