Ever since I have watched the trailer of this movie, quite some time back, I have always been wanting to catch Warm Bodies on a big screen. Cynthia and my buddy TK’s response to my overwhelming enthusiasm has been lukewarm. Until they have watched the show with me. They love it.
I am unsure why the global fascination on zombies and the undeads. Online games like World of Warcraft have them. They have been the prime targets in many shooter games. Even in Call of Duty and Saint Rows 3 whereby I don’t see how zombies get into the stories, but they are there. As though in our mind, the apocalypse happening in the future would turn many of us into the rotting zombies. Dead, but not quite dead.
Warm Bodies in essence is a story about a zombie named R and a human girl called Julie. And R has a friend called M. Do the names like Romeo, Montague, and Juliet ring a bell? It seems that Shakespeare would continue to inspire, all the way to the apocalypse and beyond.
This story is interesting because it is told from the perspective of a zombie. R narrates most of the plot. The way he sees things, the first time he falls in love and somehow manages to suppress his hunger for Julie’s brain. Zombies eat human brains for the memories within, and to feel human again for a short while. There seems to be a constant yearning for the zombies to feel human. Indeed, this love between R and Julie has triggered an effect to the zombie community and turning them warm. Hence the film’s title, Warm Bodies.
The relationship between zombies and human is slightly more complicated than us versus them. Zombies that have given up hope to feel human again turn into skeletons. In this three-way relationship, zombies emerge as the protagonists while flaws from the human and the skeleton such as apathy and distrust would leave the audience something to think about.
The morale of the story if I may add would be such. Healing between groups of different people – be it as rich and poor, healthy and disabled, different religions and non-believers, and different cultures – would start with acceptance and love. Change is possible. Casting away prejudice and fear so as to see things from a different perspective. Realizing that the very thing you fear about the other one could well be the same thing the other one too fear of. And perhaps, we are not that different after all.