Here's why zombie/romance movies can be a bad idea - at least when the zombie is involved in the romance - they aren't allowed to look like bloody, decaying garbage. Case in point is yesterday's first image of Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: First Class) as the rain-soaked zombie R in director Jonathan Levine's adaptation of Warm Bodies. Two more images have arrived online courtesy of Cinema Blend and, while they at least show some veins, Hoult looks about a frightening as a goth kid at a Bauhaus concert.
Not to unceremoniously dump on the movie. having read the script, I can say it's a pretty funny and fresh take on a zombie movie, and while some scenes may be acted more romantically than they are on the page, this isn't Twilight. If anything, it's a more light-hearted extrapolation on the Bub character from Romero's Day of the Dead, so let's be clear about this before anyone thinks that the movie will inspire tweens to start hanging around graveyards hoping their true love will come bursting from the ground.
All I'm saying is, clearly, Levine and company may have dressed Hoult up as a zombie, but they don't want him to look like a zombie zombie.
USA Today has a a couple new photos as well, but not much has changed, except the second photo is bombed by Rob Corddry.
Based on Isaac Marion's book, Warm Bodies co-stars Dave Franco and John Malkovich and opens on August 10th.
Zombies love people, especially their brains. But R (Nicholas Hoult) is different. He’s alive inside, unlike the hundreds of other grunting, drooling undead—all victims of a recent plague that drove the remaining survivors into a heavily guarded city. Now the Zombies roam about an airport terminal, searching for human prey and living in fear of the vicious Boneys, the next undead incarnation.
One day, R and his best friend M lumber toward the city in search of food. There, R first sets his eyes on JULIE (Teresa Palmer), a beautiful human. Determined to save her—first from the other Zombies and then from the Boneys—R hides her in his home, a cluttered 747 aircraft. Julie is terrified, and R’s grunted assurances of “Not…eat” do little to calm her. But when R begins to act more human than Zombie, coming to her defense, refusing to eat human flesh, and even speaking in full sentences, Julie realizes that R is special.
After a few close calls with the Boneys, and with her father mounting an armed search for her, Julie realizes she can’t hide forever. So she sneaks back home, leaving R broken-hearted. Desperate to see her, R decides to comb his hair, stand a little straighter, and impersonate a human long enough to get past the city guards. If only he can prove to the humans that Zombies can change, maybe R and Julie’s love might stand a chance. But with the rampaging Boneys heading toward the city and Julie’s father intent on killing R and his Zombie friends, the stage is set for an all-out battle between the living and the undead.
A genre-bending tale of love and transformation, WARM BODIES is a story about a boy who loves a girl…for more than just her body.
