Movie Discussion: Warm Bodies

Scott Hardie | February 2, 2013
I didn't realize that this movie was about teenagers until I looked it up to make this page. The actors in the advertising look WAY too old to be teens.

Scott Hardie | October 27, 2013
Wow. I didn't expect greatness, but this was much worse than I was hoping for, given the popularity of the source material and the zombie genre's ripeness for parody. As critic Michael O'Sullivan wrote, "It's less funny and self-aware than Shaun of the Dead, less swooningly romantic than Twilight, and less scary than pretty much anything else out there with zombies in it." That sums it up: The movie is a failure on multiple levels.

An occasional logical inconsistency in a movie doesn't bother me at all. A few add up to a nuisance. In Warm Bodies, there were so many problems with the plot that it became a major distraction, sucking me out of the movie every time I noticed another one. Here are a few off the top of my head:
- Julie can't afford to be seen at the airport. Why do she and R drive a convertible around the tarmac, cheering loudly?
- When Julie and R drop from the stadium balcony into the pool, how did the Colonel know which pool they were going to fall into so that he and his squad could be there with guns drawn?
- Where did the humans get the resources necessary to build a ten-story wall around an entire metropolis? Why would they build it far higher than necessary?
- Nora holds the Colonel at gunpoint long enough for Julie and R to run away. How do none of the soldiers in view not notice this? And where did she get the gun?
- Why was Julie unwilling to rejoin her father in the suburban neighborhood, but still willing to run away to join him later that same night? (There was a line of dialogue about how the Colonel would have shot R, but he could have easily stayed hidden in the house.)
- If the Colonel employs so many soldiers, why don't they go off to scavenge for resources in the city? Why send civilian teenagers?
- Does one smear of zombie goo on Julie's face really make her human scent undetectable to zombies? That's quite a stretch.
- Why does Julie, more than capable with a gun, accept R's protection in the first place? Why would she walk with him without objection for miles, right into a zombie hive, and then fall asleep?
- Where did Julie get such professional-grade firearm training in the first place? She has grown up in a mansion with servants, and her father goes out of his way to keep her out of harm's way.

For the record, I'll give the movie a pass on the dippier core elements of its plot, like how love cures zombification (wha?), or how the Boneys behave far more intelligently than the zombies despite being a form of devolution, or how the Colonel refuses to listen to any claim that R is reformed. Those are dumb but fine, necessary for the plot and/or typical for the genre. I was bothered that R's narration in the opening scene indicated that he was already far more intelligent than he should have been, given his behavior. Am I out of line to be bothered by all of these plot holes?

The dream sequence was one of the biggest signs of failure to me. After we heard for an hour about how zombies cannot dream and how badly R wants to dream, he finally has a dream, which should be a critical scene. From the photography, it seems like it's supposed to be visually astounding compared to the drab, run-down dystopia that R lives in. And yet, it's just him in a field, talking to three other characters about the plot of the film. That's the best they can come up with? He's not dreaming that he and M are fully human again, or that Julie has fallen in love with him, or that the world is restored to normal, or something really breathtaking like a fully CGI environment? The movie has all of the resources necessary to be great, but no imagination to use them toward any purpose.

The movie didn't make nearly as many zombie jokes as I was hoping, but it did have a few good ones: Julie trying to shamble, R saying how long it was going to take for the zombie pack to walk into town, M and R's "conversation" at the diner counter. Which jokes did you like?