Roundtable: Zack Snyder: Army of the Dead (2021)

First Impressions

Anton: Army of the Dead is long, uneven, but still very much a Zack Snyder movie. Would you agree, gentlemen?

Aren: In a text message after watching the film, you used the phrase “obscenely long” to describe Army of the Dead, and I think that’s appropriate. The length is obscene. The movie is fun, but that fun is diluted by how long it is. There’s no reason for this sort of team heist movie to be two and a half hours, even if it spends a lot more time doing worldbuilding than most films of this sort. But I also think the length and shagginess of the material is a natural byproduct of Snyder’s current distrust of studios: after the Justice League fiasco with Warner Bros., he was not going to agree to make a movie for Netflix without having final cut, so they had to accept the shape of the film.

Anton: One would want to tag on the phrase “warts and all” to describe a shaggy film Netflix presumably agreed to accept based on the director’s brand alone, but in the case of Army of the Dead it’s not so much that you have an uneven movie, a mix of definite strengths and weaknesses. Rather, I just think the movie is okay overall, with a few high points, but then Snyder stretches out this middling movie to a detrimental point. There’s very little I actively dislike about the movie, but there’s also little I’m excited about.

Anders: To me, this just shows that what works for one movie may not always work in another. While Zack Snyder’s Justice League shows the potential of letting an artist realize their complete vision, in the case of Army of the Dead I don’t feel like there’s so much vision to realize. I can see many of Snyder’s thematic preoccupations in the film, and I was with the concept up to the moments when they enter the city, but in terms of its visuals and its ultimately muddled story, I feel like this might be Snyder’s worst film.

Anton: Is the story muddled and confusing, or rather conventional and overstuffed? I don’t think I was ever confused by what was going on. 

The premise—zombies have taken over Las Vegas and a team of bandits is recruited to sneak into the city and rob a secret vault full of money before the city is nuked by the military—is classic high concept and certainly compelling in its mash-up of common genres. It’s both a zombie flick and a heist movie, a claustrophobic thriller and an expansive speculative fiction epic. I understand Netflix greenlighting this on paper. 

But the execution really brings little new—apart from some zombie worldbuilding I think we’ll get to later—to the novel mash-up premise. All the characters are the typical types, and it plays out pretty much as you would expect.

Aren: You’re right, Anton. The story is more conventional and overstuffed than confusing. I don’t find anything in here confusing like I did parts of Sucker Punch, for instance. It’s just a high concept zombie heist movie that doesn’t need to be 148-minutes long.

Anders: By muddled, I don’t mean confusing. You’re both right that it’s actually very conventional in many ways. I just find it muddled in the sense that it never really focuses on any particular element. So, I’m criticizing the execution.

My overall impression of the film is that Snyder succeeds the best in the “big” moments: in the concept and spectacle. Snyder is best when it comes to his tableaux spectacles, and even his use of CGI to really create a grand scale. But the film gets so bogged down in individual moments, not only by shifting its entire visual style, but also by trying to provide depth to characters whom the script never really develops beyond clichés, with actors who are mostly unable to fill in the gaps.

As a Zack Snyder Film

Anton: I was probably less wowed by the action than you guys, even though it’s still good. Nevertheless, does the success of the premise and spectacle of Army of the Dead, combined with the weakness of its characters, call attention to a deficit in Snyder’s approach to filmmaking? 

In my view, Snyder seems to be trying to repeat his approach to superhero characters—add angst and emotional trauma and a level of self-seriousness to the action-oriented fun fantasy types—to what really should have been a slick, fast, and light heist flick. 

You’ll remember that one of the things I found so compelling about Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead is its economic storytelling (as I discuss in my review). In Army of the Dead, Snyder seems to have forgotten what worked so well for that zombie movie and instead tried to graft the tone of his superhero movies onto this genre mash-up. Is one of the problems here that so many of Snyder’s interests come together to their detriment?

