Aleya Ericson | rawr reviews
Terror is inspired in people everywhere when the logo for Summit Entertainment — a simple white line over a black background that forms a mountain. Doesn’t sound familiar? Summit Entertainment is the film studio that produced the Twilight movie series.
With that knowledge, many anti-Twilight fanatics ran screaming from the trailers of “Warm Bodies” as one might flee from a hungry zombie when the logo for Summit Entertainment flashed across the screen. And oddly, it ends up being justifiable.
Warm Bodies, follows “R”, a zombie after the apocalypse who doesn’t remember his life before he became a zombie. All R can remember about himself is one letter of his first name. R lives in an airport by day and provides comedic mental narration to events he experiences as a zombie.
One day, he leads a zombie mob in search for food when he encounters a group of survivors. There, he eats the brains of a survivor, which allows him to gain the memories of the survivor. That particular survivor had a girlfriend named Julie, so R gains his memories and instantly falls in love with Julie.
Herein, the problems with the story begin. R serves as an interesting enough character that he could have carried the entire story as a zombie that makes hilarious commentary on the pre-apocalyptic setting as well as the current apocalyptic setting. For instance, he noticed how the current widespread use of technology makes us all zombies in a way.
But alas, this had to be a love story instead of a simple zombie comedy. Julie, despite being competent with a shotgun, seems unable to make competent decisions in her life. It is now time for a pop quiz.
When you are one of the last survivors of a zombie horde and your shotgun has jammed do you…..
A) Flee, because zombies want your brains.
B) Find something else to fight with because, quite frankly, zombies want your brains
C) Trust the zombie who led the zombie charge to keep you safe. After all, he’s a pretty smoking hot and you will enjoy a good bout of necrophilia after Stockholm syndrome kicks in. After all, it will spice up your apparently boring life as a survivor of a zombie apocalypse.
If you answer C, congratulations. Julie agrees with you while common sense does not. Julie not only trusts the zombie who ate her boyfriend and caused most of her friends to be eaten — she follows him to an airport full of zombies. This airport full of zombies is somehow safer for her than anywhere else according to R.
While at the airport, one of the most apathetic romances of history begins. R is a zombie, mind you, so he can barely manage more than a couple words at a time to communicate. When he communicates with Julie, it is often in incomplete sentence fragments. Yet Julie falls head over heels for a zombie that is dead, can barely talk and is keeping her prisoner in an airplane. To be fair, R has an excuse to be in love with Julie, since he has all of her boyfriend’s memories. Julie, however, has no such excuse other than perhaps a touch of Stockholm syndrome and even necrophilia.
For a movie to exist as a romantic comedy, it must be able to sell the romance as well as the comedy. The romance part of the movie fails on Julie’s sheer stupidity. When R finally confesses that he ate Julie’s boyfriend’s brains, which she somehow missed during the zombie attack, Julie doesn’t seem to care. Most average girls would find this a deal breaker. Even better, Julie manages to have a Twilight moment of her own when she asks R at the airport.
“What are you?”
Quite frankly, all the viewer wants to do is answer Julie’s question with the obvious: he’s a zombie, dumbass. Did you miss the part where he led the charge that killed most of your friends? I found myself rooting for the much happier ending where R eats Julie’s brains and goes to live the rest of his undead life as a happy bachelor zombie.
The comedic element of “Warm Bodies” is ruined by the trailer. The trailer is so extensive, in fact, that the first thirty minutes of the movie can be missed and the movie will still be understandable. The trailers of the movie ruined what should have been funny moments to the point I was instead feeling guilty for not working on my mountains of homework.
“Warm Bodies” is neither romantic nor funny enough to justify its 97 minute running time. Instead of wasting time on this movie, curl up with your favorite warm body on Valentine’s Day and watch something worthwhile.