Zombie Shakespeare

Okay sure. It’s not a perfect movie. It may not even be a particularly good movie.

Author

Tyler Clark
June 15, 2023

Good morning Consumers. This is Please Consume, the Film newsletter that loves you more than Ben Affleck loves being from Boston.

Warm Bodies

June 15th, 2023 - Written by Tyler Clark

Okay sure. It’s not a perfect movie. It may not even be a particularly good movie.

However, Warm Bodies is a very very specific cultural artifact from an era that was truly not that long ago but felt like several decades past.

Also, it has a killer opening that we will be taking a look at. So join us as we explore what a Romeo and Juliet story was like in 2013!

Zombie Craze of the 2010s

There was a strange phenomenon that occurred between 2010 and 2016 in which people were obsessed with zombie content.

There’s no definitive reason for this but it’s a pretty easy guess that The Walking Dead had something to do with it.

It’s weird to think about now, cause who really spends time thinking about The Walking Dead these days, but from it’s premiere to around the end of season six and beginning of season 7 the show and subgenre as a whole were massive!

At the height of the show's popularity it was bringing in millions of fans. Its season 5 premiere in 2014 brought in over 17 million viewers and an additional 5 million over the course of that next week.

And with all crazes from the 2010s, if there was a genre, there was a YA take on it. Warm Bodies is that Young Adult take for the flesh eating killers.

We Rooting for You Nick!

The following is for Warm Bodies star Nicholas Hoult.

If you are not famed actor Nicholas Hoult please stop reading this immediately. Or don’t, I could care less.

Nic, you are such a talented actor with great work from your supporting childhood performance in About a Boy to your brilliant performance as a dying war boy in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. Even your recent work in Those Who Wish Me Dead and The Menu have been wonderful and varied.

That being said, stop trying to play a superhero. It feels like every month you’re in the running for a different cape wearing hero whether it’s Batman, Superman, or even Lex Luthor.

You were Beast, and you were quite good in the blue fur, but please do more experimenting with your image and come back to us in three years when you’re ready to play Kyle Rayner.

Thank you for your time, sir.

Opening with a Bang!

As we mentioned before, Warm Bodies is far from perfect, but what it is is a quirky little comedy that’s premise is too clever for its own good.

And we enjoy it all the same. You see, the film ends up getting too stuck in its own premise to be able to have any fun with it.

But this opening gets the tone exactly right. It’s winking at the audience by doing the same ennui BS that you’ve seen from a million teen/young adult novels (here’s looking at you Perks of Being a Wallflower).

It takes the idea of the struggling straight white guy protagonist, unhappy with how his life is going, to its logical extreme and revels in that idea while also dropping some much-needed exposition.

Today’s Scene

Stream It

If you want to watch Warm Bodies at home, you can find it here.

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