Warm Bodies suggests what the Twilight films might have been if the Twilight films didn’t, you know, suck.
This movie is also a tale of forbidden young interspecies love, but it’s self-aware and funny and really charming. Basically, it’s a reworking of Romeo and Juliet (there’s even a balcony scene) with zombies. But the traditional zombie lore has been cleverly tweaked. Now, when the lurching undead catch a human and eat its brains, they also ingest their victim’s thoughts and emotions — and suddenly feel a re-stirring of their own blighted humanity.
The story, derived from Isaac Marion’s 2010 novel, is set in the usual post-apocalyptic future — eight years after a mysterious plague turned most of the population into shambling gut munchers and drove the uninfected survivors into walled compounds, from which they cautiously emerge to scavenge for supplies. In a cute twist on the 1978 Dawn of the Dead — in which George Romero relocated his zombie war to a shopping mall for purposes of social commentary — the zombies in this picture are headquartered in an abandoned airport, where they shuffle about day in and day out, pausing only to share an occasional grunt or snarl. Their endless, dead-eyed perambulation suggests in a horribly vivid way what it might be like to be stuck in a crowded air terminal where every flight has been delayed forever.
One of these walking dead is a young guy called R (Nicholas Hoult, of X-Men: First Class and the British TV series Skins). R doesn’t remember much about his pre-death existence, beyond the fact that his name started with R, but judging by the rancid hoodie in which he wanders around, he figures he was probably an unemployed slacker.
Read the full review at Reason.com
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