Month: July 2024

Warm Bodies (2013)

Mrs. Sharky wanted to watch a romantic comedy. Uh oh.

I said, “What’s in it for me?”

This is the type of give-and-take situation we domesticated adults must consider every single day, and believe me, it ain’t easy.

Fortunately, my painstaking research turned up Warm Bodies, a zesty Canadian zom-rom-com that actually checked all the boxes for both our discerning tastes.

What a find!

Written and directed by Jonathan Levine, and based on a novel by Seattle writer Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies is the story of R (Nicholas Hoult), an unusually thoughtful zombie who wanders around an airport with his fellow undead shufflers, after a plague or virus or something turns a majority of the population into brain-eating ghouls.

“What am I doing with my life?” he wonders in narration. “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.”

One fateful day, R impulsively rescues Julie (Teresa Palmer), an armed forager, from a pack of his hungry brethren and takes her to safety. This single act of compassion from a walking dead human changes everything we thought we knew about the entire zombie genre.

Indeed, it starts a movement of humanism among the dead, as long-deceased folks begin to feel—different. Something is stirring inside.

Warm Bodies could fit snugly inside AMC’s The Walking Dead universe as a diverting subplot. Julie, the daughter of General Grigio (John Malkovich), leader of the militaristic human resistance falls for R, the zombie who ate her boyfriend’s brain.

R and Julie? Try Romeo and Juliet. There’s even a balcony scene.

I’m as surprised as anyone that I dug Warm Bodies as much as I did. It’s funny, well-written, kinda scary, and uplifting as hell. That’s not just a difficult balancing act, it’s a rarely occurring cinematic event.

A horror movie that you can snuggle your honey through.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

Yech!

Even with Ridley Scott directing, Alien: Covenant is another flop from a franchise that needs fresh blood more than Dracula.

Maybe we should blame Michael Fassbinder who gets to chew twice as much scenery in the dual role of Walter (the helpful, supportive android) and David (the amoral narcissist android).

Ten years after the events of Prometheus, which was also terrible, a new crew of explorers and sleeping deep-space colonists get a fragmented distress signal from a nearby habitable planet.

Surprise! It’s a trap! Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

Though there is space allotted for character development, nobody in the crew stands out from the usual trope type, except perhaps for Tennessee (Danny McBride), a good ol’ boy pilot in a beat-up cowboy hat.

See also: Lisa Standing (Kimberly Scott) in James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989).

There’s Captain Oram (Billy Crudup), a nervous newbie destined for failure; his second-in-command, Daniels (Katherine Waterston), still grieving her recently deceased husband, and Walter (Fassbinder), the android science officer who does most of the work.

We also get a bunch of Shemps, including Callie Hernandez, with very little to do other than perish.

Alien: Covenant attempts to re-create that ol’ black magic, but writers John Logan and Dante Harper spend too much time constructing familiar-looking scenes that hopefully resonate with long-suffering fans of the series. Consequently, there isn’t much of a story to hang your hat on, other than David’s mad ambitions.

There are elements aplenty wrangled from the first two (best) Alien films, including face huggers, gory birth sequences, automatic weapons, and renegade robots, but these never coalesce into anything able to stand on its own.

There’s the crew. The ship. The planet. The androids. Once again, the xenomorphs become an afterthought. In the final analysis, there is too much android angst and not nearly enough creature chaos, though it is a better-looking film than Prometheus.

The Alien series is stuck in a deep-space rut and could definitely use a change of scenery. I’ll let you know if there’s any intelligent life onboard after Alien: Romulus.