Obviously, for someone of my tastes, as goes for Seth Graham-Smith’s rather
posthumous cooperation with Jane Austen’s zombified corpse this is based on, you
can only improve on books about the Georgian marriage market by adding zombies
and martial arts to them. For about the first half of the film or so, I even
enjoyed myself immensely but after a time, various annoyances dragged the film
down. These annoyances are very specific to my tastes, and are in part based on
me taking this shit way too seriously, so any given reader’s mileage will
certainly vary.
Firstly, the film sooner or later couldn’t help but land at the point where
my dislike for certain elements of Austen’s work could no longer be contained,
and not just the part where I’m never quite sure why I should care for whom
these upper class people marry or not.
I loathe the way Austen turns their oh-so-important characters’ servants into
mere furniture but I can cope with that and understand it as the writer being
part of her time and social stratus. Watching a film made in 2016 that does take
the time to add zombies to the whole thing but still doesn’t do more with
servants (who are of course apart from that guy that gets dragged in the cellar
nameless) is quite a different thing. Also not changed from Austen is the
general philosophical outlook where characters complain a bit about playing the
game of their society but actually not playing it (or at least dying
dramatically trying that) is something that doesn’t even cross their minds. I do
understand the whys and wherefores of that, too, but I never can get distracted
by the writers’ wit enough to ever really get over it and relax into things. As
a sort of Austen adaptation, the film unfortunately really doesn’t change any of
this.
It even does add a few troubles all its own. I found the treatment of the
intelligent still human zombies absolutely wrong, with the idea of finding a way
for peaceful co-existence with them something that is relegated to the plans of
bad guys (and is there an Austen version that treats Wickham as a person instead
of a sexy panto villain?). Even worse, there’s that scene where the audience is
supposed to cheer for Darcy’s cunning plan to feed actual human brains to these
half-human zombies so that they turn from people into ravening beasts, which is
the sort of thing we call a war crime around here. Consequently, I found myself
rooting for the zombies.
Now, if you can stop yourself from overthinking all this quite as badly as I
do, this is a well-made, well-acted film, though I’d argue one that could have
done with doing a bit more thinking itself.
Sunday, August 21, 2016
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