Warm Bodies
How is it that a zombie has more personality than Edward and Bella combined? Well, that was obvious from the trailers for “Warm Bodies,” writer-director Jonathan Levine’s follow-up to “50/50.” But once we start watching the film, based on a book by Isaac Marion, we see that the initial concept– which, let’s be honest, is just “‘Twilight’ with zombies” –is so much more interesting than the Stephanie Myers phenomenon it riffs off of.
That starts with the soundtrack. The score is a terrific concoction by Marco Beltrami and his collaborator, Buck Sanders (Oscar nominees for “The Hurt Locker”), but it’s the song soundtrack that struck me. You see, this isn’t just an emo-alternative soundtrack that vampires use to woo dull, uninteresting teenage girls with (sorry, the truth hurts “Twi”-hards); our main character, R (the zombie played by Nicholas Hoult), has taste, and not just for brains. R goes about a normal routine for a zombie during the day: bumping into other people; communicating with his “best friend” (the terrific Rob Corddry); and looking for humans to eat. At night, however, we see him go to an abandoned airplane, where he has a collection of items from the “living” world. One of those things is an old record player, and damn, does he have an album collection; among the selections we hear are Guns N’ Roses (“Patience”), Bruce Springsteen (“Hungry Heart”), and Bob Dylan. This zombie has great taste in music (no pun intended), and it helped get me on this movie’s side right away.
The movie itself does the rest. Although the easy comparison is with “Twilight,” the better one is with “Romeo & Juliet,” as R decides to save Julie (Teresa Palmer), the daughter of the human leader (John Malkovich), when the zombies he is walking with attack a group of humans who are scavanging for supplies outside of the walls of the city they have built for themselves. Julie’s long-time boyfriend, however, is killed, and, when R eats his brains, he experiences the boyfriend’s memories. This triggers something in R, who grows very protective of Julie, taking her back to his dwelling in the airplane. The more they interact, the more they care about one another, and the more human R feels. This triggers something in him he hasn’t felt in a while…a heartbeat, and when he finds himself around other zombies, they also begin to feel it. However, this is bad news for the still-fleshed undead, because the zombies known as “skeletons,” who have ripped their flesh off, are attracted to anything with a heartbeat, and are after anything they can sink their teeth into.
I have to admit, the promotional materials for “Warm Bodies” had me very skeptical about its prospects, although the trailer– which really played up the love story –showed promise, even if it did look like a “Twilight” clone. But Levine is too smart a filmmaker to simply ape that phenomenon, and the ingenious twist is that it’s the undead who regain their humanity, rather than a human so in love they will sacrifice their own for love. That allows the story much more humanity, and romance, than “Twilight” has ever mustered for me, and Hoult and Palmer are terrific at making me care about whether R is able to “cure himself,” and whether Palmer will be able to look past his undead look and awkward communication abilities, and see the human trapped inside. It’s not a conventional love story, but damn, it is one of the best ones I’ve seen in a movie in a long time.
Also working in “Warm Bodies’s” favor is a functional, intentional sense of humor, which was sorely lacking in “Twilight.” Throughout the movie, we are given a window into R’s psyche through voiceover, and it’s one of the most inspired, and hilarious, uses of the device I’ve seen in a movie in ages. And Hoult plays it to perfection, especially when we get to hear his awkwardness after he and Julie are together in his airplane home. Listening to him try to “play it smooth” in his mind, and seeing how that manifests itself in his physical actions, is one of the great, entertaining performances in a geared-at-teens movie I’ve watched in quite a while, and you can ask my date for the movie, I was on board every step of the way, even if I was a little too chatty to myself during the film. Hoult and Levine make me believe that yes, a zombie can come back to life, and fall in love. They’ll make you believe, as well.
