Zack Snyder is not a filmmaker I have any interest in. I skipped his extended cut of Justice League earlier this year because I couldn’t care less for it in light of what was destined to be excruciating discourse. I also didn’t think it had any chance of changing my opinion on the movie -from everything I’ve heard, I was probably right. But even apart from the hideously toxic cult of personality that Snyder has either knowingly or accidentally cultivated for himself among the worst kind of genre fans on the planet, he’s just not a terribly compelling director. His stylized aesthetics on movies like 300 and Watchmen are visually distinct but substantively hollow, and while he’s certainly a competent filmmaker, beyond what his movies say about his values and his politics, there’s nothing I could deem all that worthwhile to them. Army of the Dead however, piques my curiosity.
For one thing it’s a zombie film, and Snyder’s last excursion in this genre, his 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead (also his film debut) is generally considered his best movie. But also, it is a Las Vegas heist film. That combination is genuinely one I’ve never heard of before and it sounds like a lot of fun. However, it’s perhaps not surprising that Snyder doesn’t allow it to be much fun, that he takes it maybe a bit more seriously than warranted, as is his custom. It’s also true that he largely fails to take advantage of the heist aspect of the movie, disinterested in its’ conventions and thrills. Also that the script is very bad. And yet for as dragged out as its’ two and a half hours are, it’s not as much a slog as Snyder’s previous efforts, and is punctuated here and there by really inventive beats and a handful of good action scenes. There’s not the overwhelming dourness of his recent superhero films either. Army of the Dead is the best Zack Snyder movie in years, by which of course I mean it is decidedly average.
Surely this movie beats most others in the zombie genre for strangest catalyst of a zombie uprising, everything going wrong when an Area 51 convoy carrying an alien bio-weapon collides with a random driver receiving oral sex. That bizarre circumstance is what unleashes the mutant infection upon nearby Las Vegas, where the zombies are subsequently quarantined after wreaking havoc on the city. With the site set to be nuked by the U.S. government, one casino owner (Hiroyuki Sanada) employs a squad of mercenaries to go into the desolate city to recover some two hundred million dollars.
And this cast is a motley bunch, entertainingly big and nicely diverse. It seems one of the lessons Snyder learned from The Walking Dead is how much more engaging an ethnically and culturally diverse cast is to a zombie story. None of these characters have much personality beyond some simple archetypes but they stand out, they leave an impression. I won’t be forgetting Nora Arnezeder in this movie any time soon, nor Raúl Castillo, who has steadily been on the rise these past few years. Where Snyder does try inserting human stories though it doesn’t work. One subplot concerns the strained relationship between team leader Dave Bautista and his daughter played by Ella Purnell, who joins the endeavour to rescue her friend who may still be alive in the city. Another revolves around the ulterior motives of Garret Dillahunt, and neither are particularly interesting. This isn’t a film suited for real character depth, much as Purnell or Ana de la Reguera attempts it. And another thing that kind of muddies the premise is Snyder’s lore around the zombies, who have their own world order and hierarchy with a Queen and King. They are less conventional zombies as much as hulking monsters, and the movie actually gives them something of a story thread of their own.
The visuals are decent enough if a bit plain for a movie like this (disappointing given the liveliness of the poster), but there is one notable bit of audacious VFX trickery. One member of the team is played by Tig Notaro, but you may know that she wasn’t supposed to be in it. Her part was originally played by Chris D’Elia, but then D’Elia became the subject of multiple sexual misconduct scandals, and so taking a leaf out of Ridley Scott’s book, Snyder and his team replaced D’Elia digitally with Notaro. This meant Notaro never interacted with a single other cast member or in a single real location. The resulting integration is not seamless -it’s especially noticeable in her first scene where she never appears in-shot with the characters she’s speaking to. But the compositing does get better as the film moves along, so that the only clues to her non-permeance are in subtle lighting details and the occasional obscure eyeline -things that most viewers aren’t going to notice unless they’re looking for it (it’s a hell of a lot better than Snyders’ attempt to remove Henry Cavill’s moustache at least). She also is away from the rest of the crew for a significant stretch, which is advantageous under the circumstances, but for the movie a tad unfortunate given she’s the best character in the damn thing.
Notaro is also the source of about half of the humour in the film that actually lands, most of the other comic relief being really awkward -such as one turn-of-phrase political correctness joke early on. But more than just punchlines, the humour is elsewhere in the movie clumsily applied. One character death for example is seemingly written as tragic, but shot in a manner darkly comic, leaving you unsure how you’re meant to feel about it. I also can’t tell if the bad music choices are ironic or just genuinely uninspired. Either way the film using “Viva Las Vegas” over the initial zombie takeover and later “Zombie” by The Cranberries is pretty lazy.
And then there’s the weak political satire: references and news bulletins to the governments’ actions on Las Vegas directed by a nameless president whose extreme policy and fourth-grade language is clearly evocative of Trump. However the lack of specificity makes it a tad spineless, and its’ superfluous presence belies disingenuousness -as is the case with the films’ other political stances. A lecherous police rapist (Theo Rossi) is recruited into the gang purely to be set up as zombie bait, but apart from some slight catharsis in this there’s no real purpose to the plot detour. Likewise inconsequential is the broad statement on military-industrial greed, that is just vague and formulaic enough so as to be completely inoffensive. If it’s an attempt by Snyder to respond to the unfavourable political leanings of his films in the past, it is not terribly convincing.
Still, Snyder seems very invested in Army of the Dead -he’s producing an animated series for Netflix based off the film, as well as a prequel movie with sights on a new franchise. All for a mediocre zombie flick -I mean at least Avatar had a vast imaginative world to explore. Army of the Dead is merely serviceable. As a zombie movie it’s got a lot of what you’d expect and not much more. It fails as a decent heist film and falls short in a number of other respects, though I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have some cool moments. And if Snyder wants to build on it, he can have at it -it’d be a better use of his time than more superhero movies, that’s for sure.
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