Finally, if you want to avoid the cinema for a few more weeks, you may have been drawn to the much-publicised Netflix release, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead.
Right, where to begin with this film… perhaps it’s good to begin by saying that Snyder, for all his very divisive contributions to cinema, knows how to direct a zombie film. His debut feature was the remake – or rather, the reimagining – of Dawn of the Dead, a really fantastic action-horror film. One of the best zombie films ever made and just as good as original if I dare say so. Whereas 2004’s Dawn had real bite and a good running time of around 110 minutes, Army of the Dead, much like its zombies, is a shambles.
Awful? No. Good? Well, that is debatable. For a film with a baffling running time of 2 hours and 28 minutes, it’s never boring, but it’s certainly not exhilarating either. You get all the traditional set-ups seen in better heist films like The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven and Heat, mixed in with the ragtag fighting team you’ve seen in Aliens, only unlike the Colonial Marines, these idiots aren’t even slightly compelling. One of them is dressed more or less identically to Vesquez from Aliens! There’s a punky blonde French lady, a German with a bad haircut that looks a lot like Jake Paul, Dave Bautista and a bunch of others put together by a shady Japanese businessman to collect a lot of money from the vault of a casino. There’s also a time limit involved where Vegas is going to get nuked in a certain number of hours.
All that is very uninteresting, and all you want is to see these guys shoot-up some zombies which have now ‘evolved’. Snyder might think this is original, but to anyone who’s seen Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead or played Left 4 Dead, it’s been done better and more intelligently. Everything you expect to happen happens, but amazingly the running time never becomes unendurable. I’m still not exactly sure how. It’s serviceable in its action set-pieces but, again, just very uninspired and nothing you can’t see in other shorter and more narratively satisfying horror films (and a zombie tiger isn’t going to make that much of a difference!). It’s something to have on whilst doing the ironing or cooking; you’re better off half-paying attention to it… at most.
Some people have really taken against it, which seems to be fashionable amongst critics when it comes to reviewing a Zack Snyder film. As I’ve stressed, it’s not awful by any means, but it’s barely an average experience. This is a real shame because, like this fact or not, Snyder has directed some genuinely strong films. Watchmen, Man of Steel, and Dawn of the Dead are all really good, and even parts of his other more uneven films like Batman vs Superman have frequent moments of brilliance. Army of the Dead is nowhere near the dismal standards of Sucker Punch, but that’s not saying much. The running time, to me, is just insane. No horror film needs to be that long and even classics like The Shining suffer from long running times. The original Dawn of the Dead only justified the similar length by being a complex exploration of the fragility of American civilisation and consumerism.
Now I think about it, a lot of what features in Army is present in Peninsula, the Train to Busan sequel. It’s shorter, just as bombastic, but far more entertaining. The zombie movie has evolved so much over the years, bringing us clever riffs on the sub-genre like #Alive, The Night Eats the World, REC and countless others. Army of the Dead, for all its craziness, seems rather tired.
My advice? Go back watch Dawn of the Dead, it’s genuinely brilliant and will have you on the edge of your seat throughout.
2.5/5
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