Army of the Dead was released streaming on Netflix on Friday, May 21, 2021. The big-budget zombie film streams in about 20 languages. After watching the film, I counted the credits for versions in Indonesia, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Russian, and about a half-dozen Asian languages with characters that I couldn't recognize. The film's closing titles show several LIDAR operators. This is a data-capture specialty not previously credited -- at least, in movies that I have seen. (Apparently LIDAR is used to collect data points by reflecting laser beams off objects that are scanned. The data points can, then, be downloaded into a computer and accessed to make three dimensional models of complex sets or, even, figures -- technicians, for instance, sometimes LIDAR animals so that they can be convincingly recreated by CGI.) The movie credits identify two dog and wolf wranglers -- but I didn't recall any dogs or wolves in the movie (maybe, that footage was cut). Zack Snyder directed but had two second-unit directors and each of these directors had several assistants. The film was shot in LA, New Jersey, and Las Vegas. A credit thanks the people of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico for their cooperation -- although none of the film takes place in New Mexico, presumably some of the impressive desert sequences may have been shot on the reservation. When one of the co-stars on the film was accused of sexual misconduct, Snyder and Netflix replaced the actor with Tig Notaro, a Lesbian comic, and, someone with impeccably politically correct credentials. (Snyder notes that it cost Netflix several million dollars to fix the problem --I assume that the actor accused of bad conduct had to be bought-out on his contract and that Notaro was able to demand a premium for her services. A number of scenes were shot with the bad guy, but Snyder says that he was very careful, used lots of green screen processes, and so was able to substitute Notaro for the other actor without having to do much re-shooting.) A movie like this is not really photographic -- it's essentially a complicated computer program in which actors pose against backgrounds manufactured out of pixels. The CGI artists and operators occupy about two minutes of end-credit, densely printed blocks of type scrolling by on the screen. It's all really marvelous but, perhaps, ultimately futile in some way that I can't quite define.
Army of the Dead has a pleasingly classical plot. It's like Oceans 11 rebooted as a zombie film. Las Vegas has been overrun by zombies -- I take it that there is a vestige of satire here. The city has been walled-off by ramparts of storage containers ringing the spectacular ruins. For some unknown reason, a prison camp holding immigrants and, possibly, political dissidents has been built right next to the zombie-infested city. The US President has given orders to drop a nuke on Las Vegas on the 4th of July. A sinister Japanese businessman plots to send of team of mercenaries into the city for the purpose of removing 200 million dollars stored in a casino vault -- the casino has two towers named Sodom and Gomorra. The Japanese gangster recruits an ex-soldier named Scott Ward to lead the team planning to sneak into Las Vegas, evade the zombie hordes loitering around Sin City, and extract the fortune from the casino. The first quarter of the movie involves building the team of renegades and outlaws crazy enough to undertake what may well be a suicide mission. This part of the movie is redolent of The Seven Samurai -- Scott Ward looks up old war buddies and persuades them to join his team. In the end, Scott has put together a motley band of ten warriors -- a fierce Latina named Cruz, Peters (Notaro), a crack helicopter pilot, Vanderrohe, a handsome and sardonic Black soldier, Mikey Guzman an internet sensation, famous for killing zombies on videos posted on-line -- Guzman comes to the party with two associates a punk girl and boy (a third guy backs out); these people are obviously just cannon-fodder. The Japanese businessman sends one of his thugs with the team to keep an eye on them. A German kid named Dieter is retained to do the safe-cracking. There's a subplot involving a Coyote who smuggles people in and out of the zombie-town -- Coyote is also named Lily and she's a Frenchwoman. Lily has smuggled an Indian immigrant into Las Vegas but, then, lost her in the chaos. The immigrant, Gita, is friends with Kate, Scott Ward's estranged daughter and Kate insists on joining the Mission to hunt for her missing friend. (Kate's presence allows Snyder to slow down the action for dull and maudlin scenes involving the girl's troubled relationship with her father.) A prison guard at the Camp is recruited as well -- he's a wicked fellow who sexually harasses the female prisoners and he gets his comeuppance about five minutes after the wall around the city is breached by our heroes -- Lily feeds him to the buxom and shapely Queen Zombie in exchange for something like safe passage. In zombie films, bad guys get to be spectacularly killed two times -- first by the zombies and, then, by the human heroes when the bad guy is reincarnated as a bloodthirsty member of the Army of the Dead. Of course, our heroes have to operate under time pressure -- the city is going to be nuked in a day and, later, when the President decides it's bad taste to bomb the zombies on the 4th of July, he moves up the date for the holocaust. Instead of 24 hours, our heroes now have only about forty minutes to complete their mission -- not coincidentally this is the last forty minutes of this two-hour and 28 minute gore-extravaganza.
