Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies focuses in on a post-apocalyptic world literally crawling with zombies. What you would expect from a zombie novel is the point of view of a survivor fighting off the inevitable end, but what you get with Warm Bodies is the point of view of the zombie who doesn’t want to be a zombie. His name is R, and he is the book’s narrator. The adaptation stars Nicholas Hoult as R and Teresa Palmer as Julie. It is already in post-production and is set to be released August 10th of this year. Here is the book’s synopsis per Amazon:
R is a young man with an existential crisis–he is a zombie. He shuffles through an America destroyed by war, social collapse, and the mindless hunger of his undead comrades, but he craves something more than blood and brains. He can speak just a few grunted syllables, but his inner life is deep, full of wonder and longing. He has no memories, no identity, and no pulse, but he has dreams.
After experiencing a teenage boy’s memories while consuming his brain, R makes an unexpected choice that begins a tense, awkward, and strangely sweet relationship with the victim’s human girlfriend. Julie is a blast of color in the otherwise dreary and gray landscape that surrounds R. His decision to protect her will transform not only R, but his fellow Dead, and perhaps their whole lifeless world.
The obvious challenge of this adaptation is going to be having a narrator who initially cannot speak. R is a zombie, and as such lacks the ability to articulate his thoughts. He can say short words, but most of his communication in the beginning is grunts and shrugs. The basic options to face this challenge would be to change the character so that he can speak, use a voice-over, or swap the point of view to Julie. The producers chose the most true-to-the-book option of voice-over. In an interview with Collider, the screenwriter Jonathan Levine said that for “the vast majority of the beginning of the movie, it’s all voice-over.” That decision makes the real challenge of this adaptation using a voice-over without cheapening the film. If the voice-over is not done perfectly a disconnect between the onscreen R and the audio R could form. And that sort of character disconnect could spell disaster for the film
I haven’t read the books but voiceover, second only to flashbacks, is almost never the best way to go in film.
If Wall-E, with no dialogue, can be one of the best movies of the past 20 years, then I have to believe that the creative energy is out there to make this work without a voice-over. Believe in the audience.