Spoilers. Stop now if you haven’t seen “Warm Bodies” and don’t want anything given away. I just watched it. As in the credits are still rolling. If you aren’t familiar with the movie it’s about zombies. Now I’m not a zombie person. I watched “Walking Dead” a few times and just didn’t like it. I did enjoy the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but really that was because I love Jane Austen. I’m more a witch, wizard, elf girl. But this movie looked good.
It stars Nicholas Hoult as a zombie named R who has retained a bit of his consciousness. He and some other zombies, called corpses in the movie, attack a group of scavenging humans and he sees Julie, played by Theresa Palmer. For some reason he is instantly mesmerized by her. This is helped along by the fact that he sees her boyfriend’s memories when R eats the boyfriend’s brains. R takes Julie back to his house for a bit and eventually helps her get back to the walled city where she and all the uninfected humans live. And while they’re together, R begins to change. He can talk more and walk easier and seems to be looking less dead.
R and Julie are clearly becoming friends and more. When Julie leaves R in the middle of the night after he confesses to having eaten her boyfriend, R follows her home. If the star crossed lovers bit hasn’t given it away, the fact that he finds her at her house standing on a balcony is a dead giveaway that this is a zombie take on Romeo and Juliet. To be honest, I knew before I saw the movie and I can’t guarantee I would have figured it out on my own.
As I was watching this take on the Bard’s classic tale of woe, all I could think was “I think Shakespeare would have approved.” Shakespeare’s work might be some of the most widely known in history, but at the time, it was pop culture. His plays were the original movies that broke box office records, tv shows that everyone talks about the next day at the water cooler, and books that everyone reads on planes, at the pool, and on their latest e-reader. So, I think he would have loved this recent version employing the contemporarily ubiquitous genre. This is a medium that gets the story across to a large audience because of the widespread interest in zombies. I think old Will would have laughed as much as me at the conversation of grunts between two of the zombies and swooned just as much when R and Julie finally kissed.
It might seem hokey to say the message of this movie seemed to be “love can change the world,” but in a large way it was. But in the best possible way. R and Julie really did change the world. Their love was what reminded all the zombies about life. Love saved the world. Literally. A lot of times when I watch movies, read books or see plays I’m reminded of my theatre professor in college. I took a theatre class the semester I did study abroad in London. We went to a play every week. One of the things we talked about with each play was why it was relevant right now. This story seems to always be relevant. This more violent and encompassing portrayal of it made it feel even more relevant to today. The world is pretty divided about a lot of things nowadays. A little love and acceptance, like in the movie, could certainly help make things better. And who’s to say that someday there won’t be someone or a group of someone’s who manage to be an example to the world and help us all on a better road.
As we all know, in the real Romeo and Juliet, our hero and heroine don’t exactly make it to the end of the play. I spent this whole movie being terrified they were going to die. There’s a scene at the end when R and Julie are running from the skeletons (zombies beyond redemption) and are in a stadium. They open a door and it leads to nowhere except air several floors off the ground. And I’m thinking, “No! They’re really going to die!” So they jump into the fortuitously placed water feature below and the zombie takes the impact of the fall and they survive! While it would have been truer to the source material to kill them, I certainly wouldn’t have been as pleased with the movie if they had.
You know when you watch a movie and you really like it and you get that warm fuzzy feeling? Well, I’m hoping you do and that’s not just me. I’m watching the end of the movie, with that warm fuzzy feeling, thinking, “Aww, I wish this wasn’t over.” And they’re showing scenes of the zombies becoming more human and integrating back into life with humans. It shows R’s best friend, also a zombie, and he strikes up a conversation with a human who helps him. He introduces himself and she says, “I’m Ethel.” I laughed out loud and the warm, fuzzy feeling got a million times bigger. See, I was part of the move.
So, a movie about zombies managed to make my day a bit brighter. I’m sure I’m over thinking and being a bit maudlin about the whole thing, but really it was cute and fun. I knew there was a reason I had wanted to see it so badly at the theatre.
ethel isn't really my name 