Movie Review: Warm Bodies

Can’t believe I’m the first one out of all the writers here to see this one, since neither zombie movies nor rom-coms are my wheelhouse, per sé. Spoilers abound after the jump. Not much happens in this movie to start with in my opinion (which is my usual opinion about all rom-coms), so I’ll spoil almost all that there is to spoil.

The movie is in a standard rom-com format: zombie meets girl, zombie falls for girl, zombie and girl have an intermittent break-up, zombie and girl get back together, the end. This movie did an excellent job of walking the fine line between taking itself seriously and just being awful, which is very similar to Cabin in the Woods in a sense. Both played into traditional movie norms and were almost bad on purpose, making them good.

The key example of this can be seen in the two girls: Julie, the main girl and love interest, and especially in her best friend, Nora. Both were stereotypical rom-com girls (with the ability/training to fight zombies of course), but it was done in such a way that it made fun of other rom-coms. Like parody.

While this is all going on, the zombies are becoming human again. While Blackout suggested in an earlier post that zombie-itis might be more of a disability in this movie, it did just remain a disease. The only difference is the zombies could get over it (like one gets over the flu). And they did that over the course of this movie.

M is my favorite zombie, and he is the best example of why the writing in this movie is excellent. When a majority of your characters can only say one or two words at a time, you really need to make those words count. On top of that, the acting and directing for this movie was top notch and they successfully demonstrated how the zombies were feeling without words. His dialogue especially demonstrated the excellent writing, directing, and acting in this movie. He always had the perfect word on his tongue and he had the best facial expressions. He put the ‘com’ in this rom-com, and not in the way one would expect.

Did I mention all of the zombie fighting? No? That’s because like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the zombies were somewhat thrown in. Anyway, the reason there was zombie fighting was because there were different kinds of zombies. They are regular ones, which we all know and love, and the bonies/skeletons, which are fast-moving skeletons who like to kill/eat things more than the regular zombies. I got the feeling the bonies got thrown into the movie so that there could be a “bad guy”. While they did fulfill their purpose in this movie, that was about all that they did.

In short, this was an excellent movie for what it was. Was it an Avengers or a Dark Knight? No. But if you take it for what it is you will not be disappointed.