Director: Jonathan Levine, 2013 (PG-13)
If you think back to the last love story you watched, it
probably featured a beautiful twenty-something woman and a hot and handsome
hunk, two of the current or emerging stars of today’s Hollywood. Two lovers full of life. It probably did not
have a gore-encrusted scruffy corpse as the leading man. Rarely has there been
a zombie love story. But this is one.
Yes, it’s the zombie apocalypse!
Warm Bodies begins with this voice-over:
“What am I doing with my life? I'm so pale. I should get out more. I should eat better. My posture is terrible. I should stand up straighter. People would respect me more if I stood up straighter. What's wrong with me? I just want to connect. Why can't I connect with people? Oh, right, it's because I'm dead.”
The young man who is thinking this is R (Nicholas Hoult),
who never gets a name as he simply cannot remember his pre-undead life. He
merely shuffles around in the airport that he and others like him exist.
The film features a voice-over narrative throughout. Although
cliché as a device to let us inside a character’s head, in this case the
characters cannot speak. They only grunt. But voice-over allows us to discover
that R is full of thoughts and desires, wants and wishes. We would not know
this from his (lack of) communication.
In this post-apocalyptic world, three kinds of beings dwell:
the undead, known as corpses (not zombies); the bonies, corpses that have
devolved to the point of pulling off their own dead skin and flesh; and the
humans, almost at the point of extinction.
When a team of young humans leave the city walls that
protect them to go in search of medicine and supplies things go horribly wrong.
Julie (Teresa Palmer), daughter of the city’s leading general Grigio (John
Malkovich), and her team get attacked by a horde of corpses bent on eating live
flesh. Perry (Dave Franco), Julie’s boyfriend, gets killed and his brains eaten
by R, the hero of the film. Then in a poignant moment, R falls in love with
Julie and saves her from Perry’s fate. He then takes her back with them,
smearing gore on her face to cover the aroma of life that attracts the zombies.
At this point it’s worth mentioning that this is more than a
love story. As a zombie flick, it has its fair share of horror moments. After
all, zombie movies are captured in the horror genre. Warm Bodies includes some
nasty images of bonies eating humans, and some violence. But the images of R
eating Perry’s brains are perhaps the most gruesome.
Yet these scenes are crucial in R’s wooing of Julie. As R
says in voice-over, “There's a lot of ways to get to know a person. Eating her
dead boyfriend's brains is one of the more unorthodox methods, but...” He
cannot put his thoughts into words to talk to her and so assimilates Perry’s
memories by absorbing his brains. In this way, he does get to know her, even if
she does not get to know him.
But a strange thing happens. As he falls deeper in love with
her, his dead heart begins to beat. And he is able to speak words, slow and
monosyllabic at first but later short sentences. Then his zombie friends begin
to change, too, recognizing the feelings of love that awakens them from their
long sleep of death.
Here lies the connection to Christianity. We are all
zombies, dead men walking. As the apostle Paul says, “sin entered the world
through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all
people, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12) But love changed everything. “For God
so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in
him shall not perish but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16).
Jesus, full of love and life, came to this planet that was
full of death as a healer for those that would hear and accept. He said, “It is
not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the
righteous, but sinners.” (Mk. 2:17) Starting with the Twelve Apostles, his
radical vision of the kingdom transformed people who in turn brought this
saving love to others: “We know that we have passed
from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does
not love remains in death. (1 Jn. 3:14)
Copyright ©2014, Martin Baggs
