Week One: Warm Bodies (Minor Spoilers)

So, my husband and I are taking the plunge: we are going to try to go to the movies once a week, and I’ll report back here, dear reader, about what’s hot and what’s not on the big screen in 2013. Of course, this is totally biased and depends largely on my enjoyment of movies with “heart,” as well as sci-fi. The worst kind of reviewer of all, alas: one with her own taste. :-)  

The first movie that looked worthwhile was Warm Bodies, which came out February 1, which had both heart and science fiction. Based on a young adult book by Isaac Marion and put out by Summit Entertainment (the same folks who did Twilight), Warm Bodies is clearly jockeying to fill the movie void left by the ending of the Twilight Saga. Fortunately, none of these characters had quite the same pervasive unhealthy, unexplained infatuation demonstrated on the silver screen for Twilight. (Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the Twilight Saga, but the Bella-Edward attraction was never quite explained to my satisfaction – it was more like one day Edward woke up and decided to stop being cryptic, and Bella was totally fine with risking un-death to raise her social status.)

Warm Bodies is the story of how a zombie is changed by love and by how one small change in him could affect other zombies. The zombie R narrates what it’s like to be a zombie in a tongue-in-cheek manner. For example, zombies can’t think (though R and his best friend M can, to a certain degree), bleed, or dream. The closest zombies get to dreaming is eating the brains of their victims, where they get to experience their memories. It is through the experience of eating a young man’s brains that R falls in love with Julie… Wait… R loves Julie…. R(omeo) loves Julie(t). It’s true. There are multiple Romeo and Juliet references here (and how can you get more star-crossed than girl whose father is the leader of the last group of humans and the zombie who ate her ex?), including a balcony scene. What the movie does well, though, is that the R&J references are not pounded into your face, the zombies are appropriately disgusting though more understandable by the end of the movie, and, for a zombie, R shows a lot of, well, heart. (And brains and courage, too, but that’s another parallel – one that will have to wait for Oz the Great and Powerful on March 8.) Julie is not a languishing damsel in distress – she and R seem to have a somewhat equitable relationship; the fact that R ate her ex is significant; and the end of the movie gets wrapped up in a neat little package like only the silver screen can. It was the best romantic comedy I’ve seen in ages. Next question: does that say more about me or more about the kinds of movies that have come out in the last few years?

Oh, and it doesn't hurt that saving the world plays a role in the movie, too. Heart. It had heart.