Film Review - Army of the Dead (2021)

 Army of the Dead is a new Netflix film directed by Zack Snyder and stars Dave Bautista as Scott Ward, a former soldier who rescued people from Zombies in Las Vegas and now he is tasked by a Japanese businessman named Hunter (Hiroyuki Sanada) to retrieve 200 million dollars from a safe underneath an abandoned casino but getting a team together to get the money will be one thing, retrieving it and getting out alive will be another.

 

Army of the Dead has like a lot of Snyder’s films some nice action moments and some nice visual moments it also has the same weakness that a lot of Snyder’s films have and that is no real human heart beating at the centre of it and that comes down to he heist angle that the film goes for and it really didn’t work for me.

 

And the main reason it didn’t work for me is that I didn’t really find myself caring all that much about the people in the heist team, it just felt like they were introduced and then kablamo their thrown into the abandoned Las Vegas and sent on the mission and this is where Snyder having a great screenwriter would have really come in handy.

 

For like Tim Burton and Ridley Scott, Snyder is a visualist who a lot of the time and in a lot of the films he has made save for 300 and Watchmen he gets caught up in the cool visuals and exciting action and slow motion moments that he forgets to give his audience great storytelling and compelling characters to go along with the cool visuals and here that isn’t the case.

 

For the characters a lot of the time feel like their copied from James Cameron’s Aliens, there’s the veteran, the badass, the expert and so on and so on but whereas Cameron took the time to build up the characters in quiet moments Snyder doesn’t and it hurts the film and it hurts the response at least for me to the action and the visuals which do look good but without the script to back them up they just feel hollow.

 

And so that was Army of the Dead and it’s fine, perfectly fine but it just confirms for me that Snyder needs a good screenwriter at his side in order to really shine as a filmmaker and in the past he has had that but he doesn’t have it here and it hurt the film overall for me, 2 out of 5.