Name Lips
03-16-2008, 05:00 PM
I know, I know, it's been out forever and is going to DVD in like 2 days. But even so, Emerald and I finally got around to going to see it.
All in all I liked it, but I'm a little confused about some of the decisions they made when they put it together.
Specifically, it seemed to be taking one track, dropping certain hints and clues, and then everything suddenly spun off in a different direction, and then boom it ended.
Even more specifically, there were hints all along about a developing intelligence in the zombies. They seemed to have picked a leader who was directing them intelligently, learning how to set traps just like Neville, taming dogs just like Neville, and basically being set up as an Arch Nemesis. The zombies apparently were mindless killing machines, but are suddenly behaving in a coordinated way, following, tracking, and hunting Neville (they used one of his mannequins as bait for a trap - that's no small thing for a "mindless" zombie!).
And then, almost out of nowhere, a surviver comes along in the nick of time, saves him from certain death, takes him home, nurses him to health, collects the zombie cure (which he just that day developed), and leaves again with the cure. Neville stays behind and gets to confront his Arch Nemesis, and goes out in blaze of glory to make sure the other surviver escapes.
Every time Nemesis appears, I almost get the feeling like he's not really like the other zombies, like he's a thinking being, and that he's almost about to speak or communicate in some way with Neville. In the last scene, when Neville is trapped in his isolation room in his lab, Nemesis appears almost as the triumphant general coming to witness victory. He walks with command and authority, knocking other zombies out of his way so he can confront Neville. He strides up to the glass and looks Neville in the eye. I can see a glimmer of intelligence.
And then he starts banging his head into the glass repeatedly to break it. Woah! Change of gears (in my mind at least). Suddenly he's just a regular, bloodthirsty zombie trying to physically tear his way through objects to feast on human blood.
And that business about bringing in a random survivor, who knows because of a message from God that there is a survivor's colony nearby, totally out of the blue, seemed strange to me. I know in a "real" zombie infection things would happen randomly and unexpectedly, but this is a movie and I expect a plot that fits together in a satisfying way. The unexpected, unexplained randomness fits in certain styles of movies (like Blair Witch style "from the point of view of the cameraman" films).
What I personally was expecting, when Neville was making his suicide attack against the zombies and was mysteriously rescued in the nick of time, was that his savior was in fact the zombie patient he was trying to cure back at the lab, and upon whom the cure had apparently failed. I thought that the cure had simply taken time to do its work, and she woke up and was going to be an actual character.
In this one moment of insight (in which I thought I had figured out the end of the film) I thought she would turn out to be the love interest of the Arch Nemesis zombie (after all, he first saw Nemesis right after he captured her - it would make a strange sort of sense that she be his mate), and that was why Nemesis was chasing him - to get her back. And I also thought she would have some sort of useful insight into the zombies that he could use in some way to defeat or cure them all at once - like knowing where they congregated at night or something.
But no, they did it they way they did it, and by large it worked well and was pretty cool. I was just a bit taken aback that it seemed to change direction so quickly.
All in all I liked it, but I'm a little confused about some of the decisions they made when they put it together.
Specifically, it seemed to be taking one track, dropping certain hints and clues, and then everything suddenly spun off in a different direction, and then boom it ended.
Even more specifically, there were hints all along about a developing intelligence in the zombies. They seemed to have picked a leader who was directing them intelligently, learning how to set traps just like Neville, taming dogs just like Neville, and basically being set up as an Arch Nemesis. The zombies apparently were mindless killing machines, but are suddenly behaving in a coordinated way, following, tracking, and hunting Neville (they used one of his mannequins as bait for a trap - that's no small thing for a "mindless" zombie!).
And then, almost out of nowhere, a surviver comes along in the nick of time, saves him from certain death, takes him home, nurses him to health, collects the zombie cure (which he just that day developed), and leaves again with the cure. Neville stays behind and gets to confront his Arch Nemesis, and goes out in blaze of glory to make sure the other surviver escapes.
Every time Nemesis appears, I almost get the feeling like he's not really like the other zombies, like he's a thinking being, and that he's almost about to speak or communicate in some way with Neville. In the last scene, when Neville is trapped in his isolation room in his lab, Nemesis appears almost as the triumphant general coming to witness victory. He walks with command and authority, knocking other zombies out of his way so he can confront Neville. He strides up to the glass and looks Neville in the eye. I can see a glimmer of intelligence.
And then he starts banging his head into the glass repeatedly to break it. Woah! Change of gears (in my mind at least). Suddenly he's just a regular, bloodthirsty zombie trying to physically tear his way through objects to feast on human blood.
And that business about bringing in a random survivor, who knows because of a message from God that there is a survivor's colony nearby, totally out of the blue, seemed strange to me. I know in a "real" zombie infection things would happen randomly and unexpectedly, but this is a movie and I expect a plot that fits together in a satisfying way. The unexpected, unexplained randomness fits in certain styles of movies (like Blair Witch style "from the point of view of the cameraman" films).
What I personally was expecting, when Neville was making his suicide attack against the zombies and was mysteriously rescued in the nick of time, was that his savior was in fact the zombie patient he was trying to cure back at the lab, and upon whom the cure had apparently failed. I thought that the cure had simply taken time to do its work, and she woke up and was going to be an actual character.
In this one moment of insight (in which I thought I had figured out the end of the film) I thought she would turn out to be the love interest of the Arch Nemesis zombie (after all, he first saw Nemesis right after he captured her - it would make a strange sort of sense that she be his mate), and that was why Nemesis was chasing him - to get her back. And I also thought she would have some sort of useful insight into the zombies that he could use in some way to defeat or cure them all at once - like knowing where they congregated at night or something.
But no, they did it they way they did it, and by large it worked well and was pretty cool. I was just a bit taken aback that it seemed to change direction so quickly.