Army of the Dead Review

An Army of the Dead review in which I talk way too much about zombies. 

There’s a certain cinematic nostalgia when it comes to zombie films, those soulless monstrosities that have shed their previous humanness only to now roam in growling and moaning hordes across dystopian landscapes. It’s a pretty simplistic venture. Someone got exposed, that person gets *turned* into an undead killing machine and now everyone is fucked. Wash, rinse, bite a neck, repeat. 

So walking into a zombie movie is mostly old hat at this point. It’s something of a solved science. We know how they get made, how they take over, how the humans will react, and ultimately how we’ll win. There are only so many ways to skin this undead flesh. 

That doesn’t mean new movies in the genre shouldn’t be made, but rather we can likely temper our expectations some. Zombie flicks are a go-to because we can eliminate one half of the equation outright. We don’t need to know why this particular bad guy is taking over the world. It’s mostly, “Mmm, brains, arghh” and we move on with our lives. What their lack of humanness provides is the ability to explore everyone one other side of the *human* equation (and to rack up a huge body count). The *reaction* to the zombies is often more interesting than the zombies themselves. The Walking Dead is going on infinity seasons about this very thing. 

And that can make for rather mundane fare. Except that zombie movies continue to crank out because of their simplicity, because they offer a chance at ultimate humanness, because they have those things inherent to our own twisted psyche that allow for the good to wrestle with the bad. What would we do in this situation? How would we react when faced with our own loved ones being turned? Would I survive a world obliterated by flesh-chomping, iron deficient veiny corpse brides? I’d like to think I make it out, but who the fuck knows. I’m not all that great with a nail-scattered baseball bat. 

We understand zombies as well as we understand most other characters in films. They are easy in this way, in that when they are the primary (in your face) antagonist. They allow for the humans fighting them to be more human. They represent both sides of the coin, with internal struggles, clashes with their own ethics and morality all while piling up an undead body count on the other side. It makes for “easy” filmmaking because one side, with all of its relatively predetermined rules, can act accordingly. After that, it’s human condition time folks. It’s why zombies keep popping up. Just like you can’t keep them down in the movies themselves, you also can’t keep them out of the pages of working scripts. 

Zack Snyder, on a base level, likely understands this lack of juxtaposition and why he’s leaned this way more than once in movies before. When he hasn’t been recutting major superhero films or working his way through the broader parts of the DC Extended Universe, he got his start making a zombie film. 2004’s Dawn of the Dead put the director on the map, plotting a course for him through the industry for years to come. Now, nearly two decades later he’s come to finish the job in some ways. What we get with Army of the Dead is more a spiritual successor than a real sequel, a zombie movie about the humanity of others while they rob a casino. 

In his first movie, Snyder was working from the James Gunn script and the two forged a path through the world of another zombie takeover with unclear resolutions. We don’t know the fate of the world and maybe it’s not important if we do. To some degree, Snyder is working from the same beats in this newest film. The world doesn’t matter. The fate of existence doesn’t matter either. It isn’t existential, it just “is”. When the world is held hostage by disease, giving up isn’t simply a justifiable recourse. It’s just the path. 

Army of the Dead starts conspiratorially enough with a military convo from Area 51 that you know is doomed before it even leaves the secured gates. What gets released is an unkillable zombie monster that lays waste to everyone involved before turning his sights on Las Vegas. Then, through a very Snyder-ian montage over the appropriately score “Viva Las Vegas” we see how the city is laid to waste, the zombies complete the takeover, lives are lost, bombs are dropped, carnage abounds all before the city is eventually walled off into a quarantine. 

It’s here we pick up Dave Bautista’s Scott Ward who lost more than he can deal with at the hands of the zombies the first time and is now riding out his days not as a mercenary soldier but as the most muscle-jacked line cook in the Western Hemisphere. We know that while Las Vegas was walled off and the zombie invasion contained, the government plans to finish the job with a tactical nuke to wipe out The Strip and its surroundings once and for all. If it's a thinly veiled attempt at metaphor for the cleansing of our human sins, it works. 

From here, Army of the Dead turns into a “once last job” type of flick with Scott assembling his teams of mercenary misfits and ne’er-do-wells to retrieve the millions in cash still in the bottom of a casino vault before the city is scorched. Snyder tries to cover a lot of ground here, making us want to care about the humans involved with the mission while also establishing what Las Vegas has become since the apocalypse. It’s mostly a fool’s errand. We know most aren’t going to make it out alive anyway, so who gives a shit? 

That being said, there are gems in this group. Tig Notaro who stood in for the axed Chris D’Elia is perfect as the helicopter pilot. Her current “real life” show” has the comedian not understanding or knowing the celebrities she’s put face to face with and that general gestalt comes through perfectly on screen. Matthias Schweighofer as the German safecracker, who only wants to understand the emotional layers of those with him before he hears the inner workings of the safe is great as well. 

Army of the Dead does a couple of things “new” within the genre that are worthy of note. For starters, he does try to humanize the zombies. These new undead are different than you’d expect with a top-down hierarchy that helps a lot with how the group moves through Las Vegas. In this way he draws from Justin Cronin’s The Passage series or Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain. Both of those were vampiric, but these groups need organizational hierarchy so why not transpose some of the rules onto zombies?

Army of the Dead wants you to care about Scott’s relationship with his daughter, and about the broader government conspiracy, and about the rebel fighters who’ve come back to Vegas for a payday, and about the zombie King and his bride. There’s a lot going on here and taken individually could have all made for a very cool movie. Combined together and we get diminishing returns. 

Throughout there are more-than-slick action sequences with plenty of shock value. Dude can slo-mo with the best of them and there are a couple of times when he plays off cinematic timing to hilarious returns.There are other highlights as well.  Snyder is a master of the soundtrack, Bautista kicks ass and there are a few twists and turns. It’s not a perfect movie but it’s watchable and enjoyable if you don’t mind getting zombie guts spilled on your outfit. 

But in the end, like with zombies, the point is that there is no point. As with any zombie takeover, there’s a lot of shit going on and it’s not all going to get resolved. We don’t need to account for all of the “bad guys” so why bother accounting for all of the good ones too? The main goal is to work your way through a zombie hellscape with your morality intact. Most (all) won’t get there, but everyone was doomed anyway. That’s why zombies exist in movies. To remind us of that very fact. We knew we were screwed from the beginning, but that’s cool. The blood and guts journey is worth it to just to see where we land.