Mercenaries are hired to pull off a heist in quarantined, walled-off, and inundated with zombies in Las Vegas.
A friend of mine called me the other day, saying: “Man, have you seen the Army of the Dead? Damn, it’s been years since the last time I watched something so wank”. He then added: “I mean, it’s like gathering every Hollywood cliché under the sun, putting it in, carefully trying not to miss any.”
Well, as a Zack Snyder fan, I was going to watch it anyway, but I was not in a rush. Why? For the same reason I am not in a rush to watch any film interested in profiting from the pandemic. So, it’s not personal. The good news is that the beginning is like Watchmen (2009) meets Sucker Punch (2011) a bit. The bad news is that it’s neither. Actually, everything else is bad. Starting with the characters…
Everyone is a breathing, walking, talking cliché. Sex, sexual orientation, and race – most of the burning issues of today – have been exploited by typically low Hollywood standards for commercial purposes, an event that raises questions regarding who its audience really is. Don’t bang your heads against the wall, though; the answer is: masses! The typically unspecified Hollywood audience likes unrealistic people who are nowhere to be found in our world. A surrealistic misrepresentation of every human being out there. And that’s just the characters.
The narrative… Chaos! The absolute mess! Nothing is convincing, and nothing makes sense. Everything you’ve seen and experienced before, you relive it with little to no surprise. Slapstick humour with some drama in between topped up with some (quite decent, I might say) action-packed sequences. In the end, which emotion stands out? None! It’s neither funny nor dramatic nor thrilling. It’s nothing! Two and a half hours of plot holes that include, but are not limited to (no spoilers): soldiers who escort a weapon of mass destruction and have no training whatsoever, a girl with no training whatsoever who delivers headshots like pancakes, the zombie head that could have been immediately retrieved and end our suffering, zombies moving faster than helicopters, people knowing that a nuclear is about to hit them and indifferently chat… the list is endless! Oh, and no matter what happens, do not, I repeat, do not fall for the “time” theory (no spoilers). It was way out of character and out of space. Pure buffoonery to cause you an extra headache! Do. Not. Fall. For it.
This is the worst Zack Snyder film yet! I like Snyder’s style, but Army of the Dead is atrocious, and its atrocity has nothing to do with technical aspects such as the “dead pixels” or the too “out-of-focus” issues caused by Red cameras combined with Canon lenses from the 60s. The average viewer does not care about that. Instead, they care about not being insulted by the narrative. No one wants their intelligence undermined and this is exactly what the Army of the Dead does. It considers its audience as dumb as the Shamblers – not sure about the Alphas.
Final notes: Ella Purnell is a really good actress, but her character is unwatchable. The same applies to Dave Bautista, who, unfortunately, is the only one who actually offers some drama. The only person I rooted for, though, was Chambers (Samantha Win), who literally kicked a$$! Two more highlights were the “tiger kill” and the non-CGI zombies. But if you want to watch a great outbreak film, then refer to Snyder’s directorial debut, Dawn of the Dead (2004).
Food for thought: Twenty years ago, still at Uni, I discovered the term “Third Cinema”. This term defined the differences between the “First” and the “Second”. Focusing on the First… “Solanas and Getino’s manifesto considers First Cinema to be the Hollywood production model that idealizes bourgeois values to a passive audience through escapist spectacle and individual characters.” Please keep in mind that the Hollywood they are referring to is considered leagues above today’s. For more on film history, read David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film History: An Introduction (2003).
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Solidarity for all the innocent lives who suffer the atrocities of war!
Stay safe!
