Army of the Dead (2021)

I’ve written about so many Zack Snyder films on here, I could get away with calling this a fansite. If I didn’t dislike every movie of his, of course. I hated Man of Steel (which helped kickstart this blog) and Batman v Superman, dove deep into Sucker Punch and shrugged off Justice League (the original!). I have no love for 300, feel somewhat ambivalent about Watchmen (even more now after the brilliant TV show), liked Dawn of the Dead, enjoyed the Snyder Cut more than I wanted and have not seen Legend of the Guardians: Twoowit-toohoo. So, I certainly had mixed feelings when watching Army of the Dead, despite the recent love everyone suddenly has for Zack Snyder. Getting a director’s cut that turns a shitty movie into an okay movie seems to do the trick easily, despite his track record. This one is certainly one of his better films, which doesn’t mean it’s great. It’s okay. At best.

I don’t want to delve into the whole thing, 1. Because it’s too long and 2. Because not that many interesting things are happening during most of its runtime. But Snyder did attempt to create yet another opening sequence that everyone will love and throws a lot into it. So let’s take a look at that and then at the rest of the movie.

I still contend that Sucker Punch is a male fantasy disguised as a criticism of male fantasies, so when Army of the Dead opens with the most male fantasy of getting a blowjob while driving, I feel a certain validation.

This impression is not change by the immediate presentation of topless zombies. But do we get a zombie penis? Of course not, that would be disgusting!

Then we get some mass carnage, which is what should be expected but I couldn’t help but find it particular that there are two moments where black people are shot before they can pose a real threat and are clearly shocked by this development.

Especially that second shot is really discomforting because it reflects the reality of black people when stopped by the police and this is used here for entertainment value. It surely could have been used for a critical or satirical view but it just exploited. And note how singular that image is, to just focus on this black couple being scared in a car, with a gun pointed at them.

There is this shot of a car crashing in a tree and some terrible CGI. When I show old movies to my students, I sometimes have to explain that old CGI might look silly now but was really impressive at the time. Nowadays, I often wonder why they even bother. Holding up a sign that says ‘imagine fire here' would have the same effect for me.

As we have seen before, Zack Snyder’s (and many other’s) idea of feminism in action movies is to give a woman a gun.

The prologue ends with yet another death of a parent (together with the child), something that Snyder already used against any necessity in Man of Steel. It’s the old Disney trick of using death cheaply for entertainment.

On a more positive note, there are these moments of characters doing like portraits, holding up pictureframes and looking at the camera. I’m not entirely sure what these are supposed to mean and this is never picked up again, but at least it’s a unique idea.

That’s the prologue, which has a certain energy I did enjoy, despite many questionable choices. The rest of the movie, again, doesn’t offer much to discuss, so here are the few bits worth pointing out.

As with so many action movies, this one is also an exercise in gun porn. Going through a wide array of guns, practicing with them, holding them, having shootouts in slow motion. It’s the ABC of teasing and bullet-cumshots that we just accept as very cool, no matter how much reality teaches us about the dangers of guns.

Something else that was driving me insane was the artistic decision to have every shot out of focus. Snyder has always made very dubious artistic choices, but no one can tell me that this looks cool or interesting and not just amateurish and cheap.

The rest of the movie features many interesting ideas that never add up to anything more than that: a collection of interesting ideas: zombie tigers, zombie babies, zombie hierarchies, nuke races. This is not a terrible movie but one of these films that thinks having some cool ideas is not enough, which clearly is also enough as an incentive to already plan and shoot a prequel movie and an animated series to start a franchise based on a flimsy concept we’ve seen before. Finally, more zombies.