Army of the Dead (2021)

After spending almost a year and a half listening to pro-disease idiots and QANON losers, zombie movies were going to have to change.
No longer would we be able to watch a zombie apocalypse and think “How could people be so stupid? Why would anyone do anything other than just shoot the zombies?”
Considering there were COVID parties and superspreader events held by IRL morons who inexplicably declared the IRL pandemic wasn’t real, it’s not hard to see how zombies could absolutely spread uncontrollably.

Which is just about the only part of “Army of the Dead” (2021) that I found reasonable.

Also spoilers, because reading this is as close to watching the movie as you should get.

In a slightly different universe, the DOD was experimenting with a zombie virus at Area 51, and when one of the test subjects was able to escape during a very poorly planned transportation operation, some poor Airman (who clearly had Senior Airman stripes but was credited as “Sgt”) was the first unplanned zombie to join the horde.

The opening credits took us through the timeline from that crash to the ‘present day’ of the movie, whereupon the zombies had been completely quarantined into Las Vegas, which now had a snazzy double-wall around it made up of shipping containers and giant cement barriers. It was a cool visual to see all of the Vegas hotels and landmarks tourniquetted to protect the world, but I have many questions for how so many zombies were inside the containment zone and how they didn’t swarm every single worker who was placing said boxes and wall pieces.

The opening credits also showed us a series of scenes of people being evac’d from the zombie zone, but every single one ofthose evacuation attempts resulted in the rescue worker making some impossibly stupid decision and getting eaten instead.

Somewhere in there we saw Scott (Dave Bautista) doing something that involved lots of zombies dying at the end of his machine gun.

Later, when the movie started for realzies, we found out that Scott had previously been in zombie-Vegas and saved the president’s… daughter?… dog?... favorite pair of shoes?

I don’t care, and neither did the movie, because it literally didn’t matter.

Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) then entered the scene and offered Scott a job: one of the casino vaults had $250M left inside: the insurance policy had already paid out, which meant that all those bills were fair game to whoever got there first. If Scott could get to it, he could have a full fifth of that payday, and any crew he brought with him would be on his dime.

So we went through a montage of Scott finding people to work with – everyone from his past lover Maria (Ana de la Reguera) to a social influencer (???) to the completely CGI’d-in Marianne (Tig Notaro – we’ll come back to this later).

Bly also insisted that Martin (Garret Dillahunt) join the party – “officially” to help them find the vault, but it was clear he was there to keep an eye on them and make sure they didn’t try to screw Bly out of the findings.

Then there was the stupid side plot: Scott’s daughter, Kate, was living in the quarantine camp between the two walls around Vegas – there didn’t seem to be a reason why Kate was there and Scott wasn’t, other than because they needed a plot device. She hated him because he was an absent father, which is exactly the same character dynamic that Bautista had with his other fictional daughter in “Stuber” (2019).

The quarantine camp was “explained” to be a place where they were keeping people who might be infected with the zombie virus, but apparently the camp had been there for months, and when we were shown a zombie bite later in the movie, it took maybe an hour for the bitten person to transform. Furthermore, it was implied that the virus could jump person-to-person simply by being within breathing space, but it was only ever shown to be caused by bites or aggressive fluid transmission, so why a months-long quarantine would be required can only be answered by bad directing, because Zach Snyder needed another pointless dynamic.

Oh, right. This is a Zach Snyder movie.
That alone should tell you the quality to expect in this.
Anyway.

Scott and his motley crew ended up inside the quarantined Vegas, now accompanied by his daughter (for some reason) and a Lily the Coyote (Nora Arnezeder), who had made herself a nice living in the quarantine zone by smuggling people into Vegas to loot it.

When they entered the zombie realm, someone got antsy and shot a zombie, to which Lily responded that they – the living humans – must leave a sacrifice in return.
Why?
Because apparently the zombies had an entire society in there, complete with complex language, social hierarchy, and the ability to impregnate one another. 
“But aren’t zombies ‘the living dead’?” I can already hear you asking your phone screen.
Yes, they are.
Which means this was clearly Snyder’s attempt at building on the lore of what zombies are. 
Unfortunately for him, we’ve had a pretty solid, consistent display of them since George Romero’s “The Night of the Living Dead” (1968); Snyder’s choice to add ‘features’ to zombies missed the ‘lore building’ mark and ended up squarely in the ‘stupid choices’ box that Stephanie Meyers and her sparkly vampires inhabit.

Then, over the next hour or so, everyone died: some when to find the vault, some when to find the escape helicopter (unclear why they couldn’t just leave the way they came in), some wanted to find more loot; all of them crumbling into flesh piles when the zombies got to them. 

