It's been a hell of a comeback year for Zack Snyder, righting wrongs with his superior cut of Justice League and now coming back full circle to his Dawn of the Dead roots for a spiritual sequel.
Whilst the zombie genre may not be quite as overcrowded as the superhero genre, there's arguably less that you can do with it - a billion seasons of Walking Dead hammered that point home to death - and coming up with an idea that doesn't retread familiar ground is actually not an easy accomplishment. Clearly embracing the challenge, Snyder co-created the story and the co-wrote the script and - for good or bad - it's, much like ZSJL, very much a Zack Snyder movie, through and through.
The story has a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas result in the city being walled off and scheduled for a nuclear strike. When former mercenary Scott Ward is approached with the opportunity of a lifetime - to enter the war zone, get to a casino's safe and recover a big fat payday, he puts together a team, not all of whom he expects to come out alive. With hours on the clock before the area is vapourised, the team undertake the mission only to find that the zombies they are dealing with aren't quite what they expected.
An undeniable part of your enjoyment of Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead will be directly tied to your tolerance of the distinctive filmmaker's work as a whole
An undeniable part of your enjoyment of Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead will be directly tied to your tolerance of the distinctive filmmaker's work as a whole. Beyond his fairly down-to-earth Dawn of the Dead, from there on out it's been pretty-much all-style, all the way, all the time. His page-to-screen adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, his page-to-screen adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen, and then his missed mark of a creative project with Sucker Punch, notably the first film he'd also written. After that it was DC all the way, and we all know how that turned out. For fans of the director's visually distinctive efforts, the idea of a brand new, Big Budget, zombie action movie franchise will probably sound pretty cool, and clearly Netflix are pot-committed to this new universe, having already shot a prequel film and embarked upon a spin-off animated TV series.
With it being possibly too late now to turn back on this whole new world they're creating, the good-ish news is that Army of the Dead is sporadically ambitious in terms of world-building, and frequently stupidly fun. Sure, it's quintessentially flawed - a trademark of pretty-much everything Snyder - but it has moments of ambitious scale in setting up a zombie universe which could actually make for plenty of other tales in this unusual environment.
Hardly revelatory, and still in need of a not insubstantial amount of judicious editing - what Snyder film doesn't? - this first story has almost enough different about it to keep you engaged, with its biggest issue being the characters, which still need a lot more work (perhaps there's a 4 hour cut out there which can fix that - let's hope not though).
Less forgivably, it takes a good long while for any kind of tension to build, but there is still an at-times intoxicating blend of madness here which attempts to defy your desire to write off the production entirely, and the ending is so wonderfully over the top that it hits all the marks you'd hope for from a zombie blockbuster. It's kinda like some fever-dream where Michael Bay remade John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars. And probably every bit as good - or bad - as you'd expect that to turn out.
Army of the Dead comes to the UK on Netflix, available in 4K UHD with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. It perhaps somewhat surprisingly didn't attract the 4K tag initially, although all's good now. It's also seen a limited theatrical release Stateside, and would probably look pretty good on the Big Screen, with a larger-than-life 1.78:1 ratio and some not insignificant scale to the piece. It's a Snyder film, so unsurprisingly the slo-mo is off the charts, but damn if it doesn't look absolutely stunning, with some really tremendous framing, well-staged setpieces and superb use of focus to give it the filmmaker's trademark flair. Sure, it's got that Netflix Dolby Vision thing going, where the image feels darker than it ever needs to be, which can drag down a few moments, but it's still a largely fabulous looking production. The score too - whilst hardly a noteworthy entry to Junkie XL's work, or even amidst his work for this director - is suitably engaging, with plenty of ferocity to the bombastic sequences.
Like some fever-dream where Michael Bay remade John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars
Netflix has certainly attracted a veritable ensemble cast to populate this new universe, with the likes of Power's Omari Hardwick, Goliath's Ana de la Reguera, Luke Cage's Theo Rossi, Deadwood's Garret Dillahunt, Miss Peregrine's Ella Purnell, and Discovery's Tig Notaro (who could make reading a shopping list hilarious) leading the charge, and Hiroyuki Sanada (recently wasted in Mortal Kombat) pulling the puppet strings from a safe distance. It's largely up to Dave Bautista to carry the piece though, which he does reasonably well, even if his brief contribution to Blade Runner 2049 had more weight and heartfelt characterisation in barely a tenth of the screen time used here. Also worth noting is French newcomer Nora Arnezeder, who certainly makes an impression.
Unsurprisingly, Snyder isn't big on characters though, attempting to recreate several pivotal moments from Aliens - not a bad film to ape, and he does it reasonably well, actually retreading vast swathes of that seminal classic - but often forgetting that even Cameron managed to establish his lovable crew first before tearing them apart. More often than not, the only time you come close to caring about this lot is as they're about to die, which is way too little, way too late, with a couple of them even gifted a spark of "Hey, I've actually got a character!" dialogue almost immediately before they get killed. Army of the Dead never gets hateful in its treatment of the humans - ok, perhaps once, early on - but it also could have done a lot more than this. A zombie spin on Aliens, with a little Black Hawk Down thrown into the mix, with Mad Max-esque notions of tribal villainy, a little 30 Days of Night, and that aforementioned Ghost of Mars-by-way-of-Bay all makes for, if nothing else, very interesting ingredients, but Snyder doesn't quite manage to push it all into an effective whole.
Ultimately the whole damn 150 minute movie feels much like an extended version of that opening 15 minute credits sequence/montage - which many viewers have possibly already seen - namely, a paper-thin introduction of characters who you could possibly end up liking, but then suddenly find get squashed under a giant container whilst being eaten by the zombie horde. As long as you're prepared for that, you'll likely have something approximating a blast. Dawn of the Dead this is not, however, with Snyder simply unable to remember - or unwilling to go back and learn - what he did right on his debut, refusing to spend the required amount of quality time with his characters so that you genuinely care about their fate. A shame really, because some of this could have been more than just gorgeous to look at and sometimes deliriously over-the-top - perhaps even a tense and intense ride - really who wouldn't have been interested in a zombie spin on Aliens done right? Or even Black Hawk Down with zombies. This one isn't a train wreck, particularly if you like the director's style, and it'll probably make for a halfway decent 'blockbuster' Friday night in, but it could have been so much better, and with Snyder taking up pretty-much all creative duties on the piece, this time round he's only got himself to blame.
Army of the Dead comes to the UK on Netflix, in 4K Ultra HD Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, on 21st May 2021.