The Army of the Dead is a 2021 production from The Stone Quarry, Zack Snyder‘s production company. The movie was released on Netflix on 21st May. At the helm of the movie was, unsurprisingly, Zack Snyder as the director and writer of the story. He wrote the screenplay together with Shay Hatten and Joby Harold. The movie stars Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossie, Matthias Schweighöfer and Hiroyuki Sanada, alongside even more, less important characters.
The Story
The story of The Army of the Dead starts a bit strange. We get some background information on how it all came to be, all well and good, but after that part, we move onto scenes, without any dialogue, where we supposed to meet our characters. We get some slow-mo shots of the important characters shooting at an army of, you guessed it, zombies. It felt like a bit of a strange introduction as it barely tells us anything about our characters.
After that, we move on to Scott Ward working in his restaurant, after we saw him shoot his wife because she turned into a zombie, a rather gruesome scene. This becomes an important part of the plot because this sets up his ruined relationship with his daughter, Kate. But when the two of them finally get some alone time to talk about their feelings, we are told that this wasn’t the reason for their deteriorated contact. Her problem was with him never calling her, although that seems like a rather weird thing. A dad kills his wife but never talked about it with their kid?
The whole plot of the movie is definitely kinda cool. The idea of the smart zombies creates an unusual dynamic within a zombie movie, which gives both cool moments as well as a convenience for our protagonist to do their thing. The heist itself proves to be a great story as well, although their way in was a bit too easy in my opinion, apart from the grim booby traps in front of the vault. But moving up the nuke timeline was a bit strange. That has to be one of the dumbest plot devices I’ve ever seen.
Nearing the end of the story, we get even more out-of-place moments. Kate manages to find the women within a huge building within like half an hour or something. After that, the helicopter seems to have left but, no, she flew away only to fly back a minute later or something like that? And on top of all of that, Vanderohe survives the nuking because he is in the vault, only to come back out seemingly not too much later. And he just proceeds to walk away until his biggest problem is a zombie bite, hours later. Maybe nuclear radiation isn’t a thing in this universe but it took him rather long to turn, while Scott turned within seemingly minutes.
The Characters
The movie has quite a large group of characters. Just like your typical heist movie Scott gathers a team of pros from all sorts of background. And while maybe, in the end, they are not much more than cannon fodder, because literally, everyone dies, they all served their purpose. Some characters were better written than others, with the likes of the helicopter pilot, Scott’s crush and The Coyote being not interesting at all. On the other hand, Scott himself, Vanderohe and Dieter were all well-written cool characters who each had a unique personality.
One thing all characters had in common was their weird decisions. At one point or another, each character made some choice that just made no sense whatsoever. Dieter putting Vanderohe in the vault while leaving himself outside, Kate running off on her own towards the building filled with all the zombies (of course such a convenience that just all left) and Martin betraying the crew over and over, which just ends up leading to his death.
I do admire Kate’s story especially though. Her father killed her mother because she turned into a zombie, which led to their disconnection. After coming to terms with him and looking to move on to better times, he turns into a zombie and she needs to shoot Scott. That was a quite powerful emotional moment, almost the only one in this movie as this movie is more for the thrill-seekers.
The Production
The department where this film stands out. Zack Snyder is known for his action movie in the DC Universe and shows his skills again in The Army of the Dead. This movie has some insane sets and costumes. The broken-down city, the zombie army, a freaking zombie tiger and a zombie horse, it’s all there. Although brutal and gross from time to time, this movie’s cinematography can’t be understated.
Some of my favourite scenes include the zombie tiger killing Martin, throwing him around and biting his head clean off. Furthermore, the scene on top of the building with Scott and The Coyote, where the zombie king throws the spear through her chest after she looked away for a split second, wow. For some reason though, Zack Snyder thought it was nice to a heavy background blur to every scene. I’m not sure if I’m a fan of that specific choice.