Teresa Palmer and Nicholas Hoult (Jan Thijs/Summit)

Imagine you’re a zombie. Imagine that, when you eat your victim’s brains, you have a vision of their memories. Now, what if those memories were the equivalent, of eating a cupcake and seeing scenes from the Twilight movies play in your head? This scenario is the kind of promising twist weakly executed in Warm Bodies, the promising but weakly executed adaptation of Isaac Marion’s brain-eaters-with-heart novel.

It’s a great premise. The protagonist R (Nicholas Hoult) is a feeling man’s zombie, longing to connect in a world in which technology has kept us connected but also driven humans farther and farther away from each other. The awkwardness of the walking dead yearning to connect and be human is a great metaphor for the adolescent trying to learn how to be a functioning adult with fulfilling relationships. But the movie commits the very sin its hero wants to overcome. Lame jokes continually take the script away from the emotion and connection its young dead protagonist longs for.

It doesn’t help that the lighthouse guiding R to the shore of human relationships is a blank slate. In the middle of a zombie feast on human flesh, R is taken by the sight of Julie (Teresa Palmer), who happens to be the daughter of the commander (John Malkovich) determined to eradicate the zombie scourge that threatens to wipe out humanity with its deadly virus.

Julie is a pretty blonde and is pretty boring, and has no chemistry with her brooding undead boyfriend. In one of the movie’s reminders of technological obsolescence (she finds a Polaroid camera too), she is taken with the stack of records R collects (because vinyl “sound … more … alive.”). It’s my own entirely subjective judgment that considers her passing over the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo to play Springsteen’s painfully-obvious-in-context “Hungry heart” a deal-breaker, but there you go.

VInyl LPs come to play early in the film, and set a gentle, wistful tone. R drops the needle on a record with an unmarked label—a detail that drove me crazy throughout the movie. I was relieved when a stray album cover of the Doors’ Strange Days did not lead to a soundtrack appearance of what would have been an all-too-obvious “People are strange.” What did R play? John Waite’s wistful “Missing you.” Sadly, that tone isn’t sustained, flat jokes drowning out sharp ideas that never develop.

Julie doesn’t have much chemistry with her human peeps either. In fact none of the humans have much chemistry, and shoehorning them into a Romeo and Juliet framework is just a reminder that, if the movie took that angle to its Shakespearean conclusion and these crazy kids killed themselves, nobody would care.

Rob Corddry and Nicholas Hoult (Jonathan Wenk/Summit)

The most developed relationship in the movie is between R and M (Rob Corddry). The Daily Show reporter overcomes the limitations of a zombie’s frozen expressions to express a real friendship with his young charge. Corddry has established himself as an excellent character actor, and it’s too bad there wasn’t a bigger role for him here.

When zombies seem more connected and lively than living humans, why would zombies want to be back among the living? Levine has told interviewers he connected with the novel’s sense of zombie as just regular people with poor social skills, and here Corddry’s quiet charisma comes through as well, in small gestures like greeting humans with an awkward but hopeful “hi.” In this context, the movie could have worked against the surface rom-com angle and as a more scathing critique of technological society that its source suggests.

And maybe the characters’ wardrobe change suggests a buried satire. In the book, the clothes that R carries into his hulking purgatory are business attire, while M is dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt. This is reversed for the film, which has M dressed in a suit and tie and R. in a hoodie. Does this hoodie suggest a kinship with the Unabomber’s tirade against technology, inspired by philosopher Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society? Early in Warm Bodies, we see R’s vision of life before the zombie apocalypse, in which the crowded airport where he and his minions spend their walking dead life is populated by commuters lost in their smart phones, slaves to technology.

Whatever the angle, the movie is over-written, R’s inner dialogue explaining too much instead of letting the actors deal with the challenge of conveying meaning without a voice over. Warm Bodies wants to be a warm film, but it’s just another kind of walking dead.

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Warm Bodies
Written and directed by Jonathan Levine, based on the novel by Isaac Marion
With Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich
Rated PG-13 for zombie violence and some language
Running time 97 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you