And it turned out Martin wanted the head of the zombie queen, because Bly believed that it would give him the ability to make and control his own zombie army. Somehow.
Ugh.
Why wouldn’t Bly just make that the heist?
Yes, the promised money did actually exist in the vault, but we also found out that Bly had hired multiple other mercenary teams for the same mission previously and all of them had died too, so why make the money the focus when he could have just said ‘kill the queen and I’ll pay you’? It certainly would have been a shorter jaunt.
Sure, promising someone the payout only if they succeed technically means no money out of your pocket, but at the same time: if none of them succeed, then at some point you run out of skilled people desperate or greedy enough to try.

And in the background of aaaaaaaaall of this: the President wanted to nuke Vegas to get rid of the zombie infestation once and for all.
Why?!
Because Snyder clearly expected Trump to win a second term and for this to be a “poignant” political statement or something – the president was never named specifically, but whenever they were referenced, it was always via some blindingly-stupid quote.

It was shown that the zombies could still die from head-shots, so why didn’t the DOD just make it the new training ground for all snipers? Why not just hoist a bunch of Marines up on cranes – safely outside the quarantine ring – and let them shoot down for target practice? How was ‘tactical nuke’ a more reasonable option?
And a reminder: presidents don’t have a magic button that launches a nuke – the Air Force and Navy have entire chains of people who actually do the approval and launching, so more than one person could have said ‘no’ to this.
Regardless: the timeline for the nuclear launch was the driving factor for how long Scott and his party had to hit pay-dirt and escape, but that only served as a reason to force everyone to act faster and make more impressively stupid mistakes to get eaten better.

There were a few dim moments of entertainment in there, against the black backdrop of boring shenanigans, most of which centered around safe-cracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighofer) and gunman Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), who had some bromance bonding before Dieter died as he pushed Vanderohe into the opened vault to protect him from a zombie rush.

As part of their plan to escape, Marianne got a rooftop helicopter up and running and was supposed to take everyone home, yet only Scott and Kate made it up there. 
But – surprise! – the zombie king, wearing a mask and a cape, also managed to make it to the roof and jumped into the helicopter with them, where he bit Scott just before Scott shot him in the head.
Marianne got shot somewhere during that fight and the helicopter crashed, killing her too, leaving only healthy Kate to shoot infected Scott after a conversation that was supposed to be heart-wrenching…if I’d had any reason to care about either of them or anything else in this.
Top to bottom, it was maybe 20 in-movie minutes between when Scott got bitten and when he started to transform.

Meanwhile, Vanderohe found his way out of the vault post-nuke and simply strutted out of the now-zombieless-Vegas with a dufflebag full of cash. He wandered to the nearest town – which conveniently had a regional airport and private jets – and used his newfound wealth to charter himself a flight to Mexico City, during which he realized he was bitten and the screen went black. Exactly the same ending as “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011) but with far less logic behind it.

So… how? How did he walk for what was clearly hours and not transform? Why did Snyder show Scott transforming so quickly when someone could instead carry it for hours if not days?
The answer is clearly “because Snyder wants to make this a series,” which is not an acceptable answer for a story line and the world-building he’d already established.

The soundtrack for this was there. It was in the background. It didn’t benefit or detract, so that’s tolerable.
Considering this is supposed to be the springboard for the cinematic universe that Snyder never got from DC, I’m actually surprised the music wasn’t better. There should have been a heart-thumping zombie theme, or a heroic tune whenever someone fought off a small crowd of corpses. There should have been something to carry forward, since that’s the running norm for soundtracks now. Superman got a new theme in “Man of Steel” (2013) that played in “Justice League” (2017) and the “Wonder Woman” (2017/2020) theme played in both of her movies and also “Justice League.”

The special effects for this were pretty good. The zombies were all humans in makeup, so they didn’t look like CGI golems.
Tig Notaro was completely CGI’d into this: originally the helicopter pilot was supposed to be Chris D’Elia and he’d been filmed in the role, until it came out that he was a sexual predator, so D’Elia was digitally erased and Notaro was added across the board. There were a few scenes where her actions/responses didn’t quite line up with the rest of the cast, and when I watched the movie, I’d assumed that was just bad acting/directing in a few spots. I didn’t learn about the CGI magic until later, which speaks volumes to the quality of that specific project, so kudos to the render monkeys who had to figure that out.
But successfully injecting one character into a movie does not a tolerable experience make.

So… yeah. It was a heist movie, with zombies, where the rules only applied for as long as Snyder was entertained by them before he decided he wanted something else to happen.
This really isn’t worth your time.
I’m giving it a 1 Claw because you shouldn’t watch it, but if for some reason it’s calling you via siren song, then at least wait until you’re on a plane again and it’s the only thing available on the entertainment system.