Warm Bodies Review

Warm Bodies Review

Year: 2013

Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich

Directed: Jonathan Levine

Running Time: 98 mins

Written and directed by Jonathan Levine (50/50, The Wackness and All the Boy’s Love Mandy Lane a favourite of mine) seems reasonably strong in both areas.

We join Nicholas Hoult (famous for x-men first class and clash of the titans and the upcoming jack the giant killer) in what I thought was a strong performance where he plays an unusual zombie named R. Unusual as he’s slightly more aware than most of the other shambling corpses. To the extent he has his own crash pad inside an unused aeroplane, I might add here that there’s been a zombie apocalypse and there’s only one human settlement left walled off. After a good description by R what zombie life is like him and his friend M another semi-conscious zombies go with a group of other zombies in search of food (humans)

A group of teens chosen to go out around the same time to collect some resources, this film has some brilliant tongue in cheek moments describing how zombies go about things. Also in this film seems zombies go through a change after a while their skin comes off and they turn into *bonies* totally transformed and not human in anyway.

So the inevitable happens they meet a fight breaks out where R see’s Julie (Teresa Palmer another good performance she’s from I am number 4 and the sorcerer’s apprentice) he gets a strange feeling until Julies boyfriend shoots him, he switches back to zombie mode and attacks eats bits of and takes her boyfriend’s brains in his pocket.

He then advances on Julie who tries to stop him, she gives up and awaits a brain eating R wipes his blood over her masking her scent from the other zombies and tells her to follow.

He takes her back to his crash pad where more interaction with her starts turning him more and more human waking memories etc.

Now I’ll tell you a few key points here now, Julie’s dad is the leader, army general of the safe zone. Zombies gain memories of the brains they eat and feel more alive, so he sees and gets memories from Julie’s bf’s brains.

Now this film shows human nature and explores if we have the capacity to change our conceptions in both ways through the humans and the zombies. I think bonies represent the nay Sayers that are everywhere that will not change any matter what.

So Julie finds out about R eating her boyfriend as R becomes sorrier about it and tells her. We than get one of them moments in films like this where they split wondering if they can change and if there’s any point. Julie goes back to her place R to his and finds out halfway there that his becoming human has infected the rest of human like zombies.

R proceeds to go back and tell Julie about the change and that the bonies are chasing them also because they can sense they are a threat. Julie tries to convince her dad that they can change but he doesn’t listen to begin with isn’t it always the same?

When the soldier realise that the normal zombies are helping them fight the bonies they join together and kill them off. I know I don’t usually spoil the endings here at The Horror Nation but it’s easy to see with this movie yes they slowly become human again through interaction with the humans.

Right nit-picks Julie got over and forgave about her boyfriend possibly to easy considering they really seemed to be in love it is explained that she was kind of prepared for a while but meh I think I’d be a bit more upset at losing someone than that. More John Malkovich would have been nice. Meeting the boyfriend in R’s head seemed a little morbid, even more so when Julie talked about him, hence they seemed in love but she forgave easy part.

And the film seemed to end a bit quickly but I do see what extra could they have added? Someone discovering the bonies/zombies making their way to their base (though they are supposedly the last settlement) better than just a random report? I suppose.

Lastly we humans are ruthless; if we’d walked into zombies fighting like that we would have mown them all down.

Things I liked the zombie effects and make up were top class, expected in a mainstream film to, the CGI a little lacklustre as there only really seemed to be 2 maybe 3 different bonies just repeated over a number of times, though they were good and detailed!

The storyline well I haven’t been glued to a film like that for quite a while to be honest I don’t know why either I found the film passed past fast and I was left mostly pleased by the outcome, despite it at its basic level being a rom-com! With the nit-picks I give this film a solid 4 stars out of 5 and say it’s well worth paying to go see 

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