Robots, Zombies and Harry Potter - A Review on 3 Completely Unrelated Movies
Written by Ronan Butt-Merton
I decided to watch three completely unrelated movies during lockdown and write my thoughts on them down, then turn it into an article for my school’s magazine. This is the result:
Robocop (1987):
Robocop is the story of high crime and violence in a neo-Detroit, a police force bought out by corporations with little interest in the public good and a cop torn between his reprogramming and his humanity as he tries to save what little he has left to care about. I’ll say this, it’s definitely worth watching. It is quite violent at points, but it’s well used to accentuate the cold and jaded nature of the world it’s set in. Robocop luckily avoids pulling on admittedly fun but overdone buddy-cop tropes and is instead more of a revenge thriller, but with more focus on the motivation of the eponymous cop in the brutal actions of his corporate overlords than the final act revenging. Something about the uncaring and cruel hedonism of the powerful company heads strikes a little more powerfully in a world that has seen billionaires (debatably) go to space in the past fortnight.
Warm Bodies (2013):
Warm Bodies is a really, genuinely heartwarming romantic zombie film with comedy elements. It plays on the common zombie cliches (we all know these: eat brains, stumble, groan) and makes it into a romance between a member of a group of survivors and a disillusioned airport-dwelling shambler. It stays consistently interesting throughout the film and was one of the few movies in which I felt the narration was not only annoying but even interesting and definitely added something to the film that could not just have been shown on screen. It didn’t lean too hard on being a satire of zombie tropes, even, which is an impressive undertaking in a media landscape like our own that’s constantly eating itself.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001):
The Harry Potter movie I’ve seen the most, personally, was the Chamber of Secrets (the second one) because it was the only Harry Potter film my family had on disk. While I haven’t committed the entire plot of this one to memory, it’s still pretty enjoyable to watch with a soundtrack not just so good, but so fitting when you remember to separate it in your mind from its place in the cultural zeitgeist. A solid watch which is a thoroughly good adaptation, though with some of the problems of the source material showing through (anti-Semitism of the banker goblins included). The three leads are neither the best nor the worst child actors around, falling somewhere on the better end of the spectrum in my opinion, though the casting holds up any of their failings by being so iconic and generally agreed upon to be accurate to any imagining of the original novels.
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Obviously, these three movies are actually connected through their different representations of a future dystopia. Robocop is a dystopia based on the inside influence of powerful corporations, Warm Bodies is a dystopia based on the outside influence of the zombie plague and Harry Potter is set in a matrix-style simulated reality, run by robots combining inside and outside influence of humanity as they have been created by people though now act outside of their control. It’s now your turn to watch these movies yourself and let us know in the comments below what you think about these 3 films.
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