Warm Bodies
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Came home from work totally exhausted and kicked back on the
bed to watch Warm Bodies (2013) a film I have had in my possession for several months
but hadn’t gotten around to viewing. It was right at the start on Cinemax West
so I decided to give it a go. About what I expected, a Romeo and Juliet zombie
film with the violence off screen; the graphic bloodletting of Walking Dead, on
cable television has more visible, explicit gore than Warm Bodies. This has a
few touches that differentiate it from the typical zombie films we are
accustomed to, but Romero was getting to the end results of Warm Bodies with
his last few (not well received) Living Dead pictures.
**
Corpses are “resetting”, the heart is starting to pump, and something has sparked inside of them. They can once again dream, with words starting to form and leaving their lips, as well as, feelings once again developing. Can it be possible for the world to “exhume” again with the living dead actually starting to live? Of course, even as a walking corpse, R (Nicholas Mount) is one of those CW dreamboats, so it is a little easier for Teresa Palmer to warm to him (pun intended) than if he were with rotted jaw and peeling flesh. I can only imagine the teen girls were lost in R’s eyes. I can imagine them sighing and saying, “Ohhhhh, he’s so dreamy.” Palmer is one of those blonde cuties who will continue to get parts in these kinds of films until her beauty fades. Yeah, I admit, her over-the-top stilted walk, mimicking the zombies, while alongside Mount amused me. I will say this, the film has a nice soundtrack. The film itself: no great shakes. Just didn’t do anything for me. I think, because the film is just too safe and cute, it fails to generate serious suspense.
Those boneys—the walking dead in skeletal form too far gone to begin the healing process and regain their humanity—are a scary lot but they are used poorly in the film. That they become such an afterthought and Malkovich brushes aside his allegiance towards blowing away all zombies just because his little girl begs him not to are developments I found rather questionable. I think Malkovich’s role could have been pretty much portrayed by anybody; he’s on autopilot here, and the part isn’t all that extraordinary. He has his outpost, building a wall around it in the hopes of concealing out the dead, and has that philosophy of “shoot the dead in the head” without much contemplation. His wife was taken from him, and his daughter’s beau gets his brains eaten by R (another distinction from other zombie films is that when R eats brains (indicating zombies seem to have that inexplicable ability to “experience” memories from those whose gray matter they devour) he can relive the victim’s memories). The boyfriend was just in the way so it was for the best, I guess. We don’t need the complications of another boyfriend to screw up the romance of Palmer and Mount, now do we? Palmer takes to Mount rather quickly/easily, too. I was startled by that, actually. It isn’t fifteen minutes after they meet that she’s smiling at him and talking about iPad and Vinyl, with the way music sounds (music “lives” according to R when played off a record from a turntable).
Look, I have no problem with the zombie genre being used for a number of audiences. I’m not part of that niche that will take a shine to Warm Bodies, just as I’m not the intended target audience for the Twilight films. But I know which zombie/vampire films appeal to me and there are plenty of them to suit my fancy while the teenagers and women so fawning over romantic horror (“horrormantic”?) get certain entertainments distributed/marketed to them. My wife really liked Warm Bodies and adores the Twilight series, so she’s of that niche I have no attachment to. You get Palmer talking about R with a gal pal when she returns to the outpost (after R, for the most part, protected her from the harm of flesheaters), trying to examine this yearning for him, attempting to justify an attraction to a corpse, with the sentiment of “why do we defame them with the name of corpse?” Her and the gal buddy “make up” R so he can imitate human, as the eventual confrontation with Malkovich looms, paralleling how Palmer mimicked zombie previously. We zombie fans do get our “apocalyptic eye candy” of a city in ruin, with abandoned cars and buildings deteriorating. R stays in an airplane, isolated on an airstrip where other planes are scattered about, decaying as time passes by. The narration of a zombie (what he thinks and feels yet cannot quite describe in voice) is perhaps the film's most appealing mainstream feature. Also seeing through the eyes and experiences of a victim whose brains he eats certainly is a device that provides a reasoning behind why R might be jonesing on Palmer besides the whole Love at First Sight. There is an irony there; in eating the brains of her boyfriend, he can not only nourish himself but take his place...kind of sucks to be the boyfriend, right?
