Warm Bodies Review
Ask anybody who’s taken my class: Romeo and Juliet is one of my favorite things to teach. We do funny accents, we reenact the sword fights at the front of the room, and I divide my kids into teams and whip up vicious rumors of what the teams are saying about each other for my amusement. So the Warm Bodies film, a.k.a. Romeo and Juliet with zombies, should have been right up my alley, but…
Let’s start with the good stuff. The actors make this movie: Nicholas Hoult manages to make a zombie interesting, Rob Corddry playing zombie Mercutio makes the most of his screen time, Teresa Palmer is overshadowed by Analeigh Tipton playing Nora but is still solid in her own right, and I don’t think John Malkovich has ever given a bad performance, but he doesn’t start here. The movie is pretty funny, and for the tiny budget it had, it looks pretty sharp, too. Little nods to the original play (Perry instead of Paris, R and M for Romeo and Mercutio) are clever, credit where it’s due.
But here are my grievances: first, doing any kind of adaptation of Romeo and Juliet without the friar is straight up madness; Mercutio is more entertaining, but Friar is the best character! Second, the zombie-ism seems to be a metaphor for depression on some level (lack of interest in the world, difficulty communicating, likelihood of lashing out at others’ brains, etc.) and the message seems to be no one’s too far-gone to help… except the boneys, who we should all kill. That’s a weird moral. Third, the boneys; on the one hand I hate them because they’re a cheap ploy to create drama when the audience is supposed to end up liking all the regular humans and zombies (except Dave Franco, heck that guy), so we need to shoehorn in a new enemy that has nothing interesting about them, but on the other hand I hate them because of their stupid name. But at the end of the day, I think the biggest disappointment is the overall message of the story.
Every year I ask my students for themes of Romeo and Juliet, and every year they tell me: “love conquers all.” But it doesn’t! Love (and we’re using that term generously given the short time they‘ve known each other and Romeo’s history with women; let’s leave it at this: it’s real to them) DOES NOT save Romeo and Juliet, and in fact if they had been less madly in love that love could have actually grown or flourished, because desperation to be with each other RIGHT AWAY is what continually puts them at danger. But Warm Bodies’ twists that message back on itself to suggest that love can fix your problems (even depression!) and that if you trust it, things will just get better, which undermines the tension that makes Romeo and Juliet such a great story. The tragedy isn’t that their love was perfect and failed; the tragedy is that two young people made mistakes that should have been fixable, but weren’t because of the feud they were born into.
And while Warm Bodies’ story might be sweeter, but when you take away the meaning of the original text, what you’re left with is empty calories. I’d rather eat the whole brain.
2.5 brains out of 5. If you want a zombie romantic comedy (zom-rom-com, for short,) go watch Shaun of the Dead.