Title: Army of the Dead
Directors: Zack Snyder
Cast: Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Matthias Schweighöfer, Nora Arnezeder, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tig Notaro, Raúl Castillo, Huma Qureshi, and Garret Dillahunt
Movie length: 2 hours 28 minutes
Army of the Dead is Zack Snyder’s brand new movie featuring a new release model where it is released in theaters and on Netflix at the same time.
The basic plot of the movie is there is a zombie outbreak caused by a new type of zombies that are different from most movie zombies. This is also a heist movie where the crew assembled have to go retrieve millions of dollars from a Las Vegas vault.
Like with most of Zack Snyder’s movies they are filmed and framed beautifully but with no real substance. Unfortunately this was a very dim presentation, imagine a Broadway presentation or a concert with only half the lights on or less. Throughout the whole movie I was struggling to watch it not because of the plot but because the movie was out-of-focus in multiple scenes at the movie theater I watched it at and it was very dim. You know a movie is out of focus when they show you text on screen and you having trouble reading it. Or you know a movie is dim when you’re having trouble making out what’s on screen.
Now this movie is not all grim and dim (pun intended), there are some highlights I liked in this movie.
-Possible mild spoiler-
The zombie animals were a nice touch and everybody did a great job in terms of acting. There was a few jokes sprinkled in that I found humorous but just like with the zombie animals I wish there were more. This movie felt more like a Planet of the Apes movie but not as clever or well realized. This movie expects you to believe that these zombies are evolved enough to press the elevator button, know exactly which floor our protagonist are on, peacefully wait, then when the elevator door opens evaluate that these are the people that you should be attacking and then use martial arts to attack them. As somebody that has seen quite a few zombie movies the the wide variety of zombies in this movie made no sense.
Some of the characters in this movie were also very flippie floppy and it made you confused because you see a character act one way and then you think okay that person is compassionate and then they just turn into a hard-ass and vice versa. In classic Zack Snyder fashion there are scenes in the movie that only happened because they look cool and make zero sense to the story. For example, you see this huge powerful cool looking saw and you think, I bet this would be awesome to kill zombies with. So we are going to set it down here and we’ll never speak of it again. Because that makes sense.
There’s also a lot of drama in this movie which was good and well acted but I felt like it wasn’t needed. This is supposed to be a simple extraction, go to the zombie site, get the money or whatever you need, and get out and everybody just decides to have emotional moments which just makes the movie longer.
I have no issue with drama or building characters but if you’re watching a chase scene and then the car just stops and you have this emotional scene, that detracts from the moment. If you’re being chased by zombies this isn’t the best time to have this kind of conversation. It’s almost like they were wasting time or waiting for the zombies to arrive. And speaking of zombies this has got to be the most annoying zombies I have seen in any zombie movie, mainly because they kept screaming at a very high pitch over and over again which gets irritating and annoying fast.
Finally let’s talk about Tig Notaro, Netflix paid millions of dollars to add to the movie. And when I say add to the movie, I mean they digitally added her to the movie where even Dave Bautista to this day still hasn’t met her. That’s some fancy move they did, because I didn’t know that until I read a few articles about it. She plays a helicopter pilot that can fix anything.
Overall I thought how do you make a zombie heist movie in Las Vegas this boring and this uneventful?
I give this movie a C- for clock. As in this movie will have you checking your clock and thinking when is it going to be over?
Army of the Dead is now showing on Netflix, and in select theaters.
Do you plan to see the movie? Let me know in the comments.
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