Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
The five Bennet sisters, notably intelligent, strong-willed Elizabeth (Lily James) and first-born Jane (Bella Heathcote), have grown up in precarious circumstances. By law, the modest fortune possessed by their loving and unconventional father (Charles Dance)–who has seen fit to give all his daughters good educations and would like to see them happy doing whatever they choose–will go to a male cousin upon his death. The girls' relentlessly practical mother (Sally Phillips), however, has dedicated herself to brokering good marriages for them before they wind up smart, genteel and impoverished spinsters–a genuinely grim fate in 18th-century England.
When Mrs. Bennet hears that a young, wealthy and unmarried landowner, Mr. Bingley(Douglas Booth), has just taken possession of a nearby country house, she gets to work cultivating a relationship between Bingley and Jane, her eldest. In the process, second-in-line Elizabeth is introduced to Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley), Bingley's best friend, and also an eligible bachelor. Unfortunately, Elizabeth hates Darcy on sight, pegging him as a stuck-up jerk, and he doesn't think much better of her, especially after forming the mistaken impression that Jane is a gold-digger trying to snare Bingley.
And then there are the zombies... England is in the midst of an undead plague and Mr.Bennet had the foresight to have all five of his daughters trained in the Shaolin arts (even though the samurai way is more socially acceptable...classier); Jane and Elizabeth are crack zombie killers, as is the swashbuckling Darcy. Surely all these principled, intelligent, attractive young people can be brought together despite their various differences! There is actually a great deal more plot–not only must the Bingley/Jane, Darcy/Elizabeth situations be remedied, but there are three more unmarried Bennetsisters waiting in the wings. But even in more conventional adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, it's ultimately all about Elizabeth and Darcy, each richly imbued with both prejudices and pride.
Jane Austen was nothing if not a keen and pitiless observer of the way men and women reveal themselves within the harsh rules of 19th-century social behavior, so Grahame-Smith's interpolation of the unbridled lust (for brains) of "unfortunates," as his living-dead chompers are called, can only be hailed as a stroke of perverse genius. That director-screenwriter Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down) totally gets it is evident from the start. The period-appropriate toy-theatre prologue that quickly dispenses with the history of the zombie plague (it may be why King George III went famously mad, don't you know) segues confidently into a “Masterpiece Theatre” world of formal balls, whist parties, family dinners, church-going and sibling confidences without losing sight of mucky reality: war, sickness, poverty and, yes, walking corpses. Nineteenth-century-ish dialogue notwithstanding, Pride and Prejudice and Zombiesis a sharp combination of PG-13-rated walking-dead shenanigans and girl-power-inflected, teen-friendly soap opera that just might snare a slice of the Hunger Games demographic.
VOCABULARY
- bachelor - холостяк
- dispense - распределять
- genuinely grim fate - по-настоящему мрачная судьба
- imbued - пропитанный, пронизанный
- mucky - грязный
- pegging - привязка
- pitiless - безжалостный, беспощадный
- precarious circumstances - тяжелые жизненные обстоятельства
- swashbuckling - удалой