Army of the Dead (2021)
Directed by Zack Snyder; screenplay by Zack Snyder, Shay Hatten and Joby Harold; starring Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell and Omari Hardwick.
2.5/5
Zack Snyder’s new film, Army of the Dead, opens with yet another one of those scenes that has very little to do with the rest of the film, stitched on as an ill-fitting prologue and intended for use purely as marketing material, put out early on YouTube to tease the fans.
This new phenomenon, one that I really hope stops sometime soon but am not holding my breath over, usually features characters that are intended to die or who simply don’t connect to the rest of the film: in Mortal Kombat we had the first showdown between Scorpion and Sub-zero, in Spiral we had a torturous game as a kind of cold open, and here we have the inception point of the sort-of-but-not-really zombie apocalypse set to ravage Zack Snyder’s world – or at least Las Vegas.
I say sort-of-but-not-really because Army of the Dead isn’t actually concerned with the apocalypse, as much as that jarring opening, dusty Nevada setting, and abundance of stuck-going-nowhere characters may make it appear as such. It is very much set in our world (Sean Spicer makes a baffling appearance to discuss the impending nuking of Vegas), it’s just that one little part of it is infested with the living dead.
At the heart of the thing is Dave Bautista’s Scott Ward – a fast-food chef with some kind of military background (it’s not entirely clear what he was but apparently he won the Medal of Honour at some point.) As with every character in this large ensemble piece, Ward is strapped for cash and dreaming of a better life, so when a Mr. Tanaka (another appearance from Hiroyuki Sanada) appears one day and offers a chance at that dreamt of future, he jumps at it.
Bautista makes Scott work because of his range. We all know by now that the man can quite easily play the gentle giant with a lot going on behind the eyes, as well as the menacing brute and though there is room for him to play both here, it’s tricky to help but to feel that he’s the only thing tying you to the character. I’m hoping Bautista soon moves away from stuff like this and gets more roles that might test him a little or showcase his true talent.
The mission is incredibly brazen: Tanaka wants to send Scott and a team of his choosing back into Vegas, just as everyone is being evacuated from the surrounding area in preparation for the aforementioned nuking of the place. Underneath Tanaka’s old casino lies a cool $200 mil. and to get there quietly – the airspace above the city is restricted – they’re going to need to go in on foot, and that’s going to involve a lot of navigating already well-worn genre tropes… and guns, of course.
Army of the Dead’s opening titles are quintessential Snyder. A sequence chock-full of mostly superficial information that we’ll learn along the way anyway, plays out as a grand, slow-to-a-crawl tapestry of bloody violence, accompanied by a cover by Richard Cheese and Alison Crowe of Presley’s Viva Las Vegas. At one point, Cheese, mid-song, breaks the fourth wall (would this even be the fourth wall?), calling out to a zombified impersonator of the song’s original creator – “watch out Elvis!” – moments before he’s crushed by a felled Eiffel Tower replica.
It’s a moment that could be some kind of metaphor for whatever’s going on in the rest of the film: a cover artist yelling at a cheap impersonator about his impending doom at the hands of a tacky replica. I have to warn you, though, there’s nothing at the end of that train of thought. Snyder just wants to make images that appear a bit deeper than the shallow pools they are. As I say – it’s quintessential Snyder.
Surprisingly enough, with these opening titles, Snyder actually seems to get his more obnoxious stylistic mannerisms out of his system. To my surprise (and joy), from the end of this sequence forward, there is a distinct departure from the rest of Snyder’s body of work, at least on the surface – the whole thing starts to get lighter, becomes somewhat tongue-in-cheek and for the most part features very little slow-mo.
On the face of things, this is the right move. Snyder’s obsession with all things grimdark and cool has played a key part in many of his misses in recent years, so it’s good to see he’s moved on at least partially from that phase, but this isn’t to say that the guy’s resolved his more dramatic flaws. Fundamentally, tone and style weren’t all that was holding Snyder back. He still most certainly suffers from a deficit of substance.
Just as with his earlier entry to the zombie-flick canon (the metaphor-killing remake of the late, great Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) Snyder only really sees the decomposing cannibals at the heart of the genre as an obstacle for his characters and nothing more.
Somewhere in here, there’s a half-baked analogy for the US-Mexico border wall… maybe. Surviving residents, displaced by the ravenous horde, find themselves trapped in refugee camps attached to the border wall encircling the City of Lights. Within, power-abusing authority figures throw their weight about, and for some reason, the coyotes are trafficking people back into the danger zone. But ultimately the film only ever pays the whole matter lip-service.
The zombies, once a stand-in for the mindless masses, the drones of consumerism, trapped in Vegas of all places – it’s Sin City for God’s sake! – are now intelligent, non-mindless, beings (this also never really pays off) capable of forging a whole kingdom.
Hell, even the title of the film isn’t really explained or justified. Where’s the army? Are we referring to the prologue? To the weird sentience of those never-really-explained “alpha” zombies? It could be referring to that one moment a character refers to the infection as a bioweapon with the purpose of creating an undead army, but here too this never goes anywhere.
But this isn’t to say everything needs to be a metaphor, the flaws run deeper.
As with most – if not all – of his work, Snyder cares very little about his characters as characters, rarely using them as anything more than vehicles for momentary affect without really considering how they got to be where they are in the first place – at least in an emotional capacity. It’s just so maddening because the cast is actually really likeable. The oddball chemistry between Omari Hardwick and Matthias Schweighöfer in particular is incredibly compelling to me, but that attraction to their relationship comes purely from some low-level empathic response you get when you see two charismatic people interact.
The film survives purely on the little hits of dopamine you get from seeing characters do something a little cooky or seeing something cool happening. That’s it. That’s the movie.
Watched on 21st May 2021