The cinematic folly of Zack Snyder’s alpha-zombies

Zack Snyder commits a cardinal sin in his latest offering, Army of the Dead, by giving his zombies, well, brains. It’s not his only sin though.

The movie welds together two hackneyed genres – the heist film and the zombie flick – in a postapocalyptic Las Vegas walled off from the rest of America. None of this stops a brazen band of go-getters from sneaking in and trying to make off with millions, right under the rotted noses of all those shambling bodies. Basically Ocean’s Eleven with a ton of gore and an ex-pro wrestler in the lead instead of George Clooney.

Aside from the screenplay in general, the biggest weakness of Army of the Dead (2021) is its zombies. The movie pretty much forfeits its ‘scare impact’ the moment its alpha-zombies display the first hints of intelligence, which is essentially in the opening 15 minutes. Yep, Snyder has fallen into the same trap as so many other horror film failures, including George Romero’s later sequels: Zack made his zombies too emotional.

You only have to lack a social life and to have watched enough old zombie flicks to instinctively know what works and what doesn’t. The zombie genre has been done to death

Guy with no social life watching a zombie romance

(sorry) and each new filmmaker is looking for an edge that will reinvent this hackneyed horror trope. But this path is fraught with many pitfalls. Successful franchises like AMC’s The Walking Dead got around it by inventing ever more gross-out special effects each season, although the real secret to its success was having its zombies remain mindless killing machines to the very end. Just as important, the show’s human characters remained believable and/or sympathetic until the end, too, at least until the end of Season 5.

That’s another related flaw of Army of the Dead: it’s difficult to invest too much in its bland characters and cartoonish stereotypes. Except perhaps for Nora Arnezeder, who plays the kickass female French soldier with such conviction. Naturally, there’s also a kickass Mexican soladara with a mandatory bandana, a goofy German safecracker who’s not very funny, a conniving corporate villain, and a bunch of other forgettable characters who get eaten anyway.

But it’s the zombies that let Snyder down. His walled-off Las Vegas is described by the kickass Frenchie, Lily, as being not so much a prison as a “kingdom” of the zombies. And indeed, the film’s numero uno alpha-zombie poses and struts about like the king of the underworld; or rather, a second-rate Phantom of the Opera who works out. Besides his metal mask, he also wears a cape, carries a spear and enjoys contemplating a statue of Zeus in front of the Olympus casino, seeing perhaps a demigod reflection of himself. Seriously, how un-zombielike can you get?

Meanwhile, his consort – yes, Zeus-zombie has a love interest – is forever bouncing about and landing in these wide-legged squats and grimacing her guts out like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat crossed with the vampire queen from an Anne Rice novel. Worst of all, these two reanimated demigods have somehow conceived a child – don’t ask me how – and alas, when Anne Rice’s queen of the damned is decapitated, our heartbroken Zeus literally tears the foetus out of his dead-again wife, holding it aloft before his loyal corpse subjects like a sovereign who has lost an heir to the crown.

It’s all very silly, and something of a head-scratcher why in the world Zack would return to this theme of the zombie miscarriage when a similar scene was heavily redacted from the cinematic release of his previous zombie outing, Dawn of the Dead (2004), an otherwise superb reimagining of the George Romero classic. Snyder’s early cinematographic brilliance
of that remake shines through more strongly in Army of the Dead, but not much else shines, apart from perhaps the meticulous CGI destruction of Las Vegas. 

Dawn of the Dead action figures selling online

The promo documentary Creating an Army of the Dead informs us that Zack wanted to make a fun film that simultaneously evolves the zombie genre. But providing his two dead honchos (sorry) with brains was actually a step backwards, making Army of the Dead a lot cheesier than what Zack probably had in mind. There’s a reason why such rose-tinted zombie shows as the Santa Clarita Diet and iZombie function only as mediocre, female-friendly comedies. Or why the TV series Z Nation is such a B-grade stinker (he’s half-man, half-zombie – please, no). Z Nation and a million other zombie movies have all been trapped by the same ‘reinventive fallacy’ of giving their living dead too much wit. Fools’ gold, baby. In contrast, classics such as 28 Days Later (2002) or REC (2007) or Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead (1978) are able retain their shock-and-awe value on the strength of the horrific implacableness of their legions of the undead.

It’s worth noting that Zack Snyder has a track record for staid hero-worship movies (300, Watchmen, Batman v Superman) and that Army of the Dead is perhaps his first stab at horror comedy. Sadly, it’s not always pleasant viewing. The film is deliberately cheesy, yet it lacks the fine balancing act of a good horror comedy or tongue-in-cheek grindhouse. In fact, the movie seems to lack all comical awareness, with its few blatant jokes falling dead flat, like that two-ton container crushing to death a heroic soccer mom and her young daughter during the film’s montage. Not funny, dude. Even poor kickass Lily is forced to deliver a wretched one-liner before her own illogical death. On the other hand, a strutting Zeus-zombie is funny.

