by Cameron Ross Price
I don’t think the description “Heart Throbbing Romance” has ever been more appropriately applied than to last February’s apocalyptic love story Warm Bodies. Releasing this movie just before Valentine’s day was probably a none-too-subtle attempt to cash in on the feel good vibes of a nation at love, compounded upon by the already borderline religious fervor people have about a zombie apocalypse (everyone and their mother seems to know what they would do should the dead come knocking). Yet despite the potential to be an off shoot from the vein of Twilight movies, Warm Bodies combines love and death to create a zombie apocalypse scenario that really puts the humanity back into the undead.
The recent popularity of The Walking Dead, 28 days later, and a plethora of first person shooters have hammered home one idea: The only way to survive a zombie apocalypse is to have as little contact with the dead as possible and to hoard as much of the scarce resources available to you. If your family and friends have turned, they won’t remember you, they don’t care about you, and they will try to eat you, inevitably strengthening their numbers. This idea is very sobering, but to some degree fans of the zombie genre have all accepted this, practically hoping to be thrown into that reality where they chop off the heads of all dead sons-of-bitches with the fake katana they bought at a yard sale for five bucks.
Still, what I think most of these people overlook is that more than bullets, food, companionship, and shelter, the most valuable commodity that a person can have in an end of the world scenario is hope. Warm Bodies is an answer to the hope that there is an end to the madness, and also a re-hash of the old cliché that love saves all.
Most zombie movies won’t give any particular zombie much attention, focusing mainly on the survivors, but this movie does a lot of work to make you feel sorry for the zombies through the narrations of its main character R. His body is still rotting and stiff, his mind is devoid of all memories of its past, and he still suffers from what is called the “new hunger,” but R’s narrations, both introspective and observative, do an incredible amount of work towards encouraging the audience to see the zombies as human again. He even suffers from the most human of human emotions, love, specifically love at first sight. The moment he first sees Julie his heart literally starts to beat again and their sordid romance starts a revolution that begins to turn back the zombies that are not too far gone (although there are a number of super zombies they call “skeletons” that lack any human qualities). Also, the main characters names are a reference to Romeo and Juliet and the interactions between the zombie hordes and the human survivors sometimes gave me a Montague, Capulet feel. Once again, love is the answer.
At its core the love story is your classic romantic comedy plot line: guy meets girl, guy falls in love too quickly, girl is hesitant or has reason to be distant from guy, series of awkward encounters leading to eventual romance ensues. In this case, the zombie apocalypse angle breathes life into the tired plot line. At times I found myself wondering whether R was so awkward when talking to Julie because he was a zombie and thus unable to hold a decent conversation, or just because he didn’t know how to talk to cute girls. By straddling that line, the movie lets his character take advantage of both faults. Usually I don’t see why the female love interest in a romantic comedy has any reason to be interested in the guy with no immediately obvious positive features, but in this case you can see how the oddly human zombie is intriguing compared to the normally morbid understanding. Also, instead of having to deal with a series of lame encounters taking us from one major plot point to the next, the movie gives us gun toting, skull bashing, zombie killing action scenes to spice things up.
Warm Bodies tells the zombie apocalypse story from the zombie’s perspective, giving us insight into what we thought was cold, dead, and lifeless. The movie offers an explanation for why zombies eat brains, claiming that they absorb some of the memories and experience them in vivid hallucinogenic flashbacks. R’s reflections make us feel like the only reason he has to be a zombie is because he gave up on his humanity. When R and Julie prove that its love that can bring the zombies back from the dead, it makes it feel like the acceptance of the zombie apocalypse for the sake of survival is what furthered the scenario. I feel like the popularity of zombie genre movies has brought a certain level of normalcy to the idea that makes people much less afraid of it than they used to be. Warm Bodies, in how it completes the circle of the zombie apocalypse happened, people survived through it, then it ended, solidifies our own belief that we would survive.
Overall I would say that the movie is worth watching as long as you understand that it’s a romantic comedy first and a zombie movie second. It’s not perfect, for instance Julie somehow manages to overlook the fact that R is munching on her at-that-moment ex-boyfriend’s brains when he first meets her (and also munches on them periodically throughout the movie to learn more about her through her ex-boyfriends memories…creepy), but then, I suppose, love isn’t perfect either.
