- Directed by Jonathan Levine
- Written by Isaac Marion, Jonathan Levine
- Stars Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich, Lio Tipton
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 39 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07s-cNFffDM
Spoiler-free Judgment Zone
It’s basically a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. It has an angle that’s rarely seen in zombie movies, which boosted it a bit. It’s decently made in all aspects, and entertaining, but not quite great.
Spoilery Synopsis
R wonders why he can’t connect with people or stand up straighter. Oh yeah he’s a zombie. Credits roll. He doesn’t remember his name, but it probably started with an “R.” All his friends are zombies, and he wonders what they were in life. He and the others hang around in the airport all day, every day. At some point, zombies who give up become “Bonies,” which looks pretty awful. Still, he’s not mindless, he can open doors, play records, and do simple tasks. All the zombies have one thing in common; their taste in food.
We cut to a survivor camp. There are military checkpoints, and it doesn’t look very much fun either. It’s been eight years since the plague began. Julie and her friends get a pep talk before being sent out into the city to scout and scavenge medicine. The zombies rush into the lab and there’s a gun battle. R watches in fascination as Julie shoots all his friends.
R eats Perry’s brains and gets his memories and thoughts. He walks right up to Julie and stares into her eyes. Perry was Julie’s boyfriend, and he got some of that from the brains. He takes her along with the zombie gang. They go to his home/lair, aboard an old jetliner. “Not eat,” he says, but she’s clearly terrified of him.
She can’t leave because the whole airport is swarming with the undead. We get flashbacks to Perry meeting Julie’s father, the leader of the humans. R plays records for Julie, and she sees that he’s not exactly a mindless zombie. We see that R’s cold, dead heart thumps a beat.
The two go outside and Julie pretends to be a zombie. She wants to leave, but he wants her to stay, so they go for a drive in his convertible. He’s not a great driver. Before long, she starts to have fun. He collects things, and she likes that. She sleeps, but he doesn’t do that anymore.
M, one of the other zombies, hears the music and lights in the airplane. Julie goes out, and he and his zombie buddies surround her. She fights them off with a weed whacker until R shows up to help her. A Bony shows up and almost gets them both, but they narrowly escape with M’s help. Other regular zombies see them holding hands and let them through.
They two drive away from the airport and eventually stop at a house in the suburbs. Meanwhile, back at the airport, M and some of the other zombies start to remember things from their own past, sparked by R and Julie holding hands. Some of them get a heart-thump as well. The Bonies detect something human-ish about all this, and it looks like there’s trouble on the horizon.
Julie’s dad drives by outside the house, and Julie says he would shoot R if he ever saw him. She doesn’t want that. She figures out what R did to Perry, but she understands. R has a weird dream of hanging out with Julie and her friends in “real life.” He wakes up in the morning, and she’s gone.
R is depressed at being left by his “girlfriend.” Julie returns to the city and her father is happy to see her, but also angry that she’s been gone for so long. He’s paranoid about her being bitten.
R runs into M and the others, who are all acting much more human than they had been. The Bonies chased them out. M says R has started something with their memories. “We are changing,” says R.
R sneaks into the city and looks for Julie’s house. Inside, Julie tells Nora that maybe they’ve all misunderstood the zombies. She misses him. She goes outside on the balcony and sees R down there. She warns him that anyone else in the city will kill him. Nora comes out and sees him; she thinks he’s cute. She hugs him and comments that he feels warmer than she remembers. We see that his eyes and skin color are getting more normal looking as things progress.
He tells her that lots of them are changing and evolving, but that the Bonies are chasing them. Nora has some makeup that would let R look even more normal, and then they could sneak him out of the city. The Bonies are massing outside the city, and the soldiers are getting ready for a fight, including Julie’s father the colonel.
Julie tries to convince her father that the dead are coming back to life, but he’s not willing to listen. R introduces himself, but he’s too nervous to speak. Nora pulls a gun on the colonel until R and Julie can get away in the subway.
When they get back to M’s group, there are hundreds of recovering zombies with him. The Bonies are breaking in to fight. The Bonies, zombies, and soldiers all converge in the subway. Some of the dead rescue the soldiers and report this back to the colonel.
We see R’s eyes turn blue just as the colonel shoots him. He’s bleeding, which corpses don’t do. The soldiers put down their weapons and the colonel changes his orders to the men. The soldiers and the zombies team up to fight the Bonies.
Given time, all the zombies become human again. R still doesn’t remember his real name, but otherwise, he’s looking pretty normal again. We see the humans tear down their wall.
Commentary
Throughout the film, we get a voiceover of R’s internal monologue, and he sounds perfectly normal “on the inside.” The zombies themselves have some reason, even in the beginning, but the “Bonies” are the really nasty ones.
The acting here is decent, and the script is a rehash of “R”omeo and “Julie”t (except for the downer ending), but it’s entertaining and occasionally funny.