Army of the Dead

Disappointed. This movie is entertaining. It is good. Thanks to its big budget, it looks better than 90% of zombie films and has many great ideas. But it fails to take any of these ideas to the next level. The hierarchy of zombies is extremely interesting, and while we do get a sufficient amount of it; I wish this was one of Zack Snyder's epic "Director's Cuts" and it had gotten another hour or so to flesh it out. A handful of characters are also on the edge of greatness. They were awesome, but a little more time to shine could have done them wonders! But at least with these examples: what we got was still really good. My biggest issue is with the awesome action sequences that they tease but never deliver. A character has a favorite weapon—NEVER USES IT! A bunch of dried-up zombies are said to come back to life when it rains—IT NEVER RAINS! Why?! Why would you have these things in the movie if you aren't paying them off? These add to the overall feeling that this is a tame return to the genre for Snyder. His 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake is one of the wildest and scariest zombie films ever made. I have my issues with 'Dawn', but it clearly swung for the fences and accomplished everything it was going for. Army of the Dead doesn't feel this way. I appreciate that it isn't as bleak as 'Dawn', but it has so much less bite. Half of the kills are good, but the other half feel very basic or even happen offscreen!! A father/daughter subplot adds nothing new—and drags down the fun. Not just their relationship, but her entire involvement is seemingly just there to mess up the characters' plan. A tired and frustrating trope. Army of the Dead had all of the ingredients to become a classic. Instead, we settle.

**What happens when you give Zack Snyder complete creative control? A crazy awesome zombie sci-fi action heist joyride!** Sheer insanity at its ridiculous best! Zack Snyder goes all out with Army of the Dead by throwing as many plot ideas and spin-offs as he can to build his dream movie playground to play in for years at Netflix. Zombies plagues, zombie robots, time travel, multiverse, and who knows what else all flash across the scene and somehow don’t distract from the exciting central story. Dave Bautista leads a crew of expendable mercenaries to break into a vault in the middle of a zombie-filled quarantine zone once known as Las Vegas. The stand-out character in all this is Matthias Schweighöfer‘s Dieter. His comedy and goofiness breathe life into an otherwise wholly gritty film. The nonstop action and gore will satisfy any genre fan. Rather than the typical rescuing of a trapped loved one or VIP, I appreciate the new purpose for battling zombies - money. Zack Snyder goes full throttle, and it definitely pays off! I can wait to see more.

The only good thing about Zack Snyder's masturbatory exercise Army of the Dead, is that it's comparatively shorter than his version of Justice League – but what movie isn't? An hour and a half short of a four-hour movie is still too long, especially considering that if everything we've seen before were edited out of the film, AotD would be a short feature. True, we may not have seen a heist/zombie apocalypse movie, but we've seen dozens of heists and dozens of zombie apocalypses, and bringing the two genres together only serves to highlight the inconsistencies of each. But, let us start at the beginning. A US military convoy is transporting an unknown cargo from Area 51. The two soldiers in the cab of the truck debate the contents of the box (“the original draft of the Constitution written in the blood of the Founding Fathers… Amelia Earhart, long live ", etc.). Whatever it is, it’s highly inflammable, judging by how the truck instantly turns into a huge ball of fire the moment it makes contact with a considerably smaller vehicle. Actually it is some kind of superhuman zombie that kills a bunch of soldiers and infects two of them. This entire scenario could easily have unfolded without the arbitrary and random explosion; the gigantic fireball is here solely because Snyder is such an impatient director that, in a 140-minute film, he can't wait even five minutes before blowing something to bits – the cinematic equivalent of premature ejaculation. On the other hand, Snyder takes his time on plot points that we all know by heart. Hero is offered a job. Hero turns down job. Hero changes his mind and takes the job. Hero assembles team. And so on and so forth. So as to leave no cliché unused, the hero also has an estranged daughter, Kate (Ella Purnell); this, however, deserves some more attention. Kate works in a quarantine camp for zombies, which is nothing short of a logic-defying concept. It is first established that the zombie bite takes immediate effect, transforming the victim into another zombie – and one does not quarantine a zombie; one shoots a zombie in the head and moves on. Now, it has always been a habit of zombie movies to play fast and loose, depending on the requirements of the script, with the time it takes for a bite to kick in, but two wrongs don’t make a right. All things considered, AotD is a rip-off that makes it a point of ripping off bad ideas – which might be all right if it were a parody, but the movie is too bloated and excessive to ever be able to take itself lightly.