Aren: Yes. He’s stuffed it with too much that overlaps both Dawn of the Dead and his superhero films. In some ways, it’s like a mashup of Dawn of the Dead and Justice League: a survival film and a team-up movie, a horror thriller and an epic about sacrifice. There’s a lot going on and Snyder doesn’t have the focus he employs in his best films, like Batman v Superman or 300 or the aforementioned Dawn of the Dead.

Even though this movie is perhaps his least distinct film in terms of visual style (despite Snyder acting as his own director of photography), which we’ll get to in a moment, it still explores Snyder’s pet themes, mainly the cost of heroism and how the existence of the supernatural shapes human interaction on both the personal and the civilizational scale. It also adds a personal dimension that’s impossible to read outside of the context of Snyder losing his own daughter, Autumn, with the relationship between Bautista’s Scott Ward and his daughter, Kate, played by Ella Purnell. 

Anton: With the father, Ward, feeling like he failed his daughter? Yeah, I agree. I don’t want to say that particular lines are just Snyder speaking from the heart, or anything like that, but just as the end of Justice League cannot be read without thinking about the circumstances behind the Snyder Cut, so this film’s central relationship invites audiences to read in some associations with his personal life, which is now pretty famous.

Anders: For a film upon which Snyder so obviously puts a few of his fingerprints, I found it baffling how narratively redundant and lacking in visual innovation the film was. While I kinda love the premise of an isolated, zombie-infested Las Vegas and a full-on heist film going into the city, in the larger story beats and even in specific action sequences, there wasn’t much new going on. I made a note while watching how much this riffs on James Cameron’s Aliens, in terms of the overall team structure and certain plot points, particularly Ward going back to get Kate. Heck, even Samantha Win’s Chambers is basically a riff on Jeanette Goldstein’s Vasquez in Aliens, down to her red bandanna. 

Anton: Great point! As we’ve noted, Snyder likes to lean into allusions and references. 

Anders: I mean, it’s also worth noting that it wouldn’t be a Snyder film at this point without some really on-the-nose soundtrack choices. The cover of the Elvis Presley hit, “Viva Las Vegas,” during the opening credits works (it is performed by Richard Cheese and Allison Crowe, the later a favourite of Snyder’s daughter, who also covered Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for the credits of Zack Snyder’s Justice League). However, his later use of Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds” recalls that it was also used in Blade Runner 2049, another film that uses a post-apocalyptic Vegas (and Dave Bautista) to better effect in my mind. But only Zack Snyder would have the balls to actually use the Cranberries’ “Zombie” in a zombie movie, which plays at the end when Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick) is escaping. I actually laughed out loud at that point.

Anton: In the title credits sequence, the cover of “Viva Las Vegas” shifts gears from an almost parodic version, with the male vocals leaning into the swagger, to Allison Crowe’s swinging version, and then finally to her vocals and the instruments becoming a kind of lamentation for the city, as it is walled off with shipping containers. 

With the musical choices and the tonal shifts from grimly humorous violence to grandiose sombreness, I think that such aspects are further examples of how Army of the Dead is still such an embodiment of Snyder’s oeuvre. But whereas Justice League sums up and culminates so much of Snyder’s work, this just sort of fizzles in mediocrity. You are totally right about even the soundtrack not hitting all the time.

Aren: Questionable soundtrack choices seem to be a recurring aspect in all of his films. His use of mediocre covers is one of the weaknesses of Sucker Punch. Even in his Justice League, which is great overall, he uses some pretty lame music choices. It’s just that all the rest of the material is so good, it compensates for whatever obviousness the music brings. And there’s no satirical edge like his choices in Watchmen.

Visualizing Action

Aren: As I mentioned above, Snyder serves as his own director of photography here, and Army of the Dead is the first of his films to be shot digitally. It’s a bit surprising to know that he’s the DP because the film doesn’t have many of the tableaux or large-scale compositions he’s known for. Rather, the film takes a subjective, handheld camera approach to almost every sequence, with a shockingly narrow depth of focus throughout. This movie is so blurry moment-to-moment, it’s hard to watch at times. I know this is deliberate, especially in the midst of the panic caused by the zombies, but I was hoping at points for the clarity of his work, such as in his cut of Justice League

Anders: The visual approach is my biggest complaint with the film. It's especially pronounced by the fact that at moments it shifts back and forth between the handheld, narrow focus, and the larger use of tableaux.

