Wherefore art thou, Zombie-o?

Mild Warm Bodies spoilers to follow. 

I liked Warm Bodies at least ten percent less on my second viewing than when I saw it the first time, meaning it can (and probably should) drop a half-star from my initial lofty 4.5-star rating.

Ironically, I also found it ten percent more clever than the first time.

That's in part because I can be dumb sometimes.

I loved Warm Bodies, ranking it #12 for the year in 2013, even without realizing that it's based loosely on Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet.

I suppose it might have been obvious if I had been looking a bit more closely. The protagonist (pictured here, played by Nicholas Hoult) is a zombie who's called R, because he can't remember his full first name. (And it's never revealed, in fact, though I could have sworn that it was.) That would have been a tipoff. The fact that the girl he falls for is named Julie (played by Teresa Palmer) might have been a second clue. Then there's the broader fact that any work of art featuring "star-cross'd lovers" can be thought of as taking inspiration from Romeo & Juliet, and a zombie and a human -- mortal enemies on most occasions -- are as Montaguelike and Capuletesque as you could want.

But the scene that really clicked it home for me is when R risks everything by trying to pass for human in the walled human city, and comes to the garden below Julie's balcony to speak to her. How anyone could see a boy talking to a girl in a balcony and not think of Romeo & Juliet is beyond me, but that was me two years ago when I first saw this movie.

Saw it and fell in love with it, as I said.

Imagine how ga-ga I would have been if I could have also detected the Shakespeare homage. Not only is there the stuff I've already mentioned, but there's also a symbolic double suicide (which ends a bit happier for these characters than those in the play) and even a scene where the zombie Romeo kills his rival, as Romeo kills Paris in the text. Instead, I had to get that homage only on a second viewing when the rest of Warm Bodies left me a bit more cold, so to speak, than it had the first time.

It's still a movie with a surprising amount of heart and soul, but this time it connected with me less emotionally even as it connected with me more intellectually. I guess we can see which type of connection I value more.

I wonder in retrospect if this was Hoult's de facto audition for Mad Max: Fury Road. I mean, it proved he could play a pale-skinned, sickly looking guy desiccated of most of his blood.

Attitude's a bit different, though.

Pirates vs. zombies

The early 21st century was a big time for both pirates and zombies.

You could argue that Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later revived our interest in zombie movies in 2002, and then the following year, Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl made pirates hip again. (If they were ever hip in the first place.)

Why, then, have zombie movies been allowed to proliferate without seeming to owe a debt to either Boyle or zombie godfather George A. Romero, but every time we see a new pirate-related property, we feel like it's an attempt to ride on Pirates of the Caribbean's coattails?

These may seem like rather outdated thoughts, since there is neither a new zombie movie nor a new pirate movie acting as a news peg, but I've been thinking them because my son has been watching The Pirates! Band of Misfits every couple days since Christmas, when he got it as a present.

I quite enjoy The Pirates, which is a big step up from non-Wallace & Gromit Aardman movies like Chicken Run and Flushed Away, but I do recall thinking at the time it came out that it was a rather too-obvious attempt to capitalize on Disney's Caribbean-led pirate rejuvenation. Perhaps being a rival studio of Disney -- albeit a significantly less powerful rival -- made the inevitable comparison seem all the more inevitable.

But it was the zombie thing that caused me to judge that comparison unfair. Did Disney take out the patent on the pirate movie? Certainly not. People can and should make whatever pirate movies they want to make without having to bear the burden of owing something to Caribbean, a series that only really has one good entry. (I actually didn't see On Stranger Tides, but the critical consensus on it was not great.)

Certainly, zombie movies exist in whatever forms they want to exist. One of my more delightful surprises of 2013, for example, was Warm Bodies, which sees a teen zombie as its lovelorn protagonist/ narrator. On the opposite end of the spectrum there was World War Z, a surprise only because it wasn't terrible, in which the zombies are like mindless swarming insects. The zombie movie genre allows you to go off in all different directions.

And here's where we see the reason why zombie movies have exploded and pirate movies have basically disappeared from the landscape, not to mention the reason why comparing zombies and pirates in the first place was only useful to the extent that they had a revival around the same time. People continue to want to see zombies in both traditional and non-traditional forms, while pirates all assume more or less the same form. And that pirate form will always be unduly influenced by puffy shirts and affected speech patterns and other silly elements that leave the genre perennially associated with comedy and children's fare.

I do sometimes wonder, though, why we couldn't have seen other types of pirate movies. Why couldn't you have a pirate noir, where characters are double-crossing each other aboard a pirate ship, resulting in a suspenseful game of wits? Why not a gritty pirate movie done in a realistic indie style? Why not a pirate movie in the Quentin Tarantino mold, violent and funny and full of pop culture references?

