Warm Bodies Information

Warm Bodies is a 2013 American paranormal romantic zombie comedy film based on Isaac Marion's novel of the same name. Directed and written by Jonathan Levine, the film stars Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer.

The film focuses on the development of the relationship between Julie, a young woman, and "R", a zombie, and how their eventual romance develops throughout. The film is noted for displaying human characteristics in zombie characters, and for being told from a zombie's perspective.

Plot

After a zombie apocalypse, R, a zombie, spends his days wandering around an airport which is now filled with hordes of his fellow undead, including his best friend M. R and M achieve rudimentary communication with grunts and moans and "Eh's" and occasional near-words. As a zombie, R constantly craves human flesh, especially brains, as he is able to "feel alive" on the memories of their former owners. The zombies travel in packs, moving very slowly, searching for victims to feed on. While out looking for food, R and a pack of zombies find Julie Grigio and a group of her friends, who were sent out by Julie's father from a heavily-fortified, walled-off human enclave in a nearby city to recover medical supplies from abandoned buildings. R sees Julie and is drawn to her. After being shot in the chest by Julie's boyfriend, Perry, R kills Perry while Julie is distracted and eats his brain, giving R his thoughts and memories making his attraction to Julie become even stronger. He rescues Julie from the rest of the pack and takes her back to an airplane he lives in at the airport to keep her safe. The two bond, causing R to slowly begin to come to life.

Eventually, Julie gets restless and convinces R to take her home. On the way, R reveals to her that he killed Perry, causing her to abandon R and return alone to the human enclave. R begins to make his way back to the airport, heartbroken, but when he sees that M and other zombies are also beginning to show signs of life, he and M lead a group to the human enclave, where R sneaks inside the wall. There he meets Julie's friend Nora and her father Colonel Grigio, leader of the human group. While Nora is grudgingly accepting, Colonel Grigio refuses to believe corpses can change and threatens to kill R. Julie and R escape to a baseball stadium where the rest of R's group is waiting, but find themselves under attack by a horde of skeletal zombies (also known as Bonies) who have irretrievably lost all traces of humanity, and are set on killing and eating anything with a heartbeat, which now includes R and his friends.

Julie and R run from the Bonies, finding themselves trapped. Taking the only escape route, R jumps with Julie into a pool far below, shielding her from the impact but hitting his head, and both of them survive the fall. Thrilled to be alive, they kiss passionately. However, Colonel Grigio shoots R in the shoulder, causing him to bleed and proving that he's been revived. The humans and zombies combine forces and kill the Bonies, and the zombies slowly assimilate into human society. The human population destroys the walls surrounding the human society after the annihilation of the Boney population, creating a life for both humans and reanimated corpses much like the days before the apocalypse. The film ends with R and Julie as a couple.

Cast

• Nicholas Hoult as R
• Teresa Palmer as Julie Grigio
• Rob Corddry as M / Marcus, a friend of R
• Dave Franco as Perry Kelvin, Julie's boyfriend
• Analeigh Tipton as Nora, a friend of Julie
• Cory Hardrict as Kevin
• John Malkovich as Colonel Grigio, a leader of the human group and father of Julie
• Patrick Sabongui as Hunting zombie
• Tod Fennell as Armed Patrol
• Justin Bradley (uncredited)

Production

Actor Nicholas Hoult plays the zombie R in the feature film, written and directed by Jonathan Levine. The film also starred Teresa Palmer as Julie Grigio, Rob Corddry as M, and John Malkovich as General Grigio. Dave Franco, Analeigh Tipton, and Cory Hardrict also appear.

The studio Summit Entertainment backed the film, which was produced by Bruna Papanadrea, David Hoberman, and Todd Lieberman and executive produced by Laurie Webb and Cori Shepherd Stern. The zombies can barely talk in the film, so extensive voice-overs were used to express their thoughts.

