Emma aime at the Movies: Warm Bodies

Warning contains spoilers: 

Warm Bodies is an adapataion of Issac Marion's book of the same name. On the face of it Warm Bodies is an original take on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. A story that has been retold in many different ways over the years.

R is a zombie living in a dilapidated airport in one of the planes and suffering from some kind of existential crisis. How the zombie apocalypse happened is not explained as R can not remember life as a human, even forgetting his first name save his initial, R.

Julie is the daughter of the leader of a nearby human settlement. The two run into each other when R along with his 'friend' M and a group of zombies go out looking for food namely humans. Julie and her scouting party are out looking for supplies and they get attacked by the group of zombies. R attacks Julie's boyfriend, eating his brains and thus reliving his memories but saves Julie from attack and takes her back to the relative safety of his plane.

The couple form a friendship that causes R to begin to regain his humanity but this angers the 'Bonies', zombies that are so far gone that they turn into ferocious skeletons. R and Julie run away from the Bonies taking refuge from the rain in an abandoned town but when Julie discovers that R ate her boyfriend she disappears in the night and returns home to her father. R returns to the airport but is stopped by M who tells him the other zombies are also beginning to dream and feel again.

R goes to find Julie and sneaks into the human settlement and goes up to Julie's balcony in a scene taken directly from Shakespeare. Julie smuggles R inside and he tells her how the zombies are changing and regaining their humanity. Julie and her friend Nora give R a makeover so he fits in with the humans.

Julie and R go to tell her father the news about the zombies but he is in a crisis as a large group of bonies and zombies have been spotted heading towards the town. Julie tries to tell her father about the zombies being on their side and about R but he threatens to shoot R. Nora comes to their rescue holding a gun to Julies father's head and Julie and R run away but they run into a pack of bonies which R fights off. Meanwhile, the humans are running towards the fight when they see that the zombies are already attacking the bonies. M says hello to the humans so they decide to only attack the bonies.

R and Julie are running away from the bonies but they come to a high ledge. With the bonies hot on their heels they have no where to go so R jumps holding Julie so she is protected from the fall. The two survive the fall and kiss but Julies father has caught up with them and shoots R in the chest proclaiming the next shot will be in the head. Julie defends R pointing out that R is bleeding and corpses don't bleed. As Julies Father has been getting reports of zombies helping humans all day he rethinks his ideas and lets R live.

The humans and zombies kill all the bonies and peace is restored. The zombies slowly learn how to be alive again and the humans learn how to tolerate and teach them.  The last scene is R and Julie holding hands while they watch the city walls fall.

As I said the movie is on the surface a modern interpretation of Romeo and Juliet but if you take a second look the film is an analogy of how through modern technology we are becoming disconnected from each other.

The classic zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead often contain metaphors for humans vast consumerism but Warm Bodies message is slightly different. It points to our disconnection from the world around us and each other. It is this connectedness that is the very essence of our humanity.