Zombieland

This film started life as a television pilot and it shows. Part of the reason so many people enjoyed this film relates to the voice-over and graphical vignettes outlining the rules of surviving a zombie apocalypse. In fact, I’ve read and heard so much proselytizing of a lot of recent devotees trying to inch it closer to instant/cult classic status, I was a little surprised at what I found. I wish that the filmmakers had been a little less precious about some of the conceits dreamt up for a serialized television version of this story because they actually do harm to the film. The clearest example of this is the Zombie Kill of the Week segment, which makes a lot of sense for a weekly television series and absolutely none for a feature film. The film also finds the lead character running through the first several rules of surviving said zombie apocalypse with humorous accompanying footage of uninfected humans falling prey to a failure to observe these rules. These are a lot of the fun of the movie, but have been too clunkily adapted from the show and are a little puzzling when they skip over more than a dozen rules in the course of the film to get to the newly observed rules playing out as the film does.

I realize that the last ten years have ushered in the first real opportunity for such a television premise to have a chance to come to fruition, and I think that the creators really had something fun in mind. I can also appreciate that the producers fought to see the project come to light, despite the many television studios that passed on the project. This feels like a Showtime series akin to Dead Like Me, though I think the scale of the show would have suffered next to the movie at that studio. I also think the film cast aids in elevating the material above what the likely cast options would have been able to offer on a televised version. Despite my sympathies with the filmmakers at the studio oversight and the subsequent dogged determination to see this come to light, we don’t have a comedy classic here. Thankfully the writers did have the clarity of mind to hit fast-forward in the third act rather than suffering the common fate of dragging out false ending after false ending in an attempt to deliver maximum excitement. The charm of the film is in fact heavily biased toward the comedy, despite having some pretty respectable zombie film carnage and tension. The film is enjoyable and has a pretty great middle portion that I don’t want to ruin for those who haven’t yet seen it, but I think the movie’s failure to adapt to its form, lets it down. For those expecting a longtime film companion from Zombieland, I think you’ve got a mild disappointment waiting for you in the next five or six years. Shaun of the Dead should be there to comfort you on that day.

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