Warm Bodies review: Love makes us human

The first thing you need to know before reading this review is the fact that I’m an incurable young adult book addict, and because I’m also a hardcore movie addict it’s like a freaking all you can eat buffet with a free bar and a secret portal to Candyland for me at the moment with all the young adult books coming to life on the big screen like The Hunger Games, The Hobbit, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Beautiful Creatures, The Mortal Instruments, Vampire Academy and so on. So you can imagine my excitement when I first learned that Warm Bodies was being made into a movie after having read the book.

That said, let’s get on with the actual review of the movie. The story is about a zombie named ‘R’. R isn’t like any other zombie, he thinks about stuff, about life. Though you wouldn’t expect a zombie to think about anything except eating brains, R is surprisingly thoughtful about his life, or well… his death… undeadness? But even though R might think differently than what we would expect a zombie to, he acts exactly how we would expect. The thing that drives the zombies in Warm Bodies is a sort of hunger. When they eat a human brain they’ll experience the victims’ memories and feelings for a little while, which is really a nice twist in my opinion because it would be nice to know somehow that if a zombie apocalypse actually did happen one day, the zombies would kill for a greater purpose than just killing. Does that make any sense? Anyways, this is why the romance part happens. R eats the brain of a guy named Perry. All his memories is mainly about his girlfriend named Julie, and R experiences Perry’s feelings and memories of Julie, and unexpectedly starts feeling something real.  He sort of tries to rescue Julie from being a zombie snack herself but really ends up kidnapping her. R is determined to protect her from anyone and anything despite their quite large language barrier, since zombies don’t exactly talk, and the fact that they don’t exactly eat the same thing, go figure. Their connection, however, isn’t a hit with everyone. Mainly because it’s infecting the other zombies, but also because people don’t believe in a cure anymore.

Warm Bodies is a refreshing twist on the zombie genre, but also on the romantic comedy genre if you ask me. A lot of people has said that Warm Bodies is making the genre soft, or even ‘girly’, but I imagine the people who’ve said these things haven’t watched the movie or even read the book. I’m also imagining that these are the same people saying that Warm Bodies are simply ‘Twilight with zombies.’ First of all, don’t compare every supernatural romance with Twilight. When did that trend happen? It’s like comparing every action movie with Die Hard or James Bond, stop it! They’re not the same. They have their own story, their own characters and their own setting. Don’t judge a book on it’s cover guys, this movie is genuinely a really fun, refreshing and entertaining movie. It’s not one of those movies that’ll win an Oscar, but it’s one of those movies you’ll enjoy watching multiple times and feel good about.

For those who’ve read the book, I personally thought it was a really good interpretation. Of course there’re some changes and several things have been left out, but it’s impossible for a screen writer and a director to adapt a book to a movie down to every last detail, and that is something a lot of these fan bases are forgetting. Adaptations just doesn’t work that way. Isaac Marion (the author) said that you should think of the movie as a cover song: “one artist reinterpreting another in his own style, capturing the essence of the original but putting his own spin on it.” So my advice to you, if you’ve read the book, is to just enjoy the movie separately from the book and I promise you, if you walk into the theatre without expecting or demanding an exact replica of the book you’ll love it. I sure did!

Grade – A