Bill Murray, you're a zombie?

Rating: Null/10 (6 December 2010)

"That's the worst goodbye I've ever heard. And you stole it from a movie." - Columbus (Zombieland)
"Zombieland" is yet another film in a recent wave of 80s nostalgia flicks ("Adventureland", "Superbad", the various cinematic secretions of Judd Apatow etc), all written and directed by guys who came of age in the 1980s.
And so the film is set in a post apocalyptic future in which a band of survivors learn to put aside their differences, battle zombies and "become a family". Here, family, or human connection, is implicitly about restoring the perceived utopia of the 1980s, a pre 21st century world in which the cosy naivety of youth has yet to be destroyed by the "modern experience". And so our heroes all long for symbols of childhood: family, friends, old school amusement parks, babies, dogs, snack foods, 80s media, Betamax, community etc, anything that existed before the technological leaps of the early 90s escalated technocapitalism and ramped up the postmodern experience.
Like "Shaun of the Dead", this is therefore a zombie movie which trades in nostalgia, which weeps for some perceived loss of humanity. Needless to say it pales in comparison to the zombie movies of George Romero, who tackled this material with "Night of the Dead" and "Dawn of the Dead" and has moved well past such themes with his subsequent zombie flicks, all of which have been ignored by audiences.
First time director Ruben Fleischer injects lots of fun and energy into the film, but the plot itself is a fairly routine merger of the road movie, the zombie apocalypse movie, the teen romantic fantasy, Leone westerns, the "Mad Max" trilogy and loner survivalist tales like "Escape from New York" etc. That it all works is largely thanks to Fleischer's rapid-fire direction and actor Woody Harrelson pushing postmodern action hero irony as far as he can. He isn't as meta as Robert Downey Junior and Johnny Depp ("Pirates of the Caribbean", "Iron Man" etc – all performances which make the wink-at-the-audience irony of Cary Grant, Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis, for better or for worse, obsolete), but he gets the job done.
The film itself opens with Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls" on the soundtrack, an interesting choice, as both Metallica's song, and the Hemmingway novel upon which its title is based, dealt with a fear of modernity, impending death, sacrifice, mortality, a longing for family etc. Such themes are never substantially delved into or treated with much weight by Fleischer, but they do help add some gravity to an otherwise formulaic plot.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film is the way it rebels against what Jan van Dijk called the "network society" - in which society is constructed merely as purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors (ie postmodernism's brain scrambled zombie future) - but then relies on this society's "codes" to hook audiences. For example, for all its nostalgic lamentations, "Zombieland" heavily relies on video game pop ups, scribbled screen text, is structured like levels in a video game, assembled from chunks of other films, and revels in the zombie genre's seductive blood-lust. In a very real sense, the film is what it critiques.
The final interesting thing is the sudden surge of zombie movies (and the popularity of zombies in mass market video game shooters, books and television programmes, like "Call of Duty: Zombies", "Breathers: A Zombie's Lamet" and "The Walking Dead"). Writer Annalee Newitz has chartered how war and social/political upheaval caused spikes in zombie movie production over the past century, but of course that's not surprising. The iconography of the "zombie genre" has always effortlessly tapped into all kinds of primal feelings: mass fear, chaos, suffering, the whole Bolshevik class structure, mindless hordes distressing upper classes, issues of individualism, paranoia, overpopulation, disease, class anxiety, xenophobia etc. Mostly, though, zombie movies are therapeutic, our socially awkward heroes being granted the chance and excuse to kill their neighbours without guilt, unleashing their Id, ditch work, make their own rules, bash heads, ransack stores, lord over the world and of course indulge in a little attractive survivalism. Nothing else lets us confront our worst fears about our drive for self preservation than a good zombie movie.
Most of all, though, what this new wave of zombie flicks is responding to is what Fukuyama and Nietzsche called "The End of History" and "The Last Man". It's no coincidence that if one were to even briefly glance at the wikipedia "list of zombie films", they'd see that over a hundred have been released in the first 10 years of the 21st century, whilst the other big rise in zombie movies occurred in the late 60s and 70s. Faced with the dead endedness of both postmodernism and techno-capitalism, these films reflect humanity's deepest unconscious desires; the desire for a great purge. The desire for change and progress. But more so, these films reflect humanity's inability to even imagine or conceive of a future. Faced with deadlock and incapable of tomorrow's conception, the zombie movie then exhibits nothing less than humanity's rage-filled "beat the crap out of your neighbour and set the world on fire" frustrations.
7.9/10 – Slick and very entertaining, but it's not as good as even Romero's worst Zombie flicks, lacking his thematic and allegorical weight. Makes a good companion piece to the low budget "Stake Land" and "Carriers".