Army of the Dead

What happened to the good old fashioned zombies? Eat brains, psychological intrigue about the human right of life versus the basic human instinct to do anything to survive include condemning others to murder, and an unhappy ending filled with death?

I'm legally obligated to state this in my reviews now

SPOILER ALERT

SO many spoilers ahead, so you've been warned.

So this is basically a remake of Dawn of the Dead with a sh*tload of references from so many others movies. So many references.

Before I start judging this script, which was apparently started back in the early 2000's around the time of Dawn of the Dead (another Snyder film) so that explains a lot of the lame dialogue and immature and gratuitous sexism featured prominently in this film.

You know what? Film is kind of a big term to this basically straight to television movie, I'm going to refer to it as a project from now on because it feels like it was written by a 17 year old boy who is obsessed with the Walking Dead and only the Walking Dead.

So, I'm just going to move past the fact that the crash that releases the Alpha Zombie is caused by a bride giving her new husband road head and crashing head first into the convoy and IMMEDIATELY blowing up like like Ben Affleck's career after becoming Batman.

Vegas is taken over immediately, because of course it is, and there is a gratuitous shot of topless showgirls that have been turned into zombies running after a few Johns and eating them while "Viva Las Vegas" plays in the background.

I was reading the trivia about this project on IMDB and apparently Snyder cut a scene where a guy gets his tallywacker bitten off and I gotta say, as a woman I'm disappointed that he chose to do that. I had to watch bouncing titties in slow motion of three completely different women chasing a fat bald man in an asian silk robe and several other personally awkward-to-view moments specifically featuring the anatomy of a woman over the actual woman.

I wanted to see a penis getting ripped off in a big bloody mess.

If there are more than five shots of boobs and cleavage, especially of zombies, then it should be the law that there is one shot of a man getting his dong brutally ripped off. Even if it's just implied.

And I think he was trying to offset the extremely over-sexualized female characters by having a female character ‘sacrifice’ (or murder depending on how you view the scene) a sexist egotistical power hungry rapist officer of the quarantine camp. To be honest, that character was super gross and creepy and I totally called the reason he came with the heist team as the bair the second they brought him in on the team.

Moving on,

So it's a heist movie wrapped in a zombie horror movie. Dave Bautista is putting together a team (a phrase used entirely too often in this project) to invade Vegas after it's been locked down and walled up to contain the zombies inside. They use shipping containers to wall the city. And build a quarantine camp on literally the other side of the container wall. Not even like a quarter mile from the zombie hoard.

At least everyone accepts the term zombie and doesn't try to call them something else mildly vague like Dead-O's or Biters or The Infected. Just Zombies, and they acknowledge the term Shambler, or Rambler?

I don’t care, this project isn’t good enough to care.

The cast gets taken out rather quickly, and I spent a lot of time literally yelling at the TV for them to hurry the f*ck up. Several characters were literally just standing just outside of the helicopter while a nuke was in sight of the city to blow it to smithereens to thank the pilot for coming back for them AND the alpha zombie king is creeping up behind them to kill them and add them to his weird feudal system.

By the way, the alpha zombie is named Zeus because the zombies take over the Olympus Hotel and Casino.

He also had a Queen that he gets pregnant.

Yeah, you read that right. The Zombie Queen is pregnant.

The virus apparently originates at Area 51, which they only refer to as ‘that certain place’ but it is clearly Area 51. So maybe this alien zombie virus doesn’t completely kill the host? I don’t know, when Zeus first puts his head on the Queens stomach, my brain immediately went to all the arguments the Anti-Twilight fans roared from the rooftops about how Edward Cullen’s sperm would not be functional since he’s dead and his body is ‘as cold as ice’.

Overall, if all you want to watch is a bloody zombie movie with a lot of scenes to mock but are tired of watching Zombieland, go to Netflix not the theaters. It’s streaming on Netflix.

Also, be prepared because I also read that Snyder is preparing a prequel and an animated series and this film is the base of a zombie universe he’s building.

So...I guess he’s not going to be satisfied as a filmmaker unless he can be the god of it. He’s clearly got an extreme case of God and Superiority Complex and is taking it out on the world and making it everyone’s problem.