Army of the Dead is Jurassic Park II meets I am Legend. Someone asked, What if zombies could construct a complex society like in I am Legend, but all we had was the set of Ocean’s 11? And what if instead of finding actors, we found not actors? What if we made them go through the motions of a sloppy heist and then dared the audience to remember their names instead of comparing them to the actors that Netflix decided to pass on? “Fake Donny Osmond,” “Bootleg Penelope Cruz,” “C-list Mackenzie Davis,” “Dave Bautista.” The effect is one in which Zack Snyder checks all the boxes of an entertaining two hours, but not quite all the boxes of an entertaining 2 1/2 hours.
The Guy with the Buzz Saw never gets to use his saw except in the (long) opening credit scene. Bautista’s daughter inveigles herself into this heist with very little purpose or motivation. Bautista himself seems weirdly fixated on his daughter going to college. At one point, he suggests that $15 million is what she needs to be able to go to school, which prompts one to ask, how expensive is college in this universe? The inexplicably German locksmith is in charge of cracking the largest children’s piggy bank you have ever seen while also being an absolute ass about it. The movie is not concerned with your feelings though. It does not care if you want to know how we traverse thirty flights of stairs with cans of fuel to get to a roof, or how we crack and uncrackable safe or why zombies are so emotionally connected to their offspring. The movie doesn’t care if you like or don’t like Tig Notaro’s one liners to empty air, her post-modern, post-production performance art of barely fitting into the movie in which she stars.
That said, there are some flashes of brilliance, like the hibernation scene and mostly that scene, really. There are no final boss battles. There is very little dialogue of note. There will be too many names to remember.
This Netflix movie that was released approximately 72 hours early to select drive ins marks a high-water mark for weird. Yes, because made for television movies are now premiering on the silver screen, but also because this marks the first time since a kung fu special at the drive-in many, many months ago that I’ve been wined and dined by Friend for a movie, and after just over 200 reviews and several years of writing, this may mark the final summer of seeing movies together in person.
I’ve written about the way that franchises sometimes associate themselves with the people you end up seeing them with: the way that Wife and I found ourselves watching a marathon of all of the Marvel movies over two days leading up to Age of Ultron, the way that the X-Men became an unlikely thread connecting Dad and I from childhood to early adulthood, ending in that Phoenix reboot not too long ago. In a lot of ways, it’s arbitrary. When you end up seeing a lot of movies and your friends also see a lot of movies, it’s not hard to draw patterns where none exist. It helps if both of you have no taste or standards.
If I were forced to reflect on the past three years of movies that I would not have seen without Friend though, I would say most of them fall into the category of Big Budget Off-Brand Sci-Fi, which is one of Friend’s favorites. But we’ve had our fair share of zombie movies together: I think early on in our courtship, we went to see stage re-enactment of the Evil Dead series at a small community theater, complete with splash zone on a weekday. There was JJ Abrams’s Overlord (2018) and that time we watched Anna and the Apocalypse with Wife at Friend’s house before making dinner together in 2017. More recently, we saw Lupita Nyong’o in a delightful gem, Little Monsters (2019), that I’d discovered at a rare double feature on Halloween week this past year. I watched it alone in my car at the very same drive in, and then drove home, and convinced Friend and Wife to watch it again with me the very next day.
Probably my favorite zombie movie in recent years is the Rock’s adaptation of Hercules from 2014.
I remember seeing this movie in theaters with Wife many moons ago and being completely charmed by the weirdness of this movie. Since then, zombie movies that have tickled me the most have been comedies, Nicholas Holt or Aubrey Plaza or unnamed Disney actors and actresses, miming the morose affect of tweenagers feeling their feelings very deeply or not at all (very significantly, I’m not citing Double Tap as a movie worth watching). The use of zombies as background for Serious Stories of survival or pandemics has been less interesting to me. I think the racial element of movies like I am Legend were interesting contributions to the genre, but generally, I’m not interested in heroism and the moral quandries of zombies in the vein of Walking Dead. It’s hard to imagine describing Snyder’s movie as a Serious Story or even thinking of it as taking itself seriously, except that Dave Bautista has a lot of effusive moments of emotion with basically every woman in his life and they all sort of end in the same way for him. This movie probably would’ve been a really fun experience if it had been edited or maybe if Tig Notaro had starred in it instead of starring in an adjacent movie on the same lot.