Anton: Yes, you’re right, Anders. We do get some epic shots of zombie Vegas that recall Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, but they are used sparingly. I’m thinking of the crane shot that lifts up over the wall to take in the CGI-zombie army, now rulers of the city, at the end of the title credits sequence, or several shots of the alpha zombie king. There’s him riding a horse through the empty city, or standing and holding up a spear as his army attacks (like an orc riding a warg in The Two Towers), or him looking down at the team walking through the desolated city from high up on the replica Statue of Liberty. The king is out of focus and we see the others down below walking, in a manner that recalls Azog the Defiler watching the party in The Hobbit. All this suggests, I think, that Snyder conceives of this film as more epic and large scale than is really probably warranted. Unlike Jackson’s films, however, big establishing shots do not set up each new scene. 

But more importantly, aren’t you both forgetting the opening, which in some ways plays as a variation of the tableaux slow-mo style of the opening of Watchmen? Like that film, he fills in a ton of background information through the title credits. In Army of the Dead, Snyder uses the odd choice of having the main characters stand as if for a photo-shoot with a photo representative of some part of their life, and those portrait sessions intersperse a slow-mo, sound effects-less montage of the fall of the city.

Aren: I’m not forgetting his opening credits. He remains great at those sorts of sequences. It’s that his tableaux approach is most prominent in that sequence. It only shows up intermittently throughout the rest of the film. Most of it is shot in blurry close-up.

Anders: And that’s the thing, I actually think in moments this film flirts with real novelty and energy. That opening credits is very good. The scenes of the initial take-over of Vegas and the fights against the zombies culminating in the strafing of the city are very good.

Anton: I didn’t love the opening. I found it was a bit flat, even though it’s trying so hard and has some really strange and interesting elements that I’m not sure what to make of, namely the photo shoot shots of the characters. But overall it’s playing too much like what we expect from a Snyder film. I mean, it’s not bad, but I wasn’t with the movie from the beginning. If anything, once the team started to come together—and maybe because I love getting-the-team-together montages—I started to get onboard. 

Anders: Even occasionally, later in the film, Snyder will still drop something surprising, even after an interminable conversation scene that goes on for way too long. It’s undeniable at this point in our retrospective that Snyder has an eye for composition and intriguing ideas at moments, even if they are genuinely tasteless at times—take the zombie last supper scene, something he riffed on in the staging of the Minutemen in the opening tableau from his own Watchmen. Of course, I noted that the camera is slightly over to the right and not at a straight approach. I wonder if he was a bit concerned about the subtext of such a scene?

But it’s baffling to me why so much of the meat and potatoes of this film is so lackluster and frankly ugly; I know what you’re pointing out, Aren, that he’s trying to capture the limited perspective and panic of being in the city overrun with zombies, but man, I found it distracting and took me right out of enjoying the film. I’m kind of surprised that Snyder was his own DP here, since if I didn’t know any better I’d assume it was all shot by the second unit. Add to that the way that Tig Notaro’s reshoots aren’t particularly well-integrated (leaving aside the performance and character in its specifics), there are moments this film just looks a little shoddier than I expected from Snyder.

Anton: In some ways, then, the close-up camera is a throwback to Dawn of the Dead, so unfortunately he takes the wrong elements from that film.

Aren: I do want to briefly commend how he uses real sets in this one. Snyder is famous for his digital backlots, where almost everything on screen is added in post-production, but you can tell he’s using real locations and sets here. A real casino main floor. A large exterior backlot scene for the streets of Vegas. It adds to the immediacy of those moments. And, in another way, is a positive throwback to Dawn of the Dead and its mall setting.

The Team

Anton: What did you guys think of the individual team members as well as their dynamic together?

