Zombieland: Far from Brainless

There are all sort of reasons to make a movie.

You can seek to enlighten your audience on some facet of the human condition. You can try to elicit strong emotions, such as laughter or tears or screams. You can try to create an escape valve for the audience, releasing him from the daily grind of his life and make him forget for a couple of hours that he's got an overdue mortgage, a job he hates, an expanding waistline and a teenager headed for juvenile delinquency.

Zombieland, by , manages to hit the mark on at least two of these equally valid motives and by today's or any standards, that ain't bad.

Zombieland introduces us to our never really named narrator (he's referred to as "Columbus" because that's where's he's trying to get to), a nerdy but extremely resourceful and idiosyncratic 20 something college student who, after a viral plague hits the Earth thinks he just may be the last non-zombie resident of the planet. Columbus has a well defined list of survival rules which he adheres to strictly and whose viability are proven time and again as the youth outmanuevers the undead to survive on his own.

Columbus' notion of being a sole survivor is soon shattered as he encounters "Tallahassee", a 40 something, whiskey swilling Southerner who kills zombies with a glee only matched by his intense and occasionally frightening quest for a Twinkie, and a pair of teenage girls ("Wichita" and "Little Rock") who can't always be trusted, but whose paths keep crossing with the mismatched pair. The foursome meet and part, argue and get along, meet and part; all the while avoiding zombies and too much personal information, but gradually coming to realize, against all their wishes, that they need each other. Each member of the group is headed to a different location, and as the film progresses, their individual goals conflict with their growing need for companionship.

"Zombieland" isn't really a horror film as much as it is a road movie, with the plot pretty much consisting of various stops along the group's journey and an episodic narrative structure that isn't nearly as concerned about shocking us with gratituous scenes of gore and zombie feasting as it is with acquainting us with the characters and providing us with lots of memorable moments of interaction and reflection upon the grim fate that has befallen humanity.

At first, the characters' seeming blithe acceptance of the outbreak is a bit off-putting. It seems as though most people would be much less resourceful in such a circumstance and much more frantic, if not completely unhinged by it. But the creators did a smart thing by presenting characters who were ALREADY loners before the zombie plague, and whose reactions, though definitely strong, were not as debilitating or extreme as would be the case with most people. And this dovetails quite nicely with the film's overriding theme of independence and solitude versus symbiosis and comradeship, as these confirmed outcasts (perhaps excluding "Little Rock" who's a bit too young to have bidden farewell to mainstream society at age 12) must come to grips with the eventual insufficiency of the "me against the world" ethos and surrender to their own needs for community.

All the performances are memorable and the cast is well chosen. I've never been a big Woody Harrelson fan but he's perfect as Tallahassee, a character that is by turns, comic, frightening and tragic but always sympathetic. And Jesse Eisenberg is a great surprise here as Columbus, full of the quirks and nerdisms and post modern cynicism that his character demands, all of which hides a vulnerability that never seems forced or incongruent. The girls are fine, too, with Emma Stone projecting toughness and charm as Wichita and Abigail Breslin navigating the tricky path of smart aleck punk and frightened kid.

The film is not without its flaws. There's some tremendous gaps of logic in at least two of the characters' decisions that belies the intelligence and cunning they display for the rest of the film. There is also a middle section of the film that not only goes on far too long, stopping the film in its tracks, and moreover seems totally out of sync with the tone of the rest of the film. It's kind of cute at first, but it drags on and on and then ends with one of the glaring bits of illogic I mentioned above. It didn't completely take me out of the mood, but it came darned close.

The ending, despite another leap of logic, is a crowd pleaser that places all of the characters in palpable jeopardy, and this more than redeems the clunkiness of the middle portion.

No one's going to put "Zombieland" in a Top Ten Horror Film list, nor is it likely to make anyone's list of great road pictures. But it's a pleasing and well crafted combination of the two, that places character development and intelligent, memorable dialogue at the top of its priority list.

For a zombie movie, that's a rarity and a welcome one indeed.