Zombieland (Theatrical)
APPROX. 82 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2009 - MPA RATING: R
" Always wear your seat belt in case you have to slam your brakes to send that zombie in the backseat sailing through the windshield
Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.
The framework of the George Romero zombie-verse is so widely recognized by now that filmmakers can appropriate it without wasting time explaining anything to the audience. Shuffling zombies eat humans. Don´t let them bite you. Shoot them in the head. We got it.
"Zombieland" begins long after the infection-du-film has all but wiped out the human population. The film´s narrator/protagonist (Jessie Eisenberg) isn´t concerned with explaining to the audience how it all happened (brief mention of a Patient Zero who ate a tainted burger suffices) but rather how to survive in this new and very familiar world. A pasty World-of-Warcraft playing virgin-nerd, he has managed to survive only adhering to a rigid set of rules. Always wear your seat belt in case you have to slam your brakes to send that zombie in the backseat sailing through the windshield (and, oh yes, always check the back seat.) Stay away from bathrooms. And never be a hero.
At first he thinks he might be the last person alive like a dork version of Robert Neville in Richard Mathieson´s "I Am Legend," but soon he meets a self-styled cowboy (Woody Harrelson) with a cool car and a hot temper. They address each other only by the cities that they are trying to get to: Columbus (Eisenberg) and Tallahassee (Harrelson). Pre-contagion names risk a familiarity that you can´t afford in a world where you might have to shoot your buddy if he suddenly gets a hankering for your duodenum. Best to think of everyone in the abstract.
In time-honored comedy tradition, the two men are polar opposites ("Riggs, you crazy son of a bitch!"). Columbus is a shy, passive, phobic young man while Tallahassee is older and brasher though his bark is far worse than his bite. Just as they´re establishing an uneasy rapport, a new element is introduced into the equation: 20-something Wichita (Emma Stone) and her 12 year-old sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). The young women masquerade as damsels-in-dstress but turn out to be far cannier than the boys expected. After one-upping each other a few times, the four survivors finally agree to team up and head for an L.A. amusement park that they´ve heard is zombie-free even though none of them really believe the story.
The zombies here don´t function as a metaphor for consumerism (like Romero´s "Dawn of the Dead"), or post-9/11 paranoia ("Zombies of Mass Destruction") or, indeed, for anything at all. Rather they serve as a standard dramatic device to get the characters together and then force them either to adapt or die. The zombies are also there to get killed in amusing ways though director Ruben Fleischer and screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick don´t expend too much creative energy on this front. There´s a dropped piano here, some garden shears there, but for the most part our heroes just shoot one zombie after another or bash them with all the blunt force they can muster.
