Army Of The Dead

What dies in Vegas,
stays in Vegas!

Army Of The Dead
USA 2021 Directed by Zack Snyder

Warning: Very slight spoilers here and there.

Army Of The Dead is the second new Zack Snyder movie I’ve seen this year (after his new version of Justice League, reviewed here) and it’s his second zombie movie after his quite astonishing ‘reimagining’ of Dawn Of The Dead. Now, tempting as it might be to call this a sequel to that movie (rather than just the spiritual sequel it surely is), the two films are set in very different versions of a zombie outbreak so are definitely not taking place in a shared universe... although, of course, all these kinds of post 1968 iterations of zombie movies owe a debt to Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (with a small shout out, of course, to Hammer’s Plague Of The Zombies, 1966).

Actually, the film starts off with more of a shout out to Return Of The Living Dead when a top secret army cargo is compromised, due to a newly married couples in-car blow job (so it’s a military cargo gone wrong kind of zombie movie). An ‘alpha zombie’ called Zeus, presumably discovered or created by the army, escapes and takes out what’s left of the military escort. Then the credits roll where we see Dave Bautista’s character Scott Ward and a team of soldiers killing zombies by the armful (and becoming disillusioned with their job even as they earn more medals or die in the process) and Las Vegas is totally overrun and walled up by the end of those credits. We soon are also shown a back story where Bautista had to kill his wife in front of their daughter when she turns zombie and, this sets up the background where those two characters haven’t been communicating well for a while. Bautista has medals of honour but has now chosen to live his life flipping burgers in a fast food shop.

However, he’s then recruited, a little reluctantly, by a powerful billionaire who wants him to recover 200 million dollars from a safe in a hotel in Vegas. So he puts together a team and in they go, 24 hours before the final military solution of a nuclear bomb being dropped into Vegas is going to go ahead (in another call back to the denouement of Return Of The Living Dead, of course).

When he gets to the wall, his daughter negotiates to go in with them, due to her friend going in to the zombie city 24 hours before and not returning and, yeah, I won’t say too much more about the plot but it does go through some of the clichés you would expect from this and it’s not exactly unpredictable. That being said, though, it’s still pretty spectacular and plays out exactly as you’d want this kind of ‘zombie heist’ movie to go. Snyder’s direction is great, it looks very glossy and the violence is very gory (they go for that whole, ‘blood on the camera lens’ aesthetic at one point but, that’s okay, it works here). This film also has the two levels of zombie menace which seems to have become almost a convention in recent years. So you have the standard, easy to kill ‘shamblers’, which are basically the Romero type of zombies... and then you have the more ‘alpha zombies’, which are kind of agile, reasoning versions of the undead (the army of the title), who are more like the versions seen in Romero’s Land Of The Dead more than anything else... although they’re much faster.

There are some nice elements about the film too... such as a zombie tiger who is mentioned to have been one of Siegfried and Roy’s creatures. And speaking of a Siegfried, a different one this time, the safe in the film is called Götterdämmerung (at which point I would have been more tempted to title the movie Twilight Of The Zombies). The nice thing is, whenever the safecracker ‘has a moment’ with either the safe or a blue print of it, Siegfried’s Funeral March from the Götterdämmerung section of Wagner’s opera Der Ring des Nibelungen plays in the background, which is a nice touch. And I don’t know who the idiot who filled in the IMDB trivia for Army Of The Dead is but... for your information, that music is not called ‘the theme from Excalibur’, right? I dunno, the IMDB seems to have been written by three year olds lately... I’m finding more and more wrong or idiotic information on there the more I use it. So much for an internationally respected database. There’s also a nice shout out to the Headpiece of the Staff of Ra near the beginning, for fans of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

All in all though, apart form what I consider to be a not too good cover version of the excellent song The End (originally by The Doors), the film is a sure fire winner. Having Bautista in this really helps. He’s a hell of an actor and, while he does this ‘thinking man’s action man’ stuff really well, I’m still waiting for Hollywood to start giving him some roles less focused on his physique and more on his incredible acting talents. He’s one of the true ‘stars’ with a capital S that Hollywoodland has these days and I think more producers need to realise this. He’s supported here by a fine cast including stand out performances by Ella Purnell as Scott’s daughter and Tig Notaro, who wasn’t even on set with the actors but CGI ‘added in’ later (to replace an actor whose reputation has been ‘compromised’), as the gang’s helicopter pilot. Not that I would have noticed the replacement, to be honest.

The film is glossy and very easy on the eye but also, I’d have to say, quite grim and dark. There aren’t many characters who walk away from this one unscathed (or at all) but, even so, I’d certainly have to recommend Army Of The Dead to anyone who likes zombie movies. I mean, yes it’s not particularly scary and it becomes, in some ways, a bit of a body count movie but, you know, those two elements ('not really scary' and 'count the number of zombie corpses') are pretty much staples of the genre at this point and, like I said, there’s nothing really original about the movie but its nicely done and just works very well. Certainly not a feel good movie but it’s definitely a crowd pleasing one, for sure... depending on what crowd you happen to be in.