Products You May Like
With Valentine’s Day around the corner, you’ll no doubt find a number of genre outlets running lists of horror movies to watch for the most romantic day of the year. Warm Bodies is likely to appear on most if not all of them, but there’s another reason to revisit the 2013 film this year: Lionsgate is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a 4K Ultra HD (with Blu-ray and Digital) edition in Steelbook packaging, available exclusively at Best Buy.
I realize Twilight is practically a pejorative on a horror site, but we probably wouldn’t have Warm Bodies if sparkling vampires hadn’t paved the way. Both films are coming-of-age romances with monsters based on young adult books. Warm Bodies has the added benefit of the proliferation of zombies in pop culture heralded by The Walking Dead, plus a sense of humor akin to Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland.
Jonathan Levine was an ideal candidate to adapt Isaac Marion’s 2010 novel. He tackled horror with his festival favorite debut, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, then proved he could balance comedy and drama with his next efforts, The Wackness and 50/50. Warm Bodies has even more to juggle, but he does so dexterously — and even manages to slip in a nod to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie!
A rarity in the well-trodden oeuvre of zombie cinema, Warm Bodies is largely told from the undead’s perspective via internal monologue. It also puts a few notable twists on the classic zombie rules. The zombies generally lumber around Romero-style but become ravenous when exposed to food. While they mostly grunt and groan, they can occasionally muster up a word. The ones that completely lose their humanity become skeletal uber-zombies, dubbed boneys, that shed their flesh and feed on anything with a heartbeat.
Eight years into the apocalypse, ambivalent zombie — or corpse, as the humans refers to them — R (Nicholas Hoult, Mad Max: Fury Road) is smitten by Julie (Teresa Palmer, Lights Out), one in a group of humans who set out to gather resources beyond the wall they’ve build around their settlement. He saves her from certain death and brings her back to his makeshift lair in an abandoned airplane, but not before eating her boyfriend Perry’s (Dave Franco, 21 Jump Street) brain and gaining his memories.
Thinking she only has to lay low for a few days before getting out, Julie makes the most of her time with R, and they fall for one another. As R’s emotions grow, so too do his other human qualities — he starts to dream, experiences the cold, and speaks more — which also sparks something in the other zombies. Meanwhile, Julie’s father and leader of the survivors, Colonel Grigio (the great John Malkovich), dismisses the notion of a benevolent zombie. R and Julie find themselves in the middle of a battle between humans, corpses, and boneys.
The zom-rom-com uses William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a template. R and Julie are thinly-veiled analogs for the star-crossed lovers, complete with an on-the-nose balcony scene, while Perry and R’s corpse friend M (Rob Corddry, Hot Tub Time Machine) stand in for Paris and Mercutio, respectively.
The romance arc is rushed to fit within the confines of a 97-minute film — Julie barely raises an eyebrow at R’s ability to talk and quickly brushes off the fact that he killed her boyfriend — and teeters on the edge of melodrama. The resolution is particularly mawkish, not to mention its logic doesn’t hold up under the slightest scrutiny. Nevertheless, the relationship is endearing enough to carry the picture beyond its faults. It never feels lacking in other departments, despite the fact that zombie action is mostly limited to a couple of sequences.
Warm Bodies succeeds because R is a layered character brought to life — or, rather, undeath — by a nuanced performance. He’s conflicted about his lifestyle but that doesn’t stop him from feeding, and he falls in love with Julie but killed her boyfriend before essentially holding her captive. No stranger to acting under makeup, having just played Beast in X-Men: First Class, Hoult admirably expresses emotion through body language, utilizing his expressive eyes.
Palmer is left with the majority of dialogue, but she does so with ease. Her on-screen chemistry with Holt certainly doesn’t hurt. As the main source of comedic relief, Corddry steals every scene in which he appears. Franco plays up the smarminess so audiences don’t mind seeing him get eaten, while Malkovich brings his usual gravitas to the production.
Every coming-of-age movie worth its salt is accompanied by a resonant soundtrack. Levine swaps the source material’s use of Frank Sinatra for a mix of contemporary indie acts like The Black Keys, Bon Iver, and The National with classic cuts from Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Guns n’ Roses. The film also features a score by Marco Beltrami (Scream, Logan) and protege Buck Sanders.
Warm Bodies‘ visual palette is cold and muted, providing a stark contrast to the vibrant pre-apocalypse life glimpsed in flashbacks. Director of photography Javier Aguirresarobe no doubt became part of the conversation due to his work on two Twilight movies (New Moon and Eclipse), but also shot The Road and The Others, so he has experience rendering apocalyptic despair.
Warm Bodies is presented in 4K with Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos audio (plus DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 on the Blu-ray). The Steelbook is packaged with a semi-transparent slipcover, both designed by Matt Ryan Tobin, featuring additional artwork. It’s otherwise identical to the standard 4K edition from 2017, which itself carried over the extras from the original Blu-ray. Thankfully, the movie was produced at a time when studios still put effort into extras for mid-budget movies.
There’s over 80 minutes of featurettes with the cast and crew: “Boy Meets, er, Doesn’t Eat Girl” traces the evolution from short story to novel to script to film; “R&J” profiles the main couple; “A Little Less Dead” highlights the supporting characters; “Extreme Zombie Make-Over” has makeup effects head Adrien Morot (X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Revenant) breaking down the process of turning Hoult into R; “A Wreck in Progress” highlights the production design and shooting in Montreal (including an empty airport previously used in The Terminal); “Bustin’ Caps” focuses on firearms and stunts; and “Beware of the Boneys” details the creation of the boneys (including a glimpse at the superior practical version) and other CGI elements.
Other special features include: a lighthearted commentary track with Levine, Hoult, and Palmer in which they discuss how much the film evolved — and improved — with reshoots; a compilation of behind-the-scenes footage shot by Palmer on set; a fun Screen Junkies piece on Corddry’s “method acting;” nine deleted scenes (including an alternate ending) with optional commentary by Levine; a gag reel; and the theatrical trailer.