I actually like many of the team characters, even if their depth doesn’t work most of the time. I didn’t like the daughter though. I personally enjoyed Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), the German safecracker, the most.

Aren: I like some of the characters as much as I like cliched action types in most movies of this sort. Dieter is fun and distinct. Vanderohe actually strikes me as capable and imposing, especially when he has his giant buzzsaw. Mikey Guzman (Raúl Castillo), the YouTube star and gangster, is fun—I like the sequence where we see his videos of killing zombies and doing risky stuff for views. It effortlessly captures the sort of world Snyder is trying to create. Garret Dillahunt (as Martin, the chief of security) is always a pleasure to see on screen. But some others are pretty forgettable. For instance, Maria Cruz (Ana de la Reguera) is such a nothing of a character.

Anton: I have issues with Dave Bautista as the lead. I think he is likeable but that he does not command the screen or cast beyond his physical presence. He has physique but not vocal range or facial expressions. He doesn’t play like a Danny Ocean type, who always seems one step ahead of the rest of the team.

Anders: Dieter is fun. He’s the kind of character that works well in these kinds of ensemble pictures. Memorable and goofy, I was hoping for more of that kind of thing in the film.

I do think that Bautista is asked to do too much. He’s a likeable actor, and I think he’s given the most to do here, but he also is the only character that really has discernable motivations and depth.

Anton: I appreciate that they let Bautista do more than most directors let him, and he must have appreciated that. 

Aren: He did. In an interview with Vulture, he mentions that “Zack — he gave me more freedom than any director I’ve ever worked with.”

Anton: So I don’t want to beat up on him. But I don’t think the script equips Bautista with enough to support his mid-tier acting chops.

The strange thing is that I actually thought Bautista was better in scenes with his daughter, particularly the moment where they talk about his pulling away in the aftermath of his wife’s death. He does well at conveying a guy who is not comfortable with emotions trying to come to grips with how he should have connected to his daughter. 

My issue is when Bautista is the guy running the show. I’m not sold on the idea of his character as the man with the plan, whether he’s bringing the team together or in the midst of the attacks.

Aren: Is it possible that Bautista is tamping down his physical charisma too much because he wants to be taken seriously? There’s an interesting excerpt from that Vulture interview I quoted earlier and I want to include it here:

I think a lot of guys who would be playing action stars are looking for ways to make themselves more alpha, more masculine, more heroic. I’m always looking for the opposite. I’m looking for ways to kind of take away from my stature and physicality, to make me more vulnerable. It was something that I learned about myself in professional wrestling, and it’s been the same in film. So, I do little things. When I carry myself, I don’t always have my chest out or have pumped-out arms. I don’t want to look like an action figure. I want to humanize myself and make myself more relatable — which is not easy to do when you’re built like a gorilla. Anything I can do to take away from my physicality helps, and glasses seem to go a long way.

He’s very conscious of how he looks as an actor and what kind of intelligence he projects to audiences. So he’s taken pains to change that dynamic and try to make himself more relatable and human. But does that take away the charismatic leadership qualities that are key for a role like Scott Ward? Interesting to contemplate.

Anton: That’s an interesting excerpt from the interview. I see what Bautista is doing with wearing the glasses and such. My concern isn’t that he’s downplaying his physical stature. It’s that his character doesn’t seem in command, and yet we are supposed to believe he has all these folks on stand-by, ready to join in a dangerous mission. Maybe the quality is leadership. His character plays like a member of the team rather than the leader. And maybe the real issue doesn’t lie with Bautista’s performance but with how the character is written. After all, the script is trying to make him both the leader but also have him in deep emotional turmoil with his daughter. 

Anders: This is a film where characters often do or say things because the plot requires them to do it, for instance Peters, Tig Notaro’s pilot character, is saddled with some truly cliched dialogue that was clearly not even re-written to match the tone of the new actor (after she replaced Chris D’Elia). And Ella Purnell’s Kate Ward conceals her purposes and interests long after it makes sense for her to do so. I don’t want to get bogged down in nit-picking the plot (which frankly doesn’t need to be as coherent as people assume for me to enjoy it), but this film really pushes the limits of breaking the spell from moment to moment.

