I consider myself a connoisseur of terrible movies, an Austenite, and mildly interested in zombies, so there was no film that I as more excited to see this year than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
I wasn’t let down – it was a hot mess – but is it a hot mess worth watching? That will depend on how much you enjoy any of its definitive elements.
First, you have to love bad movies, Pride and Prejudice, and zombies. There’s no way around that. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination; the zombie designs are appropriately gross and their heads explode nicely, but the acting is only okay, some of the costume choices look like an anachronistic costume closet dump, the plot is so jankily handled that it reads like Pride and Prejudice Spark Notes with a few pages ripped out, and with two notable exceptions, nearly every role is horribly (and hilariously) miscast.
The casting is easily the most egregious flaw in (slash-greatest-strength-of) this movie. When Mr. Collins is the most interesting character in your P&P adaptation, you’re doing it wrong. When you see Mr. Darcy for the first time and wonder why Mr. Collins is showing up so early, you’re doing it APOCALYPTICALLY wrong.
Jane was hard to pick out from the other Bennet sisters because all of them are generically pretty (except Mary, who was perfect). Bingley looked like an escapee from a boy band. Wickham looked like Gaston’s smarmy middle-aged cousin. Mrs. Bennet is the best-looking and least-annoying Mrs. Bennet ever (so, not Mrs. Bennet at all. More like a Real Housewife of Longbourn), and Mr. Bennet is Tywin Lannister (and Havelock Vetinari!) but spends the whole movie looking harried rather than doing anything remotely interesting. He doesn’t even have good sass. Honestly, the awfulness of the casting went to such depths that I wondered if it was intentional, but even if not, it becomes one of the funniest parts of the film.
That said, two bits of casting were perfect (if not entirely accurate): Matt Smith has the admirable distinction of being the only likable Mr. Collins in the history of P&P, managing to turn a truly cringe-worthy character into someone absolutely adorkable. For real, I’d tap that Mr. Collins.
Lena Headey as Catherine de Bourgh (LANNISTER FAM REPRESENT!) is a delight, though this may have more to do with the fact that this Catherine de Bourgh is a kickass, eyepatch-wearing, zombie-killing savior of the realm rather than an old arrogant fart.
But you have to know that Catherine de Bourgh is an old arrogant fart to begin with to even appreciate what she does, which highlights one of the film’s legitimate problems.
It’s not enough to have read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or even Pride and Prejudice itself. You almost have to be steeped in the teas of Pride and Prejudice fandom (miniseries, movies, and all) to get any true enjoyment out of this movie – either so you can appreciate the parody when it happens well (i.e. Catherine de Bourgh), or so you can appreciate when it goes wrong (i.e. in how not-Colin Firth Mr. Darcy is). Someone involved in production was obviously a P&P fan because they knew to include a scene of Mr. Darcy jumping into a lake. I don’t think enough people involved were fans, though. Otherwise Mr. Darcy would have been hot and Wickham would have at least been deceptively good-looking.
The film has some tonal issues, too. It can never decide whether it wants to be a tongue-in-cheek action movie, a straight-up parody of P&P and its fandom, or a clever piece of alternate universe fiction. This is a movie in which the opening scene clearly and expertly sets up the alternate circumstances of this universe (Mr. Darcy, a skilled zombie hunter in this fiction, crashes the hell out of a party where a zombie is present) and the first battle scene sets up the Bennet sisters as certified zombie-killing badasses. There’s also a lot of hinting at the possible intelligence exhibited by the zombies in question, but before any of that can be explored, the movie quickly shifts away from it, hurries through iconic P&P scenes, or leaps to a forced bit of humor (Did we really need to hear Charlotte Lucas snoring that long?).
Fortunately, not all of the humor is forced. The simple premise of combining Regency England with zombies naturally makes the film hilarious, and I have to admit I spent most of the film laughing entirely at small changes that were made to the Regency environment – estates surrounded by brutal-looking spikes, ladies of quality talking about martial arts they studied in China or Japan, Mr. Darcy himself being a prized zombie hunter rather than just rich, etc. The exaggerated extent to which some characters are played is brilliant, too. You know exactly who Charlotte Bingley is the moment you see her sour face at the Netherfield ball. Mr. Darcy’s sickly sister Georgiana communicates entirely through groans. When Mrs. Bennet embarrasses the family, she does it hardcore, sprawled all over a couch like a drunk socialite. And then there’s the iconic proposal scene, wherein Lizzie answers Mr. Darcy’s backhanded offer with a fistfight. And Catherine de Bourgh’s subsequent (and in this case, literal) attack on Lizzie, wherein Lizzie beats de Bourgh’s thug by dropping a ceiling on him.
