At the very beginning of Warm Bodies the mindless wandering zombies are fleetingly compared to their former selves, before the zombie apocalypse. What these ‘normal’ people are doing is also wandering, mindless, eyes on their smart phones – our zombie hero laments his inability to connect on a personal level, the film is saying that the smart phone user has the same problem. So here is my thesis: the current resurgence in zombie films can be directly related to the alienation and personal separation which inevitably comes with the increasing trend towards a life lived online. Warm Bodies very explicitly argues that only by re-learning real life social interaction can we hope to be saved. This isn’t anything new, Japanese horror movies were doing this with ghosts like five years ago, has Hollywood only just caught up, or have we only just caught up with the Japanese in terms of our increased reliance on technology to frame our relationships? Either way Warm Bodies makes its point really well, it is funny and heart warming and although the second act is rather too much taken up with quite how a zombie and a human can fall in love the end is great – Night of the Living Dead this is not. So what is fucking up my thesis? World War Z is fucking it all up. We have some amazing zombie related shit around at the moment, loads of great tv and some real good movies like Warm Bodies, all about what it is to be a human, alive, in a post apocalyptic zombie world. All well thought out and speaking directly to our current hopes and fears for our future. But World War Z? The book? Its brilliant, its about so much more than the zombies, it philosophizes, it makes you think. The film? It makes you think about how annoying Brad Pitts hair is, it makes you wonder why they threw away a brilliant opportunity for him to shoot his kid in the face whilst screaming “i love youuuu, we have to be sureeeeee”, and thats it. That is all I took away from World War Z. I didn’t walk out of the cinema thinking “I must value those around me, I must help them as they help me, I must Love! and be Loved!” I just walked out thinking that cgi zombies are not so great – World War Z is a film out of time, if it had come out ten years ago I would have shit myself at how cool it was, now though zombies have something to say and ‘R’ in Warm Bodies is saying it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588173/