Those rare zombie horror comedies that do work, such as Planet Terror (2007) or Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (1993) or Re-Animator (1985), are successful because they leave the audience torn between two conflicting emotions, revulsion and nervous laughter. But this only really works if a certain distance is guarded between the living and the dead; between the animalistic killing machine and the thinking loving human you can relate to and laugh at. Otherwise, your movie ends up being funny in all the wrong places, like Army of the Dead, which functions neither as a scary film nor as a horror comedy, not least because its Zeus-zombie retains too many human emotions, including an undying love for his beheaded queen (the zombie romance subgenre – please god, nooo!)

From the director who wowed the pants off us with his recreation of Dawn of the Dead, Zack’s encore performance is quite disheartening (then again, he did make us sit through a four-hour remake of Justice League). On top of its lame humour, Army of the Dead is just lazy and derivative. Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) kicked off with a postapocalyptic Washington followed by an alpha-zombie attack. Zack gives us an alpha-zombie attack followed by a postapocalyptic Las Vegas; while his introductory montage, which is overlaid with a schmaltzy version of Viva Las Vegas, is simply way too long, relying on cut-and-paste MTV storytelling – a far cry from his supremely terrifying opening sequence to Dawn of the Dead 2004.

The opening act to Army of the Dead, where Mr. Alpha-Zombie busts out of a steel transport container, has a little too much in common with a similar scene in Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010). The scene shortly thereafter of the two U.S. soldiers fleeing across the grasslands,

Army of the Dead vs. Resident Evil: Afterlife (screenshots)

one of them falling, the other giving him his hand before being attacked, has been lifted almost frame by frame from American Werewolf in London (1981). A sly wink from Snyder, maybe, since some of the dialogue is even similar; if so, it’s a rather feeble homage. And what about the sequence where our motley crew is creeping through those darkened rooms full of hibernating zombies and the slightest sound or bump will set them off? Seen it all before, dude. As too the corporate villain in the group who locks out or leaves behind the valiant hero, only Paul Reiser does it so much more unctuously in Aliens (1986). There’s even that most cheesy climax of a one-on-one fistfight between the goodie

      Army of the Dead vs. American Werewolf in London (screenshots) 

and the baddie atop a precipice, in this case a helicopter, albeit devoid of some necessary satire. And all those impressively gory CGI-generated headshots? They leave you feeling numb by the end, whereas the coup de grace upon Zeus-zombie from a small-calibre round leaves you flummoxed. Throughout the movie he absorbs a barrage of firepower yet this tiny single shot causes his entire head to blow apart. Huh? Was this supposed to be some sort of smug Tarantino-esque parody?

Zack’s script is dreadfully shallow; and declaring afterwards that you intended all along to make a cheesy B-grade film seems disingenuous. It was actually co-written with Shay Hatten, whose major claim to fame is John Wick: Chapter 3 (2019). Whether because of lazy storytelling or lack of budget, all those little realistic details are missing, such as drones hovering above the ruined city, or satellite tracking of this disaster zone, or military helicopters zipping back and forth; nor is there the kind of media frenzy and intense public interest such a catastrophe would provoke, to speak nothing of the outcry over the nuking of Las Vegas, protests from nearby Los Angeles or from relatives of those zombified hordes locked inside. Apparently, this same Shay Hatten has already written the prequel, Army of Thieves, a “romantic-comedy heist film with zombies”, and which has already been directed by that goofy German safecracker, Matthias Schweighöfer and produced by Snyder. You’ve been forewarned.

Aside from a cameo by Elvis zombie, the only real spark of imagination in Army of the Dead is the walking-dead white tiger. It’s clearly designated as the ex-feline from the Siegfried and Roy magic show, never mind that this show closed well over a decade ago due to a tragic mishap. Indeed, one might argue that having this reanimated tiger attack and maul to death the corporate villain is in poorer taste than that zombie foetus, given that Roy Horn

Roy Horn and Siegfried Fischbacher photo:  Carol M. Highsmith

was attacked by his white tiger Montecore in 2003, bitten in the neck and dragged offstage in front of spectators, bringing an abrupt end to his distinguished career. Despite the offensiveness to the memory of Siegfried and Roy, some more zombified animals might have been the way to go for Zack if he really wanted to put a new spin on the genre. The TV series Game of Thrones absolutely floored audiences with its white-walker polar bear and undead dragon, not to mention a monstrous zombie giant pounding at the gates. Up until then, mainstream horror had been content with a few zombie dogs accompanying their walking cadavers, or perhaps a creepy cat, such as in the Pet Sematary movies. The white zombie tiger or even that useless zombie horse of Zeus should have piqued Snyder’s curiosity. He could have had lions and apes and circus elephants all turning into rampaging, flesh-eating monsters; a plague of CGI rats and crazed birds, a pack of demonic coyotes and frothing Cujos. Anything – anything – would have been better than his king and queen zombies with their endless love (now I've got that song in my head).