I may be answering my own questions here.

While I'm waiting for these movies to materialize, I look forward to the seven or eight new zombie movies we are sure to see in 2014.

The exact consciousness level of a zombie

This post contains some spoilers about 28 Weeks Later and Warm Bodies. 

One of the reasons I ultimately didn't like 28 Weeks Later -- and more to the point, the main reason I regularly tell people I didn't like it -- is because (spoiler alert) Zombie Robert Carlyle stalks his own children.

That's right, he's been bitten by another zombie and so he becomes one himself, divorcing himself from all remnants of his former life. (I know, I know, they're not "zombies" -- they are infected with "the rage"). Yet when he crosses paths with his children, which I believe happens more than once, he breaks away from the horde to follow them.

I allow this complaint to stand in for a number of other problems I have with the movie, because sometimes it's easier just to focus on one thing. But I did really find it to be a serious problem. The movie sets up a world where zombies are unthinking killing machines who harbor no ability to make distinctions between their prey, or to have the capacity to prefer one prey over another even if they could make distinctions. In fact, pretty much every zombie movie you've ever seen sets up that same world.

The reason I didn't dig 28 Weeks Later ends up being the same reason I did dig Warm Bodies, which I saw on Friday night. Some people may find it problematic. I found it endearing, and ultimately, incredibly emotionally rich.

It may be clear from this movie's setup -- a zombie boy falls in love with a living girl -- that the zombies you're getting in Warm Bodies are not your typical shuffling, shambling brain-eaters. Oh, they eat brains alright, but it's for a specific purpose: Eating the brains of their victims allows them to experience the memories of those victims, just for a minute or so. It's like the zombie version of a powerful drug, a drug that temporarily reminds them what it felt like to be alive.

This alone I liked, but Warm Bodies is a unique take on a zombie movie in a number of other ways as well.

The desire to experience another's memories underscores the ways these zombies are still human. And that's kind of what Warm Bodies made me realize: Zombies don't have to be unthinking killing machines. Why couldn't they be just human beings struggling with their new mode of existence? Human beings who feel a newfound compulsion toward cannibalism that they loathe, but that they must yield to in order to survive?

Warm Bodies smartly establishes these former humans as beings in a state of limbo. They certainly aren't alive, but there's another brand of undead that's far more gone than they are. In the parlance of the movie, the zombies we're talking about are referred to as "corpses." However, there are also "skeletons," who look like this:

Essentially, skeletons are corpses who picked all their skin away, like you or I would pick at a scab. Although the movie doesn't specifically state this, you might surmise that the inability to stop tearing away loose flaps of skin escalates at the same rate that they degenerate irrevocably into madness. Corpses aren't really sure what they're doing; skeletons are fully committed to being the eating, killing ids that they are.

Put a bit more directly: Corpses might still be saved.

This idea that the zombies of Warm Bodies might not be lost causes allows for suspensions of disbelief that would otherwise be quite problematic. Like, the fact that our main zombie, dubbed R because he can only remember the first letter of his first name, can speak, a little bit. Like the fact that he makes moral choices. Like the fact that he returns each night to a makeshift home in an airplane, where he plays old vinyl albums that he collected when he was still alive. Like the fact that he falls in love.

If any of these things had happened in 28 Weeks Later, I would have laughed them out of the building. And in fact, because something sort of like this does happen -- a violation of the rules the movie has established -- I consider 28 Weeks to be lesser.

Warm Bodies establishes its own rules, and I quickly decided that I dug them. Zombies movies, on the whole, have always been part of a satirical tradition. They got their start as a means of commenting on us and who we are, and the comments were never positive. That's the big difference with Warm Bodies. It does have that satirical edge, most notably in a flashback scene in which we're all seen interacting with our phones more than each other. But it also has room for the optimism that human beings are characterized by their desire to improve. Zombies aren't content being what they are; they want to fight their basest impulses to become something more enlightened. They want to rise above.

The fact that the movie is narrated by R, as though he were a fully conscious and capable narrator trapped inside the body of the undead, is just one more indication of the kind of zombie movie this wants to be. It wants to explore our capacity for change, and the everyday heroism of overcoming our limitations. That makes us human as much as all our regrettable pettiness.

So I'm okay with a zombie who still sort of remembers what it was like to be human, and wishes he could get there again. It lends extra poignancy to his primitive attempts at rescuing the girl he loves from danger. If it's going to deliver me the kind of emotional catharsis this movie did, I'm okay with a zombie who thinks, who chooses, who decides. 

Besides, R has a really great record collection.