Levine said even though this is a love story that involves zombies, he hoped people wouldn't try to put the film into one category and zombie enthusiasts would be open to a new twist on the genre. "I think this movie takes the mythology in a different direction, and I think there is a lot there for die-hard zombie fans," he explained. "We're encouraging people to be open-minded, because it does take some liberties with the mythology, but at the same time, it's very grounded in the science of zombie-ism and uses that as a springboard for a more fantastical story. It may be divisive, but I think there's a lot there for zombie fans if they're open-minded to a new take on it, and I hope they can." Actress Palmer said, "For me, the core of the story is that love breathes life back into people. That human connection saves us. People who have had those lights dimmed inside them, when they fall in love they get brighter."

Warm Bodies began shooting in Montréal, Québec, Canada in September 2011, and was released in the U.S. on February 1, 2013.

Levine told USA Today that R attempts "to do a lot of things to varying degrees of success. Driving, for instance. Let's just say his hand-eye coordination is not what it needs to be." Hoult and other zombie actors practiced with circus performers to achieve the right body moves. Hoult explained, "There were some days with the Cirque du Soleil people and we would take our shoes off in a dance studio and we would kind of grow out of the wall and make our bodies feel very heavy. It's one of those things where you think about it a lot but you just have to try it out and see what works. Then Jonathan [Levine] would say either 'too much or little less', we didn't want to go over the top with it." Hoult told another reviewer that he "he drew a lot of his inspiration from Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands," saying he thought of that movie "as a zombie film, whether it was or not. Because you had to feel sorry for Edward... I was thinking of Edward when I did R."

Release

Warm Bodies was released on January 31, 2013 in the Philippines, Greece, and Russia. It was released on February 1, 2013 in the United States, on February 7, 2013 in Italy and on February 8, 2013 in the United Kingdom. In its opening weekend it collected US$20.3 Million. It has returned a box office of 64.6 million within the US and an additional $28.8 million worldwide.

IMDb's Keith Simanton predicted Warm Bodies would win the weekend box office with US$17.4 million, despite competing with that weekend's Sunday Super Bowl XLVII.

Critical reception

The film has received mixed to positive reviews from critics. It holds a 78% certified "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 141 reviews, with an average score of 6.6/10. The sites consensus reads: "It may not take full advantage of its quirky, possibility-rich premise, but Warm Bodies offers a sweet, well-acted spin on a genre that all too often lives down to its brain-dead protagonists." It holds a Metacritic score of 58 out of 100, based on 37 reviews, indicating "mixed to average" reviews.

Richard Larson of Slant Magazine said "The ubiquity of Shakespeare's original template allows Warm Bodies some leeway in terms of believability, where otherwise it sometimes strains against its own logic. But the film's persistent charm encourages us to look past a few festering surface wounds and see the human heart beating inside, which is really what love is all about." and awarded the film 3 out of 4 stars. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times deemed the film "a well-paced, nicely directed, post-apocalyptic love story with a terrific sense of humor and the, um, guts to be unabashedly romantic and unapologetically optimistic." He added that the movie "isn't perfect. It's a shame those Bonies are mediocre special-effects creations that run with a herky-jerky style... But those are minor drawbacks..." Mary Pols of Time called it "an inventive charmer that visits all the typical movie scenarios of young love amid chaos and disaster... There are so many clever lines and bits of physical comedy worth revisiting that the movie seems like a likely cult classic."

Digital Spy gave it 3 out of 5 stars and called it "a truly deadpan romantic comedy" and "a witty reinvention of the genre like Shaun of the Dead before it, drawing parallels between the apathy of youth and the zombie masses," adding, "Hoult gets to deliver a wickedly dry voiceover." Chris Packham of The Village Voice said in a negative review that "The film's intentions are way too good for its own good, producing bloodless romance and more shamefully bloodless carnage. Nobody kisses anyone else until it becomes clear that both parties have pulses, and everyone gets to keep all their limbs." Michael O'Sullivan said in his one-and-a-half star review for The Washington Post that the film is "Cute without being especially clever, it's as pallid and as brain-dead as its zombie antihero...It's less funny and self-aware than Shaun of the Dead, less swooningly romantic than Twilight and less scary than pretty much anything else out there with zombies in it."