If I can compare it for a moment to another “dumb,” “fun,” and “nonsensical” film, Michael Bay’s Armageddon, none of the characters here are drawn clearly enough, or performed by captivating enough character actors like Steve Buscemi or William Fichtner, for us to ignore how stupid some of this stuff is. Additionally, the whole putting the team together scene drags for so long that I’m willing to forgive Bay for his temporally baffling “get the crew together” sequence from Armageddon because it at least entertains and makes you laugh.

Aren: Perhaps some of the confusion about the characters can be summarized in the film’s title. It’s obviously a riff on Dawn of the Dead, but it also has a double-meaning. It refers to the army of zombies in Vegas, but also the team of characters themselves, as they are essentially an army and they all end up dead (Kate doesn’t, but she’s not part of the original team). I would’ve preferred the title, Kingdom of the Dead, as it would’ve played more into the intense zombie mythology of the film.

Mythology

Anton: I tend to avoid reading much promotional material these days, partly because everything seems so manufactured, but I was surprised after finally watching Snyder’s second zombie movie to discover it clearly has no connection to the previous Dawn of the Dead.

Importantly, the zombies are fast and slow, there being different kinds depending on their relationship to the original zombie, and already we see Snyder having fun riffing on emergent zombie mythology.

Anders: One area I did appreciate was the one thing that’s interesting and unique in this film, and that is the unconventional and strange zombie lore that film introduces: particularly the idea of the “Alphas” or intelligent and fast zombies that create a kind of zombie society, complete with a pair of leaders in the Queen (Athena Perample) and Zeus (Richard Cetrone). Also, maybe my favourite bit in the film was the zombie tiger. Just a really striking image that is well-executed.

Aren: I loved the zombie tiger and really appreciated those first moments in Vegas, when the coyote, Lilly (Nora Arnezeder), ties up the sicko security guard and leaves him as an offering for the Alphas. It’s one of the moments in the film that takes you off guard, showing that our conception of how zombies work is not what is happening in this film. The entire zombie mythology is the greatest strength of the film, in my estimation. It’s something that hasn’t been done before.

Anders: I will also say that it’s clear that Snyder is having fun at times with the kind of Heavy Metal imagery and camp-gothic expressions, say in the outfits of the Queen and Zeus for instance; that stuff is fun.

Anton: There’s a lot going on with the zombies that is both rich in terms of mythology for zombie movies, and also branching out connections to other types of related films. You’ve mentioned Heavy Metal, and I’m thinking of the covers of Iron Maiden, with Eddie, that zombie-type figure.

I also really thought about Omega Man, in which the vampire/zombies have their own plans, which only gradually become more apparent to us. 

Current Events

Anton: I’m embarrassed to say it only dawned on me now that there’s obvious social criticism embedded in the film, which is so on the nose I can’t believe I didn’t think about it while watching the movie. Las Vegas is zombie land. It’s like a one-upping of zombie commercialism in Dawn of the Dead. My goodness, maybe I’m not giving the film enough credit.

Aren: Maybe it’s the kind of so over-the-top metaphor that it almost goes over our heads because of how obvious it is?

Anton: We’ve talked about how Snyder is both a strong-willed director as well as an artist who really does react to criticism. I thought about this particularly with the film’s slight engagement with politics and current events. Once again, Snyder is fairly ambiguous to pin down, suggesting that politics don’t really interest him that much. It really struck me more as what film scholar David Bordwell calls “strategic ambiguity,” allowing audiences to read the film in different ways.

For example, at one point we have a joke about “Easy peasy lemon squeezy,” using the older racist ending, which frankly I guess I had forgotten about. Is this a conscious anti-racist moment, or making fun of that preoccupation dominating Hollywood at the moment?

Aren: I would wager it’s the latter. It’s an odd scene and stuck out, not because of it being offensive, but because of how strangely forthright it is as a joke about allegations of racism, and that it’s the German telling the Japanese man what he can and cannot say, what is and is not racist.