©Tony McGowan

Stephen King as Mark Zuckerberg's butler?

While writing The Swimming Pool from Another Freaking Dimension (a bizarro-esque parody of a dystopian Australian near-future), it got me thinking about the kind of pop culture that’s going to survive into the future and the other kind that’s

already sinking into oblivion (like my novel). Most people these days would be hard pressed to name the biggest-selling novelists of the early 20th century, let alone the dilettantes of the 19th century, aside from those they were forced at gunpoint to study at school. Patrick Dennis was a best-selling novelist in the 1950s, but by the

time the 1970s rolled around he was already a nobody, or rather, a forgotten butler for the CEO of McDonalds. And in spite of Stephen King’s colossal output and millions of copies sold, he could well go the same way. Maybe not as a butler for Mark Zuckerberg, yet those 82 or so novels of his and those countless film adaptations could be all but forgotten in a soon-ish Future World preoccupied with a completely different species of pop culture.

Ernest Cline resurrects the glories of early video games in his novel Ready Player One, which was adapted by Steven Spielberg. In this dystopian, if not prosaic future, video games and other pop culture of the distant past are something to be idolised and avidly memorised. Cline lays on the references thick and fast and just doesn’t let up. The cinematic version is fairly slick and a lot of fun, yet upon reading the novel I found myself sometimes drowning in these pop culture references, like I was wading through some bloated cut-and-paste Wikipedia nerd-school assignment. Yeah, I admit it, I’m jealous of his success. Then again, according to Wikipedia the novel did receive quite a few scathing reviews for its poor-quality writing and the book’s “Peter-Pan-ish infatuation with childishness, which comes coated in a stench of stale Doritos, Jolt Cola and lowbrow smugness”. The Daily Beast doesn’t pull its punches.

All sci-fi stories set in the future must forge their own path when dealing with pop culture of the current times. In Star Trek Beyond (2016), Simon Pegg and friends are able to work into the plot the Beastie Boys’ hit song Sabotage by joking about it being classical music. Still, die-hard trekkie fans complained that the rap song was woefully out of place. But it’s actually a common trope in sci-fi: misconstruing a piece of ancient pop culture for something else and making a joke out of it. The list of novels and films that get away with this trope in one form or another is as long as a Star Wars prequel with a young Darth Vader in love. Sometimes the joke is lost on reviewers though, even outside of sci fi. Bret Easton Ellis, for one, was slammed for getting his music references all wrong in his controversial novel American Psycho (spoiler: he did it on purpose to show what a vacuous shit his serial-killing yuppie was).

Like the hero of Ready Player One, the main protagonist of The Swimming Pool from Another Freaking Dimension has one foot in the future, another in the pop culture of the past. Rather than video games, Dezzy’s weakness is for horror movies of the 1970s and 80s. Set in the 2040s, the novel gets around a lot of its references simply by attributing them to Dezzy’s quirky father, who has passed away and left him with a whole lot of 80s baggage. Other references are justified by Dezzy’s film academy days or his hazy knowledge of these old movies, similarly to the way that Sabotage is viewed as classical music in Star Trek. And a little like American Psycho, Dezzy’s misinterpretations of past movies is sometimes intentional, just to make a crappy joke. Other times the misunderstanding is genuine, such as when Dezzy and Sonia first discover those steampunk smartglasses. Thus, I’ll leave you with a quote from that passage to finish off with:

“What spectrum are these things working in anyway?” Sonia had the headset in her hands, inspecting the various lenses in the weak light of that UV cluster. “It can’t be

just infrared. Maybe it’s some other wavelength reacting with the UV, creating this optical illusion. Because that’s all this is, a clever optical illusion, right?”
“This is no illusion,” I said, actually afraid to approach that black archway, which seemed to be vibrating ever so minutely within my granulated vision.
“Okay, not really an illusion,” she conceded. “But maybe these goggles function like the viewfinders in one of those hidden object games my grandfather used to play on his old iPad. You know, if you got stuck you got to use a magnifying glass or something similar to find the last hidden objects.”
“Viewfinders,” I echoed, amused by the name. “My dad, too, played those early detective games, along with some first-person shooter called Candy Crush.”