ARMY OF THE DEAD is a big gamble with little payout

“It is by going down into the abyss where we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

Zack Snyder’s ARMY OF THE DEAD, a Zack Snyder film written, directed, produced, and photographed by Zack Snyder, debuted on the Netflix streaming service in late-May and acts as the perfect cautionary tale of a director that has been untethered by the chains of his home studio Warner Brothers, which he divorced recently after a marriage that began with 2006’s “300”.

After a zombie outbreak has left Las Vegas walled off and in ruin, an eccentric Japanese casino owner (an underutilized cameo by Hiroyuki Sanada) recruits military hero Scott Ward (a stoic Dave Bautista) to infiltrate his towering casino of Sodom and Gomorrah (on the nose, there) to move out over $200 million unmarked dollars before the U.S. government drops a low-yield nuclear bomb to cleanse the city once and for all.

Ward recruits a crackpot team to get in and get out before the bomb drops, and his ragtag group soon discover that the undead are smarter, faster, and more dangerous than they could have possibly imagined. It is a race against time, and the house always wins. ARMY OF THE DEAD is Snyder’s second foray into the zombie genre following his 2004 directorial debut, a remake of George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, which remains one of the best remakes- and zombie filmsof all time.

‘Dawn’ succeeded because he had Universal Studios and his screenwriter James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) to keep his ambitions in check. ARMY falters for the same reason Snyder’s 4-hour JUSTICE LEAGUE which released in March succeeds... the director’s full autonomous control.

The film starts with promise, and once we get into the heart of Las Vegas we get into the heart of the film’s issues. Taken almost scene-by-scene (and quote-by-quote) from James Cameron’s ALIENS, the mercenary group dispatch the screaming zombies with too much ease. Headshots land and every shot hits the target, which is forgivable when it comes to the commando members of the team, but by the time Scott’s humanitarian daughter is sending bullets home with the ease of a sharp-shooter, the believability plummets.

Visually, ARMY OF THE DEAD does not live up to the colorful and wild marketing material. Usually, Snyder works with cinematographers including Larry Fong and Fabian Wagner who helped bring his most visually extravagant films like SUCKER PUNCH, WATCHMEN, and 300 to life.

Here, Snyder is stretched too thin and his shots are uncharacteristically dull, washed out, and fittingly “lifeless” sans the opening credits outbreak montage and the final run through the casino floor. The characters are fine enough, with the only memorable cast member being the German safecracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighofer) who plays his role with a sissy-yetconfident comedic ease.

The film is an exercise in excess, and by the time the zombie tiger nails the film’s baddie (in a scene that lasts almost 4 minutes) I found myself checking the time, seeing how long could possibly be left. All this could be forgiven if ARMY OF THE DEAD had something to say, or some compelling reason to exist. Naturally, zombies lend themselves as being avatars for art or meaning. Paul W.S. Anderson used zombies in his 2002 film RESIDENT EVIL to create a visually compelling science-fiction interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”, while Romero himself used zombies to tap into America’s social climate, militarism, and capitalism.

There is an attempt, initially, to inject some immigration parallels into ARMY, but Snyder seems to have forgotten that by the time the page to the script flips over. There’s hints that the film takes place in a time-loop (a hot narrative right now). There’s hints that the zombies are an alien viral weapon. There’s robot zombies. There’s a bunch of things in ARMY OF THE DEAD that might have amounted to something, but all boils down to nothing.

I am a Zack Snyder apologist and will always defend films of his, but ARMY OF THE DEAD doesn’t suffer from “too many cooks”. It suffers because of one.