Really, the film is at its absolute best when it’s parodying the novel of manners Austen fans have come to know and obsess over. It loses a lot of its entertainment value in its second half, where it diverges from both sets of source material to become a more drama- and action-oriented film. While some of its changes were admittedly cool (avoiding spoilers, St. Lazarus), they would have worked better in a film that viewed itself as serious alternate fiction from the get-go, rather than a comedy. And let’s face it, all of us are going to see this movie for the comedy. None of us are going to see it to watch Lizzie cry dramatically over Mr. Darcy’s unconscious body on an exploded bridge.
All this said, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is certainly not for everyone. But if you’re one of those readers who leapt with joy at the announcement of the book and then did an astonished happy dance at the announcement of the movie, you already know it’s for you. It’s not nearly as good as it could have been, but let’s face it, at the end of it all, we have both this and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is more alternate history/classic movie weirdness than we ever thought we’d get. It’s not for everyone because it was made for us, and that makes it a special movie.
Still one that’s better watched on Netflix than on the end of a $15 movie ticket, though.
P.S. Here’s the perfect Mr. Darcy and the perfect Lake Scene because no way am I going to pass up an excuse to post this masterpiece.
Zombies
Baker’s Dozen – Book Review
Jacob and I went to LibertyCon in Chattanooga, TN this June! (This article is WAY LATE because life.) Anyway, LibertyCon is notable for being more reader- and author-oriented than other conventions in the area…which means that I ended up coming home with approximately 90,000 books to read and likely review.
I am already exhausted just thinking about that. (Since this article is late: still exhausted.)
First on my pile was Baker’s Dozen: 13 Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories by Scott W. Baker.
First off, the cover does this book a real disservice. I love its visual pun, but nothing about a carton of a dozen plus one eggs screams sci-fi, and had I not encountered the author at a signing, I’m pretty sure I might never have picked it up.
I’m glad I did, though, because it’s a fun sampler platter of short stories. Baker divides the anthology into Space Opera, Urban Fantasy, Near Future SF, and Zombies. The best stories are found later in the book, but overall it was worth the $8 print cost.
Admittedly, I was a little underwhelmed by several of the early stories. While the point of a short story is, of course, to be short, a lot of the early entries in this anthology feel too short. Either they end just when they feel like they’re getting started, or the end brings a dark, abrupt twist that makes the story feel abbreviated.
Really, though, this complaint stems from the fact that I wanted to see more of each featured world. “Chasers,” a space opera about pilots who race to refuel spaceships, had the potential to be one of my favorites and could have expanded into a great action drama, but succumbed to one of the aforementioned dark, abrupt endings. “Ten Seconds,” a contemporary fantasy about a bullied child who can see ten seconds into the future, was another that, while ending happily, also ended just as I was getting excited to continue it.
When your main complaint about an author’s writing is that you want more of it, though, it’s not a bad thing.
In this anthology, Baker is at his best when he’s writing quirky humor or putting fantastic spins on modern settings. “Faerie Belches,” about a child who, well, hears fairies belch, is a fun read with some interesting twists. (Given the stories’ similarities, I pictured the characters from “Ten Seconds” and “Faerie Belches” belonging to the same universe and kind of hope that the author will turn this into a complete children’s novel.) “Excuse Me,” about a man who travels back in time every time he farts, is amusing for its concept alone, while “ZFL” is a hilarious look at a zombie football game from the perspective of its commentators.
There’s intriguing drama in many of the late stories, too, though, and I think a lot of these could support complete novels as well. “Secondhand Rush” was a particular favorite; it follows a man who performs daring, even foolish stunts, all for the purpose of selling the digitized memory of performing them to disembodied human minds stored in computers, which is straight up cool even before you consider that the man suffers Multiple Sclerosis (and all the conflicts that implies). “Thinking Out Loud” is an intriguing multi-point-of-view look at a psychic experiment being performed on prisoners; “How Quickly We Forget” is a haunting look at the actions of a memory-removal technology company; and “Call Me Z,” while humorous in places, is largely a look at what happens when a zombie fanboy (in a world where zombies can be domesticated) encounters his first zombies.
The contents of Baker’s Dozen may be too short for my taste, but the volume’s best stories and the sheer variety of material included make it worth a try. Recommended!