It’s only by Hollywood logic that the 5’ 8” O’Brien, who looks a little like Paul Walker’s brunette younger brother, gets patted on the head by co-stars here as a supposedly tiny nerd no one seems to find attractive. His tendency to turn to jelly makes him a frustrating hero, but no one is more cripplingly aware of this fact than he is. When Joel’s parents got squished by something’s foot seven years ago, he just stood there frozen to the spot: a pattern that repeats itself whenever he’s face to bulbous face with an ant the size of a bulldozer, or realises he’s been resting his back on a sleeping mutant snail. Holed up in a bunker with a dozen or so rugged alpha survivors, and valued mainly for making the minestrone, he’s naturally the only one who’s single: things were just hotting up with his childhood sweetheart Aimee (Jessica Henwick) when disaster drove them apart. Thanks to radioactive fallout, Earth’s creepy-crawlies have become giant apex predators, and 99 per cent of humanity have been wiped out – by some sheer fluke, he’s among the exceptions. Joel, smashingly played by The Maze Runner’s Dylan O’Brien, is a tag-along and a disappointment to all around him. A lot of the film’s charm announces itself in an introductory voiceover narration – a rare well-written, well-acted example, these days – from a main character who is really not having a very cool apocalypse. It’s not mock-heroic in a winking way it doesn’t seem so pleased with its own punchlines. The bromance of all time kicked off between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead.Ĭompared with these predecessors, the Netflix romp Love and Monsters is mercifully zombie-free, while serving up a refreshingly different vibe from the word go.
Emma Stone and Jesse Eisenberg got it together in Zombieland the very title Pride and Prejudice and Zombies speaks for itself.
But there’s a related subgenre for filmmakers to dabble in: the end-of-the-world romcom. Milking doomsday for comedy sounds counterintuitive, but it isn’t – in fact, maniacal laughter, in something like Dr Strangelove, comes across as the only sane response. Cast: Dylan O’Brien, Jessica Henwick, Michael Rooker, Ariana Greenblatt, Dan Ewing.
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