Warm Bodies

So with Valentine's day swiftly approaching, love is in the air. Well, in the real world it is. Here on the internet, ironic, Valentine-based hate is the prevailing force. However, if you are in a situation where you're celebrated the holiday, you may need to decide on a movie to go catch. You and your woman/man/narwhal (I'm not here to judge) may be thinking about seeing Warm Bodies.

Now if you're anything like me, then you probably looked at this movie and thought "oh God, our cultural obsession with Twilight and zombies have somehow merged together and produced an undead love-child." I was ready to hate this movie. But this weekend, me and m'lady went and saw it and...okay, it was actually really good.

For those of you who don't know, Warm Bodies is about a zombie named R, who seems to remember more of his human traits than the zombies surrounding him. During a hunt, however, he comes across a girl he's instantly smitten with, and he eats the brain of her boyfriend (who in fairness just shot him), which somehow lets him experience the guys memories, showing him flashes of his time with his girlfriend, who is about to be eaten as well. This spurs R into getting back in touch with his humanity, which in turn makes the other zombies start to experience a revival of their humanity as well.

So what is good about this movie? Well, going back to the Twilight comparison, the main female is almost nothing like Bella. She fights, she's proactive, she doesn't just instantly depend on R for everything, and she has to learn to like him. R, meanwhile, is nothing like Edward. He's not perfect, or immortal or anything, he's as close to a normal guy as Hollywood is willing to show. Outside of being a zombie, of course.

I mean yeah, he's the undead, but that doesn't mean we can't make him better looking than most living guys, right?

R's narration almost always got a chuckle out of me, the way he non-nonchalantly goes about his everyday un-death like the rest of us trudge through our often monotonous lives. There's one moment of symbolism that's almost too blatant, where he fantasizes about when the zombies were alive and interacting, only to envision everyone on their mobile devices and not paying a lick of attention to each other. It was kind of blunt, but I suppose it worked.

It's a highly entertaining concept, and for the most part it was very well executed.

Now that's not to say there was nothing wrong with it, and I have to warn you, there will be spoilers from here on.

There are just some parts that kind of broke my suspension of disbelief. One big one was when R and the girl just take a joy ride in a car they just happened to find in the wasteland that is in pristine condition, and still has a working GPS. On top of that, this happens while she's trying to "lay low" amongst the zombies. That and when she found a totally operational weed-whacker at an airport kind of threw me off.

*SPOILERS HERE*

Also, in the end when R turns human again, he's immediately shot by the girl's father, who thinks he's still a zombie. When she realizes he's bleeding, the girl yells in joy that "corpses don't bleed!", realizing that he's fully human again. Everyone is happy and awestruck, and no one decides to address the fact that THE HUMAN JUST GOT SHOT. Seriously, no one even give him a band-aid, and the water is literally turning red with his blood. I said out loud that "he's losing a LOT of blood..." and the people behind me laughed.

"You were mortally wounded!" "No I wasn't!"

*END OF SPOILERS*

The big problem I had though was with the "bonies." They were zombies that had degraded to skeletons, and were the big threat, since the zombies themselves weren't all that threatening by the end. My problem with having these irredeemable villains was that the entire message of the movie was that anyone can be redeemed. Love conquers all. I guess what it really meant was "love conquers all...unless you're one of these guys."

But even so, Warm Bodies is a clever, humorous movie that is sure to have plenty of cute scenes for the girls, and plenty of action and humor for the guys.

If you're one of the aforementioned narwhal lovers...well I guess there's water sometimes.