Arnie Attempts to Save His Zombie Daughter in This Trailer for “Maggie”
If you had told me in his action movies heyday that Arnold Schwarzenegger would eventually end up in a zombie movie, I’d have just nodded and said, “Yeah, that tracks”.
If you had told me instead that the Austrian Oak would would end up in a zombie movie where he’s struggling to protect a loved one from the onset of the disease and not blasting zombies away with guns as big as he is, that I would have scoffed at. But hey, that was the 80s. (Everyone made bad judgement calls back then.)
The trailer for Maggie sees Schwarzenegger as a quiet, grizzled father of the titular character played by Abigail Breslin (who is looking like she didn’t learn much of anything from her time in Zombieland).
The trailer hasn’t been out long but already it’s stirring up internet chatter.
Much of the gossip seems to be floating in the amusing direction of whether or not this film will amount to a silver screen adaptation of the 2013 video game The Last Of Us that everyone seems to so desperately want. The trailer sure seems to have taken quite a few cues in that direction. A big, bearded old man struggling fighting tooth and nail to protect a young girl infected with a zombie-like disease? Poignant music below melancholy dialog? Faceless military and corrupted law makers posed to try and tear our poor main characters apart? Someone was copying some notes somewhere!
For my money, I think this will probably amount more to a showcase of the Terminator’s more introspective side. Arnold’s character only has one line in the trailer and strikes me more as the strong silent type than a violence-prone madman. We haven’t seen that side of him turn up in too many of his movies so I think that’s what really might be the selling point here.
Plus if Warm Bodies and The Walking Dead have taught us anything it’s that not every zombie movie has to be a blood-bathed bullet fest. Sometimes it can just be a setting or a backdrop for a much more somber story to play out in. There’s no harm in that if you ask me.
Maggie is set to debut in a limited theatrical release beginning May 8.
