Maggie is less zombie movie than you might expect
The idea of pitting Arnold Schwarzenegger against zombies is one I’m surprised hasn’t played out on film already. As someone who was hoping to see the aging action star go balls-to-the-wall against the undead, I was a little disappointed in what Maggie actually was. Schwarzenegger dual-wielding double barrel shotguns against hordes of zombies this is not. That said, the movie is a quiet meditation focusing more on losing loved ones and the transformation rather than mass hysteria and the fight for survival we’re used to seeing. Maggie is going to polarize its audience and lose points for the slow-burn setup, but it might find a home with fans of the genre looking for a quiet new entry.
Read a few more thoughts and the rest of my short Maggie review the jump.
Again, if you’re looking for a no-holds-barred sci-fi zombie movie, Maggie does not fit the bill. Instead, the film takes its time and slowly builds toward an inevitable conclusion. The bigger picture of the apocalypse takes a back seat to a more intimate unraveling of one family, one girl, and one father. In fact, most of the people we see seem to be living a pretty normal life, and the infection as well as those who get infected are almost afterthoughts. Where most self-labeled zombie pictures take a short breather to watch characters expire and others grieve before the action starts back up, Maggie spends its entire runtime in that transitional phase. It’s a start-to-finish walk with someone who’s been bitten and is succumbing to the zombie virus, and honestly that’s a mixed bag. Just as I imagine sitting by a dying person’s bed for the last few days of their life is excruciating and emotional, on multiple levels, watching Maggie felt tedious and often unnecessarily sorrowful in its extended death rattle. But, it’s easy to say, “put a bullet in her brain and move on,” so maybe being ultra critical of the tonal shift is a bit harsh.
Maggie hits all the notes you’d expect from an end-of-your-life examination. From Schwarzenegger’s father figure struggling to accept his daughter’s fate, to a romantic element introduced for young love’s sake, to a final separation of close friends, to a town’s fearful self-preservation, to Abigail Breslin‘s last breathes of humanity – it’s all here in some form. That’s the mixed bag of it though. The film focuses on the emotional tones within the somber situation like a YA novel-to-movie adaptation might – A Fault in Our Stars peppered with some zombie seasoning to rope in the sci-fi fans, so to speak – and having the weight of the movie lean heavily toward tears and reflection becomes a bit tiresome. Schwarzenegger gets to swing an axe at the walking dead, but throughout most of the movie he’s hanging his head in despair.
From its pacing to its atmosphere, Maggie is favorably a zombie film we’ve never quite seen before and unfavorably an experiment that doesn’t quite work. As with any review or critique, saying something doesn’t “work” is a subjective statement, so take that with a grain of salt. As an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and as a zombie movie, it fell short. As a quiet, slow-burning meditation complete with its own somber soundtrack, there have been worse and there have been better. Oddly enough, the film’s director, Henry Hobson, has only done title work in the past, directing and designing title sequences for movies and video games. Starting his directing career off with Maggie was an interesting choice, and if anything I’m curious to see what his follow-up project will be.