Warm Bodies

I watched this directly after watching Schindler's List. After 3 hours of heavy, emotionally punishing drama, I needed an antidote. Something light, silly, a good time. What I did not expect was for Warm Bodies to touch on some of the same basic themes as Schindler's List: looking past differences and trying to understand another as more than their differences, tolerance, and hope in adversity. Warm Bodies is, ostensibly, a love story set in a zombie apocalypse. Unlike other zombie movies, the zombies of Warm Bodies are not unthinking, hunger-driven, primal creatures. They think. They communicate, usually with one or two words, but still. They have flashes of memory. And they absorb memories from eating the brains of people they eat. That's how R, a zombie, falls in love with Julie, a survivor in the post-apocalyptic hellscape that remains of the world. The attraction begins to stir changes in R, changes that look like an overcoming of the zombie plague. But the remaining survivors can't believe the idea of zombies being cured. And then there's a whole deeper level of zombies called boneys, that are zombies who've gone so long without feeding, they've stripped off all their skin and gone completely feral. I appreciate it when a zombie movies doesn't just rely on the familiar tropes of zombie movies. Warm Bodies' additions to zombie lore make it a fresh addition. Curing the undead is a common, but rarely achieved goal in zombie media. To see a version of that happen here is bold and fresh, and it plays into the themes of acceptance and bias against people unlike yourself. The living humans can't bear the thought of the undead coming back to being human. To them, zombies are the agents of their potential extinction, nothing more. The living have dehumanized the undead. The idea the undead could change, and that they'd have to let go of this hatred, is anathema. It's an interesting new dynamic. A love story lives and dies by its main couple, and R (played by Nicholas Hoult) and Julie (played by Teresa Palmer) have a great, sweet, wholesome chemistry. Julie, literally, makes R want to be a better person, and for Julie, R's love without reservation gives her hope in a world that has felt hopeless and oppressive. Wisely, John Malkovich, who plays Julie's dad, isn't a mustache-twirling baddie either. He is battle-hardened and personally scarred by the apocalypse, having had to put down his own wife because of it. The zombies have taken his light and hope, and he cannot see past it. He's just a man clouded by grief, not a malevolent, thick-headed army douche. Where it does lose some points is in the literal messaging of "love conquers all". That's how the zombies start to turn back; through connecting with positive emotions. It's meant well, but it is so sweet, I need to get a blood test tomorrow for diabetes. And the third act clanks a bit, both by dropping any pretense of humor, and by a nonsensical "run for your life" action sequence with R and Julie that has them running to nowhere in particular for no reason I can discern (especially when they could've run BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM and been fine), and it makes for a confusing climax where you're never sure where anybody is in relation to each other. Despite the faults, Warm Bodies is still charming enough, earnest enough, and different enough to be a worthwhile addition to the crowded zombie subgenre. And it doesn't go hard on gore at all, so the more squeamish types could enjoy this without fear of watching something like the gore from Dawn Of The Dead. It has enough tense action, sweet young romance, and humor to make for a good evening's watch.