Load Those Shotguns: Zombieland
Ready your popcorn and plop down in a good seat, because Zombieland aims to please. Let’s face it: It’s Halloween and you’re craving blood and gore. If not, you should be! The latest zombie flick caters to your every need, so crawl, drag, and chainsaw your way over to RadNerd now and check out my coverage of Zombieland.
Fasten your seat belts and get ready to double tap—Zombieland brings the brain-munchy, ankle-dragging entertainment in hordes. Directed by Ruben Fleischer and written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the latest zombie flick breathes new life into a genre of movies that often staggers.
All fans of the moaning undead know that when you’re dealing with zombies, you’re taking on more than headshots. If you want a good zombie apocalypse, you need survivors who can stand up to character scrutiny, and the key factor comes down to a matter of humanity. Zombieland nails that theme in full—its narrator appreciates the irony of a loner and social outcast thrown into the heart of a zombie infestation—but instead of showing humans who become worse than the mindless savages we so endearingly label zombies, the film chooses to comment on society while bringing its characters closer together: “If you don’t like people, you might as well be a zombie.”
Many enjoy Atonement for the romantic and, in some ways, forbidden relationship between the independent-minded Cecilia and the strong-willed Robbie, but to consider the book merely a love story diminishes its worth. Atonement is, simply put, a puzzle composed of words, dubious narration, and complex composition. Arguably split into three sections—whose clarity and certainty declines at the novel’s completion—the final part inspires an emotional reaction of unanticipated strength. McEwan daringly challenges not only the way we read a book, but ideas of truth and history and ironically good and evil. Whether the story is overwhelmingly Briony’s or falsely so can be debated, but McEwan does not allow us one absolute answer. The novel’s end tears up what we thought we knew, betrays us, and puts us in a completely different state of mind than we began or even possessed for the majority of the book. The strong moral and emotional impact of Atonement, as well as the so easily shattered or cemented depth of its characters, proves McEwan’s talent as a writer who lives and breathes the written word.