**
Corpses are “resetting”, the heart is starting to pump, and something has sparked inside of them. They can once again dream, with words starting to form and leaving their lips, as well as, feelings once again developing. Can it be possible for the world to “exhume” again with the living dead actually starting to live? Of course, even as a walking corpse, R (Nicholas Mount) is one of those CW dreamboats, so it is a little easier for Teresa Palmer to warm to him (pun intended) than if he were with rotted jaw and peeling flesh. I can only imagine the teen girls were lost in R’s eyes. I can imagine them sighing and saying, “Ohhhhh, he’s so dreamy.” Palmer is one of those blonde cuties who will continue to get parts in these kinds of films until her beauty fades. Yeah, I admit, her over-the-top stilted walk, mimicking the zombies, while alongside Mount amused me. I will say this, the film has a nice soundtrack. The film itself: no great shakes. Just didn’t do anything for me. I think, because the film is just too safe and cute, it fails to generate serious suspense.
Those boneys—the walking dead in skeletal form too far gone to begin the healing process and regain their humanity—are a scary lot but they are used poorly in the film. That they become such an afterthought and Malkovich brushes aside his allegiance towards blowing away all zombies just because his little girl begs him not to are developments I found rather questionable. I think Malkovich’s role could have been pretty much portrayed by anybody; he’s on autopilot here, and the part isn’t all that extraordinary. He has his outpost, building a wall around it in the hopes of concealing out the dead, and has that philosophy of “shoot the dead in the head” without much contemplation. His wife was taken from him, and his daughter’s beau gets his brains eaten by R (another distinction from other zombie films is that when R eats brains (indicating zombies seem to have that inexplicable ability to “experience” memories from those whose gray matter they devour) he can relive the victim’s memories). The boyfriend was just in the way so it was for the best, I guess. We don’t need the complications of another boyfriend to screw up the romance of Palmer and Mount, now do we? Palmer takes to Mount rather quickly/easily, too. I was startled by that, actually. It isn’t fifteen minutes after they meet that she’s smiling at him and talking about iPad and Vinyl, with the way music sounds (music “lives” according to R when played off a record from a turntable).
Look, I have no problem with the zombie genre being used for a number of audiences. I’m not part of that niche that will take a shine to Warm Bodies, just as I’m not the intended target audience for the Twilight films. But I know which zombie/vampire films appeal to me and there are plenty of them to suit my fancy while the teenagers and women so fawning over romantic horror (“horrormantic”?) get certain entertainments distributed/marketed to them. My wife really liked Warm Bodies and adores the Twilight series, so she’s of that niche I have no attachment to. You get Palmer talking about R with a gal pal when she returns to the outpost (after R, for the most part, protected her from the harm of flesheaters), trying to examine this yearning for him, attempting to justify an attraction to a corpse, with the sentiment of “why do we defame them with the name of corpse?” Her and the gal buddy “make up” R so he can imitate human, as the eventual confrontation with Malkovich looms, paralleling how Palmer mimicked zombie previously. We zombie fans do get our “apocalyptic eye candy” of a city in ruin, with abandoned cars and buildings deteriorating. R stays in an airplane, isolated on an airstrip where other planes are scattered about, decaying as time passes by. The narration of a zombie (what he thinks and feels yet cannot quite describe in voice) is perhaps the film's most appealing mainstream feature. Also seeing through the eyes and experiences of a victim whose brains he eats certainly is a device that provides a reasoning behind why R might be jonesing on Palmer besides the whole Love at First Sight. There is an irony there; in eating the brains of her boyfriend, he can not only nourish himself but take his place...kind of sucks to be the boyfriend, right?
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