Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Recently I visited my hometown and had a very long trip. I spent about 15 hours on a cramped plane. I don’t watch a lot of movies in the theater and so I got the chance to catch up on a lot of movies I had not seen. I’d like to write about one of the movies I saw.

One movie I quite liked was “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. As you may know “Pride and Prejudice” is a Jane Austin novel about class and romance. Austin is known for her witty dialogue and her satire of British class at the time.

I was a little worried when I watched the movie because the movie got bad reviews but I found I liked the movie. I think it was underrated. I think the problem with the reviews was that the reviewers’ expectation of the movie was different from what the movie was like. I think many of the reviewers were expecting a parody of “Pride and Prejudice” and what they saw was an homage to the book with the addition of zombies.

The difference between a parody and an homage is interesting. A parody makes fun of the original work. Parodies usually make jokes about the story of a book or movie. They do not take the original serious tone and focus on what is funny. Often the style or tone of the original is mocked rather than respected.

An homage, on the other hand, isn’t as focused on making jokes about the original but is more focused on imitating the style, ideas or stories. An homage is usually made out of love for the original work. In this case the homage was a bit strange since it was an homage to two very different genres, but I found it very interesting.

“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” was in no way a zany parody of “Pride and Prejudice”. The humor didn’t focus on parody, it focused on witty dialogue, like the original. Often the tone of the story would become more serious and the focus of being funny was on the characters.

Even the ideas of the original were mirrored in “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. In the original, class was an important theme. In the book, being of a higher or lower class was very important. You could move up in class by marrying into a higher class or you could move down because of a scandal. This was in the movie. Having a family member turned into a zombie would be a scandal and having a daughter who could fight zombies might mean more men would want to marry her.

For the most part I thought the movie worked well and that the idea was creative. There were some parts of the movie which could have been explored better. For example, the movie shows that zombies are not 100% evil monsters and that many still have many human traits. Even though this is an important point of the movie I don’t think it was handled well.

My final conclusion is that the movie was interesting, witty and underrated but some of the story could have been better handled. Overall I would give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Nathaniel

Vocabulary

witty (adjective) – using words in a funny and clever way
satire (noun) – the use of jokes and humour to criticize people or ideas
underrated (adjective) – to rate or evaluate something lower than it should be
mock (verb) – to laugh at or make fun of (someone or something) especially by copying an action, style, or a way of behaving or speaking
zany (adjective) – funny in a strange way
mirror (verb) – to copy or be very similar to (something or someone)