"You all keep talking about the city like it's their prison. It's not. It's their kingdom."
I feel I need to give a small caveat at the start of this review: I am not a particularly big fan of Zach Snyder as a director. Now don't get me wrong - I'll give him plenty of praise/credit for his skills as a cinematographer and editor, but when it actually comes to his directorial skills... well, the best thing I can say is that his films feel like they're all style and no substance. Very pretty on the surface, but very little underneath that.
I'm saying all of this upfront because it turned out I really quite enjoyed Army of the Dead, despite any misgivings or suspicions I might have had from him being the director.
Six years after zombies overrun Las Vegas and the city is left to rot alongside the undead, casino owner Bly Tanaka approaches Scott Ward, a survivor of what might as well be called "The Battle of Las Vegas". The US government is about to nuke Las Vegas in order to deal with the zombies once and for all, but Tanaka wants to get $200 million from his casino vault before it all starts glowing in the dark. Ward agrees and puts a team together that consists of a couple of fellow Las Vegas survivors, a YouTube zombie killer, a German safecracker, a people smuggler, Tanaka's employee Martin, and Ward's daughter Kate, who tags along in order to rescue a woman she knows from the refugee camp she works at who has gone into the city to try to get some cash to relocate. Once they get into the zombie-infested city, however, however, they discover that there's more to the plan - and to the zombies - than they realised.
Despite what the title might make you think, Army of the Dead is not a sequel to Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead - although Snyder did get the idea for this movie while working on that one. There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to the 2004 film in the form of a newspaper headline one character is seen reading, but other than that Army of the Dead is a standalone movie.
That's not to say that Army of the Dead is a 100% original story (Do Not Steal). When you look at it even a little bit closely, it's basically about a survivor/survivors of an event where unstoppable predators have slaughtered a whole heap of people and the survivor(s) barely escaped from, who are then asked to return to that place by a big corporation, accompanied by a corporate executive who assures them everything is on the up and up, only to discover that there's more going on than they realised and the corporation might have lied about their motives... There's even a bit where they have to rescue someone from being turned into an alien incubator a zombie, and a bit where our heavily-armed and badass surviving protagonists arrive on a rooftop to escape, with the head zombie in hot pursuit, only to discover that the helicopter has already left... or has it? Yes, there's more than a whiff of Aliens in this plot.
There's also the problem of there being several plot points crammed into the film, sans context, that are never expanded on or explained by the end of the film. The UFO sighting and Area 51 reference at the start of the film are fine because they at least are a suggestion of what has caused the Alpha Zombie who starts all of this off, and that's not a bad thing, if not always 100% necessary. But then the film starts dropping hints that the characters are in a time loop somehow? And then there are robot zombies randomly mixed in among the "real" (ie. flesh and blood) zombies, and no-one comments on any of this or thinks it's in any way odd. I dread to suggest it, but perhaps there's a 4-hour cut of this movie where all that is explained, but I (probably) wouldn't watch it. There's also the issue that the majority of the female characters are treated as little more than props or character moments for the male characters. Of particular note is one female refugee from the camp who sneaks into the city to try to get cash, and finding and rescuing her is pretty much the major subplot of the movie. Once they find her, though, she's relegated to human baggage and even gets killed unceremoniously at the very end, like Snyder decided to take on the start of Alien 3 to this for good measure.
But at least this is better than the original script from 2007. "The team quickly finds out that all the zombies are males, and that some kind of alpha zombie monsters who started the outbreak were raping all the human women who were left in the city and using them as breeders, which created hybrids of zombies and humans who are even more dangerous than normal and alpha zombies. After their escape route out of the city is destroyed, mercenaries get trapped inside one of the casinos and have to find another way to escape before [the] city gets wiped out from the face of the Earth by [the] army who want to cover up their involvement, and [the] team also has to save their female members who get captured by zombies and taken away into alpha zombies hive, which is the biggest casino in the city where they are impregnating the women they captured." Which... Sweet merciful Eris, who thought that could ever be a good idea?
Like I said though, I actually enjoyed Army of the Dead. The opening credits are fantastic, with them basically being a slo-mo telling of the original Las Vegas outbreak, set to Richard Cheese singing Viva Las Vegas, and it showcases two of the things Zach Snyder is very good at - namely slo-mo and soundtrack choices (the exception in this film being using The Cranberries' Zombie, because it's actually about an IRA bombing attack in 1993, and not actually about zombies, which makes it a little awkward to use here). The cast is all very good, especially Dave Bautista, who continues to prove he's more than just a comedy muscle pro-wrestler. And it is a lot of fun - enough so that you're more than willing to overlook how much of its homework it copied from Aliens. It doesn't overly complicate things, and it delivers what the title promises - an army of zombies. And a zombie tiger and a zombie horse, for bonus points.
3.5 out of 5.
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