Warm Bodies—PG-13

Running Time: 98 min

Director: Jonathan Levine

Lead Actors: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich

Rating: 8

It turns out, love is what keeps our hearts beating. At least, that’s what I got from the newest Romeo and Juliet story, Warm Bodies. If you haven’t seen a “Romeo and Juliet story” before, you’re probably lying. They’re modernly taken in the form of supernatural movies, like Twilight. But unlike Twilight, Warm Bodies is witty, true to its myth, and extremely well acted.

The plot and characters are loosely based off of Romeo and Juliet: a boy and a girl in rival families fall in love with each other and must battle the differences between their families through love. Except in this instance, the “rival families” are “zombies and humans”, the “falling in love” part takes a good musical interlude in the middle of the movie, and the “battle of differences” is a lot harder to explain to the parents. R (Nicholas Hoult) is a young, unusually aware zombie who constantly roams the airport in desperation for something more than his “life”. When he meets Julie (Teresa Palmer) in a zombie attack, he falls head over heels in love with her and feels the uncontrollable need to take care of her. Taking her with him, R hopes that she will eventually warm up to him. Of course, it doesn’t help that he ate her boyfriend’s brains upon their meeting. An interesting twist was just what this story needed; there were a few jump scares and disturbing images. Don’t get me wrong, R was a sweetheart, but he was a creepy dude! My only real discontent with the movie is this: I watched it twice and saw nothing new the second time. It was still a good movie, but there’s nothing really deep about it. I found no inner moral or secret message hidden in the second viewing like many great movies. Then again, a movie doesn’t have to be deep to be good. This movie, more than many others, was surprisingly well structured. It was just the right pace, just the right tone, and had the right message for its theme.

The actors were nothing to underestimate either. Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer were phenomenal. They seemed to clash in just the right ways that the whole romance thing was on the edge: I wasn’t sure until the very end that they would even be able to make it work. Hoult in particular was a diamond in the rough. He created a character that was unsettling, creepy, yet extremely endearing and real.

The ambiance was set with upbeat electro music with an old fashioned aftertaste. Our minds like to see apocalypses riddled with empty streets and empty, echoing old music floating around, and Warm Bodies gave us just that. With that echo, the whole world is empty, abandoned by human nature. There is also a familiar theme for the duration of the soundtrack; not a particular melody, but a trend. Repetition is used throughout nearly every track in the movie, like a broken record, showing the mundane life of R and his discontent with his undead.

As for the theme itself, I was utterly surprised at what it turned out to be. No, it’s not actually about true love and its power over death. It’s about people. It’s perfect for our society today, for all the people hungry for love stories yet tired of the taste. What we want in love stories is something of ourselves, not just love for a particular person, but love for everything else. There’s a reason that “Romantic” and “Comedy” come together so well, it’s become a genre of its own. Love is the want for something other than ourselves, and R expresses just that all throughout. His inner monologue, in fact, sounds just like a normal teenager, completely discontent with themselves and how they’re shaping up to be. It’s all about his want to be alive, a hunger greater than his love for Julie in particular. He wants human interaction, affection. In all seriousness, this is life. And music, actors and plot aside, this is all Warm Bodies is about. Without love, we’re all just a bunch of empty husks.

            “A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive.”         -Pearl Bailey