Tuesday 15 October 2013

a review thing

So I'm doing a film review.....

Warm Bodies:

So you know that feeling when you're attracted to a walking corpse?

No me neither, its fucked up. But this is one of the situations that's covered in Warm Bodies, the second Zom-rom-com that's ever existed in modern cinema and the first to have a zombie as the male lead (that I'm aware of). Our Undead hero named 'R' has the advantage over other movie zombies of having a Joss Whedon inspired internal dialogue, and despite being dead, being more attractive than everyone you know. (Seriously, his hair in the film is impeccable and he's fucking dead.) R spends his undead days in an airport shuffling about and grunting to his best friend 'M' (sadly not played by Judi Dench) and collecting trinkets and being cool in his Boeing 747 converted home, listening to the films groovy soundtrack. Then, on a food recon mission, R stumbles into Julie (whilst eating her twat of a boyfriends brain) and does what any love struck man would do, smear his entrails over her face and take her back to his home. From here Julie realizes that R isn't going to open her up like a box of malteasers and feast on the chocolaty goodness. What begins is a pathway to what potentially could be a revolution for the lives of every living and unliving thing on the planet.

Having a dead guy for a leading man is something of a risky choice seeing that he's not much of for talking, but having a fully functioning internal dialogue is a genius idea and Hoult delivers it very well.
Of course the internal dialogue was an original idea adapted from the book, Coincidentally called Warm Bodies (written by Isaac Marion, who incidently was interviewed by my brother on his awesome website right here).
Teresa Palmer (who I'd never heard of and imdb does nothing to help me in this regard) plays Julie as a smartarse army brat you'd expect what with John Malkovich has her Dad, but gives her enough depth that you don't want R to eat her limbs.

As with pretty much every zombie film, the metaphors for living your life are thrown around with a carefree abandon. There's a great little moment at the start where R bemoans being able to connect with people which leads to a flashback to a pre-virus time where everyone in the airport are staring into their phones and tablets, completely oblivious to each others existence.

The overriding theme that comes across (not often subtly) is the importance of connecting with your fellow human. As R gets further down the line of potentially regaining his humanity, we get the reminders of what happens if the connection is completely lost if the form of the "Bonies". These skinless super-evil zombies are essentially the poor CGI creations from 'I am Legend' loaned out to a film with a lesser budget, they look out of place but they are indeed, the necessary evil that is needed to inspire an unlikely alliance that propels the story forward.

There's not much else to say about this to be honest. It's a great little film that occasionally has a different take on the zombie film and has great soundtrack and a good central performance from Hoult and solid support from Palmer and that bloke from "Hot Tub Time Machine". If your stuck for something to watch then it's a great compromise. I know this as I wanted to see Les Miserables but there wasn't a decent showing for it.

Next time, an attempt to write something about Skyfall and why I was pissed off about there being an advert for a VW Beetle within 5 minutes of it starting.

After that, probably Total Recall again.