There should be no reason to tell you that Zombieland is a good film. If you weren’t interested the second you saw the trailer then you have no soul. However, there is still a chance for redemption! If you fight the apathy for proper comedy and see the film anyway then God may grant you your corporeal essence of self.

Zombieland is made up of everything that comedy ought to be. You take a serious situation and spin it in an absurd manner. Instead of having characters sobbing and frustrated with how dire and depressing their situation is, they look to make the most of it. Woody Harrelson has fun killing every zombie in sight, Jesse Eisenburg’s character is looking for love and Emma Stone looks to take advantage of other survivors with the help of her little sister, played by Abigail Breslin.

The cast performs so well that I could spend paragraphs gushing about it. Most notable is Abigail Breslin, who manages to play a twelve year old forced to mature before they are ready.

To put everything as simple as possible, every zombie slaying scene is fantastic, the dialogue is witty, the characters have great chemistry and the typical tropes are executed with a twist, feeling fresh. There is no way you can see this film and walk out without a smile on your face.

As a side tangent, every once in a while I feel that Hollywood has lost the art of making a truly good comedy. They all seem to be targeted towards teenagers with an overactive libido, or a low-budget recreation of every movie from the past few years mashed together. They completely miss what made classics such as Ghostbusters great, or even Evolution an enjoyable film. While Mel Brooks may have taken obvious icons out of Star Wars, the actual comedy found in Spaceballs isn’t built off of recreating scenes from the movies. It came from seeing the arch-villain playing with his dolls or the VHS of the film already being released before it was out in theaters. Absurd concepts that played off of our expectations of a movie and life as a whole, not trying to twist a scene into a poop joke.

If you want to know what true comedy is, then Zombieland is precisely the sort of film you need to go and see. It’s not trying to cash-in on a trend of spoofs, nor is it taking parts of popular zombie films and recreating the scenes with a different spin. It’s taking a terrible situation and bringing its absurdity to light. A concept that good stand-up and great comedies have been built off of.

Go see the movie. Trust me. Hell, I might go see it a second time just because it was that great.

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