Anton: Or another: I was struck by comments early in the film by a TV pundit about the US government administration rounding up those they deem undesirable—the pundit mentions concerns about undocumented migrants and gay and abortion rights activists being take away for quarantine—and Sean Spicer, former Trump White House Press Secretary, defending the administration. That and a few offhand comments about the president wanting to nuke things and get done with it suggests the idea that Trump (or at least the liberal caricature of Trump as both stupid and mentally unhinged) is the unspoken president.

Or another: the lady who brings them across is a “coyote,” using a term for the kind of people who bring migrants across the southern US border illegally.

At the same time, the significance of quarantine zones in light of Covid restrictions and increasingly hard measures taken during the pandemic seemed like a dominant subtext. 

Is all this just to flavour the film with some sense of current events and social critique, or is there anything deeper than that? Is it just Snyder putting his critics off the track with a bunch of different political references?

Aren: I wouldn’t say it’s obviously a reaction to current politics, as it was largely shot in 2019 prior to some things reaching a head. However, there were some reshoots in September 2020 as well, so Sndyer could’ve worked some stuff in. 

Snyder is very reactive to criticism, as you’ve pointed out. He also shares the typical Hollywood dislike of Trumpism, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s implied Trump is the president in the film. But to make some kind of larger throughline about COVID and the pandemic response and the entire film as a metaphor for how America responded to the pandemic—quarantine the people who are most vulnerable (the old), lock them away in a remote location (long term care homes), and then just let the plague go to town on them as the rich and powerful go about their lives—would require a deeper read of the film’s structure and allusions.

Also, remember that the film reveals that Bly Tanaka’s (Hiroyuki Sanada) whole plot is a decoy; he really wants the head of the zombie queen, not the money, and anyway, the plot to steal the money in the first place is a means to defraud the government insurance system, which already paid him for all the money left in his vault in Vegas. So Snyder is critiquing corruption of the elites and how they profiteer in times of crisis and take advantage of government payouts, as well as how they want to weaponize and profit off of the arrival of deadly diseases, such as the zombie pathogen in the film. Also, the zombie outbreak itself is a government project that escapes during a high-security transport from Area 51 in the opening scene. It’s literally a lab leak and everything that’s bad that happens in response is the government reacting to failures of their own doing.

Hmm. Maybe there is something more profound going on here, a more totalizing critique that is worth investigating. I feel like I’ve almost talked myself into thinking as much.

Anton: You’ve alerted me to more possible depths, but, as audiences are divided on, say, a film like Sucker Punch, about whether it’s quite layered and interesting or just flat and stupid, perhaps Army of the Dead is similar. I think I’d have to rewatch the movie. 

At least I can say that even if I’m not satisfied with Army of the Dead I would consider rewatching it. So it’s not a failure in my books. Just definitely several notches down from Justice League, which I thought was superb. And I can’t escape the fact that I had hopes for this film, based on my affection for Dawn of the Dead as perhaps the greatest zombie movie, that are not at all realized. 

Anders: As we’ve mentioned in many of the reviews of Snyder’s films in this retrospective, it’s very difficult to pin down Snyder’s preoccupations into a particular coherent political affiliation, at least as we tend to correlate them in our world today. He seems to be often throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

Aren: Remember, also, that this is not the last of this world we’ll see. There’s a prequel film about Dieter (and directed by Schweighöfer as well) called Army of Thieves, which is currently on Netflix, and an upcoming anime prequel series called Lost Vegas. Snyder has also mentioned the likelihood of a sequel called Planet of the Dead as well, presumably branching off from the final scene of Vanderohe flying into Mexico with the zombie bite. So we may get more commentary before Snyder is through with this world on screen.

Army of the Dead (2021, USA)

Directed by Zack Snyder; written by Zack Snyder, Shay Hatten, and Joby Harold, based on a story by Snyder; starring Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Matthias Schweighöfer, Nora Arnezeder, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tig Notaro, Raül Castillo, Huma Qureshi, Garret Dillahunt.

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