The movie is good for its genre with impressive sets and special effects. The action sequences although confusingly edited are over-the-top with lots of exploding heads. Zombies are killed with spikes through the skull, bashed to death, machine-gunned by the thousand, set on fire, crushed to pulp, and blown into scraps of bloody meat. Predictably, the thug planted in the team by the Japanese businessman has a secret agenda and ends up betraying his colleagues. One by one, the people on the team are killed and turn into zombies themselves. Time runs short. The City is nuked. And so on. The ending, supposedly surprising, is wholly predictable and doesn't make any sense. There's some mildly sardonic dialogue, but the picture isn't bitter Swiftian satire of the kind that we find in George Romero's cycle of zombie films. There's some joking reference to current events, but the film is made for everyone on the planet and, so, has to be denatured to the point of being accessible to the lowest common denominator -- everything in the movie has to be instantly understandable in rural hamlets in the Ukraine or in Hindi-speaking suburbs near Mumbai or the mountain villages of Indonesia. The international casting is intended to pander to audiences in Germany, France, Mexico, Japan, and India -- the heroes include African-Americans, a lesbian played by a famous Lesbian comedian, and other minorities. Predictably, the two human bad guys are whiter-than-white Caucasians.
The film roars ahead with shootouts, hand to hand combat with the zombies, and all sorts of other mayhem. It's mildly amusing and I thought the film was fairly entertaining. It's garbage, of course, and doesn't make any sense even on its own idiotic premises. Gita who is confined by a zombie king who rides a zombie horse is just kept in an open room with her two colleagues and she makes no attempt to escape when the army of the dead is summoned from the premises to fight the intruders. Why doesn't she run away? The team infiltrates the zombie metropolis and immediately goes into a cellar where about five-hundred zombies are hibernating -- of course, the zombies wake up with gory consequences. Why in the world would our intrepid heroes go into the cellar when they can just walk around the place outside and avoid getting up close-and-personal with the monsters? The zombie economy makes no sense --what are the zombies eating? They don't seem to be cannibals so how do they survive? Bly Tanaka, the Japanese businessman who has set this whole plot in motion, is shown morosely drinking a scotch and water as Las Vegas is bombed. Then, he's out of the picture. Surely, he deserves a more showy demise. The helicopter flying the surviving heroes out of the city is caught in the thermal blast of the nuke. But the radiation and fire doesn't seem to burn anyone. For some reason, the zombies have developed into an upper caste apparently capable of thought and planning who lord it over the shamblers, who just stagger around waiting to be shot in the head. If the upper caste zombies are capable of planning and thought, how come they don't simply scale the walls of Las Vegas and escape? They can use tools -- we see this when the King Zombie impales someone with a spear. So why are they just passively waiting around to be slaughtered. As one might expect, in this year of Covid, the movie implies that the zombies are a department of defense experiment that has gone awry. With the clock ticking with regard to the nuclear attack, the characters inexplicably pause to express their intense and sentimental feelings for one another. The hero, Sam Wood, has almost no forehead. He seems to be what was once called a "pinhead"-- it's hard to warm to this guy since he looks so strange. (The character is played by Dave Bautista who specializes in roles involving much grunting and muscular tossing of characters to and fro. Snyder is particularly fond of shots showing people thrown about forty feet and rebounding off concrete walls or pillars without any noticeable adverse effect. There's a zombie tiger in the movie, one of Siegfried and Roy's spawn, that has gone to the dark side. Instead of mauling it's victims, it simply grabs them in its moldering jaws and pitches them against walls and ceilings.)
The film's first fifteen minutes, the best part of the movie, promises wildly garish and comical action, ridiculous situations, and spectacularly violent and clear fight scenes -- under the credits, the heroes take on zombies with rockets and chain-saws and each poses silently with his or her congressional medal of honor for taking down hordes of the undead. Snyder stages the opening of the safe, a device called the Goetterdaemmerung to Siegfried's funeral march and this gives the scenes involving the safe-cracking a false, mock-heroic gravitas. Bits and pieces of the movie are engaging but pretty soon it devolves into run-of-the-mill gore. I suppose that this film cost about 250 million dollars. The Army of the Dead features Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds" and "Viva Las Vegas". I wonder what it cost to procured the screen rights to that music.
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