Wednesday Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I was somewhat concerned that I would come into Pride and Prejudice and Zombies at something of a disadvantage. I listened to the audiobook some years back when I had a car trip, and remember the plot mostly in broad strokes. I've never read the original Pride and Prejudice in any form, and have only seen bits of the adaptations.

That said, enough of the film is original that it's easy for me to see there wasn't a lot of interest in faithfulness beyond the basic joke. The fate of Mr. Wickham, in particular, is absolutely nothing like either book. In fact, as far as I can tell, virtually everything in the final act is connected to Jane Austen in only the vaguest ways.

I'm inclined to say that the novel would have been difficult to film. The movie effectively changes the genre of the story. Seth Grahame-Smith created a farce, where the plot of Pride and Prejudice happened almost unaltered, despite the presence of the undead and the Kung Fu skills of the Bennett sisters. Particularly in a post-Seltzer and Friedberg world, where spoofs are so widely viewed as cheap humor, I'd question how accepting the audience would be of this kind of story.

In this version the undead are treated as a very real threat, and seriously alter the events of the story into something of an exploitation film. Also, newly turned zombies apparently become evil and start eating brains before they lose their intelligence, so we do get some creepy scenes of zombified individuals talking quite intelligently to their would-be victims. There's even some discussion of making peace with the undead.

While this is probably the best route that could have been taken with a film adaptation, sadly there are still some fairly major problems. The film feels like it should be longer, although I don't know who would sit through a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies film that significantly crossed the 2-hour mark. Many of the events of the original novel seem to just happen here because they have to, without appropriate build-up. Furthermore, on the zombie side I feel like much of the exposition is rushed, and desperately in need of more world building.

It's not a bad film, and does manage to score some real laughs, and a few decent scares. However, it's far from the comedic masterpiece I imagine many people would imagine it to be. Then again, I doubt that film could even exist in any form longer than an SNL skit.