Zack Snyder’s newest film released onto Netflix on Friday, Army of the Dead. It is a two-and-a-half-hour zombie heist film. Although the film starts out strong, it does simmer in the second half. It had strong potential, but it did not quite reach it. It was still a decent movie and a fun watch, but there was nothing profound about it. Although it had a budget of 90 million dollars, it still felt like it held up to the quality of other Netflix films, which is not a compliment, maybe if it had been more widespread in the theaters it might have had a different feel, but it was only an extremely limited theater release. So the watching experience was good, but it did not bring anything innovative to the zombie genre, except for the zombie tiger, that was both disgusting and awesome!
Army of the Dead is about a military operation that goes bad due to Las Vegas idiocy. This results in a zombie from area 51 being released into the wild. The zombie released has superhuman strength, and he quickly builds an army that takes over all of Las Vegas. The government manages to build a wall around the city and keeps the zombies in a quarantined zone. Bly Tanaka recruits Scott Ward to create a team to go into the zombie infested land to retrieve $200 million from one of the casinos before the nuke destroying the entire city is dropped. Of course, like all good heist movies, everything that can go wrong does, and the mission slowly implodes, and the primary objective becomes to escape alive.
One of the biggest pieces of news that came out about this movie was that Tig Notaro's character had to be edited into all the scenes. The original character that was supposed to play the helicopter pilot had a scandal come about, and thus he lost the job. This change cost millions of dollars. From the erasing of one character from all the scenes and placing a new one in was an incredibly expensive operation. This is clearly a very work intensive project to completely replace a character, but it is hard to believe that it costs millions of dollars to do. So David Batista and Marianne Peters have never actually met even though they appear in many scenes together.
An interesting aspect to Zack Snyder's zombies was that they had a hierarchy and a code. There was a very clear leader to the zombies, and he had a queen that he cared about and had apparently gotten pregnant, which would have been an interesting twist to play out more on what a zombie baby would be like. The code the zombies followed was that if there was a sacrifice, then the people could wander freely throughout Vegas. The code was broken when the queen zombie was killed, and this put the king onto a war path where he would not be stopped until the rest of the heist crew was eliminated. So unlike other zombie movies these monsters had some emotional awareness and intelligence. In numerous other zombie films, they are mindless creature that are solely out for blood and just stagger around aimlessly. The zombies in this film also seemed to have more physical abilities than other zombies due to their strength and speed. Combing all of these aspects together made the zombies a more formidable foe.
This movie did remind me of Stephen King’s The Stand, mainly just because in The Stand, the devil decided to make his home base in Las Vegas. This is mainly ironic because it is known as the city of sin, thus making it the perfect place for the devil. So similarly, it makes sense that the zombies would find their home in a place of debauchery. The zombies could also be symbolic of all the people partying a little too hard in Vegas, so once the sun comes up, they stagger around trying to make it back to their hotel rooms.
Throughout the film Snyder seemed to make subtle jabs at varying entities like Christopher Nolan, the military, and D.C. While trying to trigger the traps in front of the safe, one of the characters notice that the other dead bodies look like replicas of themselves and made a comment about jumbled up timelines and being forced to repeat the same actions repeatedly. It seemed to be poking fun at Nolan’s mind bending and time bending stories like Tenet and Inception. The jab toward the military came when David Batista’s character was flipping burgers in some run-down diner, and Tanaka came in and made a comment about how Batista had earned the medal of honor, but the government did care enough to help him not be in a bad enough economic situation where he would be flipping burgers. Thus, taking a shot at how the government does not take enough care of our veterans and war heroes. Finally Snyder takes a shot at Warner Brothers/D.C by having film canisters of his Snyder cut in the vault. At the time of its creation, Snyder’s Justice League cut was not going to be released, so it a subtle jab at D.C, but amazingly enough the cut did end up getting released.
Overall this movie is worthy of watching, although it is a little long, and it did not live up to my lofty expectations. It is action packed and has a good cast as well. The filming style reminded me of the Justice League Snyder Cut as well. The montage at the beginning of the movie was by far the best part, and it just needed more of that energy throughout the film. I gave it an 85. Sadly, this was the only movie I watched this weekend because I was preparing for and taking the GRE, but next weekend should be great between A Quiet Place Part II and Cruella, I am incredibly excited!
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