Film Review: “Warm Bodies”
Written by: josh | December 20th, 2012
Warm Bodies is basically Twilight with zombies. I certainly don’t mean that as a compliment. There is nothing that works in this film. The chemistry between the two leads is off, the film completely ignores logic and reasoning, the cinematography and effects are a mess, and the story is completely predictable. It was only a matter of time before someone decided to ruin zombies.
Warm Bodies was written and directed by Jonathan Levine and when I saw that, I was baffled. This is the man that made 50/50, one of my favorite films last year! 50/50 had both comedy and heart. Warm Bodies aims for that but misses by a wide margin. It’s about a zombie who is later named R and at the beginning of the movie, he is a full on zombie. He has a craving for humans, he walks slow, and he can’t talk. The only difference between this zombie movie and any other zombie movie on the planet, is that R is somewhat cognitive. We hear his thoughts throughout the entire film. He knows what he’s doing but he doesn’t like doing it. One day while he’s trying to find some humans to eat, he notices a girl and he instantly falls in love with her. He takes her back to his pad where he promises to keep her safe. After a while, he notices that he’s starting to get better (this isn’t a spoiler, it’s in the trailer) so he wants to prove to humans that zombies can be healed and at the same time he’s also trying to win over the girl’s heart.
Warm Bodies is a slap in the face to zombie movies. This film disregards everything you think you know about zombies. I understand that zombies aren’t real and you can’t paten rules on them, but the rules they come up with for zombies in this film just simply don’t make sense. For example, one of the nifty ideas thrown into this film is that if a zombie starts eating a person’s brain, he possesses all of that person’s thoughts and memories. How in the world does that make sense? He eats a dead piece of tissue and he suddenly knows everything about this person? What’s convenient about this idea is that the memories aren’t even random. Every time he bites into a brain, the memories pick up right where they last left off. Another thing that didn’t make sense to me was that one of R’s wishes is to dream again. If he has completely cognitive thoughts and he can even do things like resist eating a human, then his brain works just fine. So why can’t he dream? Who knows?
Besides all of the illogical moments behind the movie, there were plenty of other things that didn’t work in Warm Bodies. The acting is awful. There’s no other way of putting it. Teresa Palmer, the actress who plays the lead girl, has about as much personality as Kristen Stewart. Her and Nicholas Hoult (R) have no chemistry whatsoever. There are so many teenage love moments that I thought I was going to gag. A lot of zombie films are known for having cool special effects. Warm Bodies has none. In this film, if you are a zombie for too long, then you become a super zombie that has absolutely no soul and all they do is eat; much like a normal zombie from the lore. The problem with these super zombies is that they are a CGI nightmare. Honestly, the original Terminator when his skin melts off looked more realistic than these piles of trash. One last thing, the story is completely predictable.
If you’re looking for a badass zombie flick such as Dawn of the Dead or The Walking Dead, you aren’t going to get that. If you’re looking for a more light-hearted zombie film with plenty of laughs such as Zombieland, you aren’t going to get that either. What Warm Bodies is, is a teen romance movie. I can understand why it was made. Teen romance films make a lot of money regardless of how bad they are and zombies are the hot thing right now. Put the two together and you have a successful box office. However, this is not a good movie. If you are a fan of zombies, I promise you will be offended by some of the things that the zombies are allowed to do in this film. However, if you are a fan of Twilight, then I’m sure you’ll love Warm Bodies. I’m not going to say the film is a total failure because it did make me laugh once, but overall, Warm Bodies is purely a cash-grab and nothing more. D
