Remind me again; were you upset that they weren’t necessarily in order, or that they were in order at the beginning?
I saw this last night and loved it. It was pretty much perfect as far as I’m concerned. My face actually hurt afterwards from laughing, smiling.
My son and I were discussing how not a single line in the movie fell flat and I brought up the small talk in the car montage as an example. “Every single snippet of conversation in that montage hit the mark. If there was a joke in there that fell flat, they cut it out.”
It puts me in mind of Arrested Development and how the writers said they wrote three times as much material as they needed for each episode so that they could cut out the least effective 2/3’s of the jokes and be left with something dense and tight.
Having them presented in-order at the beginning of the film established a certain expectation of linearity, so when they then picked only ones at random to expand upon later, it felt off. As a result, it didn’t feel to me that there was actually a consistent “rulebook” written, but rather that they simply wrote a couple of jokes and assigned them arbitrary values.
I had some specific issues with the placement of entries on the list (ie. Rule #1 = Cardio only makes sense if you’re writing a zombie survival guide pre-apocalypse, after the apocalypse has started, it’s a little late to start getting in shape), but that’s another story.
But the fact that it was planned as having much more content defuses that complaint, because they actually would have taken the time to slowly dole them out over the course of many hours, so the rules pacing makes more sense. I’d also expect them to have only written about 20 out of the nominal 30-some rules, so they could fill in some blanks later in the writing process, which is a perfectly accetable strategy when contemplating a series.
I took his list not as being prioritized, but as being in observational order for the numbering.
Plus, he’s talking to the audience in the narration, and the audience hasn’t had a zombie apocalypse yet, so cardio still makes sense.
Someone else mentioned this I believe but, the length of the list is part of the joke, sending up the Colombus’s neurotic nature. One of many payoffs is when he first gets in Tallahassee’s car for the first time and checks the backseat. The title pops up, “Rule 31: Always Check The Backseat.” It’s a humorous call back to his recent close call and the first indication we have that there are more than four rules.
Knowing all of the rules is not important. All we need to know is that he has a lot of them and that they will occassionally be used to comedic effect. (When Tallahassee later pulls a muscle trashing the mini-van I said to myself, “Limber up.” I didn’t notice they had snuck a title highlighting that rule into the background until it fell off the back of the mini-van with a clang.)
That’s not too late to start getting into shape. The body does a great job of increasing stamina from the level of really lazy slob back to average. If you haven’t been working cardio before the apocalypse, you’re sure as shit going to be working on it afterwards, and that’s better than nothing!
They aren’t in order of priority, he’s just writing them down as he goes along. The flashback scene where he kills his hawt zombie neighbor is where the first two rules are established, IIRC - 1. be faster than zombie 2. make sure zombie stay down - then we see him add rules 31 (back seat) & 32 (little things), so we know the list is still growing. It’s not necessary - for the plot, the characterization, or the humor - to know what all the rules are or how he came up with them.
Well, it isn’t necessary for most of us, apparently. :-)
I saw this last night. It had a lot of great touches and the writers and director have clearly been studying their zombie fiction. One of those great touches was in the beginning when Columbus was running around the parking lot avoiding the zombies and tries to get into his car but drops his keys. So what does he do? He runs in a circle, leading them around a big circle then back to this car.
Something that would not work with human pursuers, but works perfectly well in a zombie movie.
I thought of that as a callback to when we saw him playing WoW earlier, given the role of kiting in the game.
Wait, was the WoW scene earlier? Anyway, I thought it was a deliberate cross-reference.
The WoW scene is later.
I thought it was to make fun of the idiocy of Zombies, but I don’t play WoW so maybe I just didn’t get it.
I think the only point of the WoW scene was to drive it home that he’s a nerd.
With a Guitar Hero controller in the background. So point driven home.
Agree. Shame he shook off the nerdiness quickly for the rest of the film. I would’ve liked a Rule related to videogames.
I just saw this and wasn’t impressed, for many of the reasons that others have mentioned here. I can see how watching Zombieland with someone might be a good time, but I don’t believe it is a good movie. The humor fell flat with me, and the character development was weak and uneven. Frankly, I was bored. The movie seemed to take a lot things from countless other zombie movies, but didn’t do anything interesting with them. Don’t get me started on the Bill Murray scene. :(
I saw this with one of my brothers in the theater, and I was commenting how it was ridiculous that Eisenberg’s character never upgraded from his double barrel. My brother said that it complimented how out of place his character was in that environment, which I thought was a pretty good observation.
That’s kind of the whole point of the movie.
I liked the first 5-6 minutes, then the scene with the Mozart ouverture in the shop and then … nothing, really… I wish it would have been more like World War Z…
But World War Z wasn’t a comedy.
actually World War Z was funnier than Zombieland…