Army of the Dead

Someday when the dictionary entry for "biggest film blunder" is written, there will be a photo of Zack Snyder. All the pompous slow-motion, the emotional ping-pong of hollow figures and the over-the-top brutality reveal the naked truth. The guy's a pure directorial dickhead. And although he can refocus like he has ADHD, he really can't hide the stupidity. (27/05/2021)

I think I could enjoy a stupidly scripted zombie horror B-movie, but in this case most of my disappointment stems from the fact that there was no ambition whatsoever to make anything resembling horror. The tone is just overstuffed action nonsense that happens to feature zombies, and I was also surprised at how ugly it looks in many sequences. Moreover, such a banal film, which narratively and conceptually does not bring anything original and interesting, cannot be two and a half hours long for God's sake! You could throw away 45 minutes without any problem. Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead is on another league and I’m afraid we will never see anything like it again from Zack. (26/05/2021)

So sloppy, it's like nobody was trying very hard with Army of the Dead. The characters are so uninteresting that I didn't care what order they died in, the actors have no charisma or nothing to work with, and the first really interesting and entertaining action scene3 doesn't come until sometime at the beginning of the last quarter. Once they start shooting and slashing properly, it's quite fun, with Snyder keeping himself in check, so there aren't nearly enough of those slow-motion sequences to make it boring, it's just that there's about an hour of completely unnecessary ballast that is boring, where the most entertaining thing is how it all makes no sense at all. Sure, in a B-action flick, that shouldn't really matter, it's just that Army of the Dead may be a B-movie, but it really isn’t. There's climactic brutality , it only falls into the horror category because there are zombies. And Snyder's playing with the camera, which often leads to ugly visuals full of out-of-focus shots (which was supposedly the artistic intent), is more annoying than effective. I don't know. An hour after the closing credits, I can recall virtually nothing of it. Just that I was expecting a lot more than another routine Netflix movie, and I really didn't have those expectations particularly high. An unimaginative and boring waste of time. (21/05/2021)

Unfuckingbelievable things comes true and I'm excited like never before! Since World War Z and Train to Busan, there hasn't been a more epic zombie flick, and if someone can't appreciate it, they're an ungrateful cold swine and have become my number one enemy! Zack Snyder evolves zombies into intelligent, fast, and organized bad ass assholes, and I swallowed it all up and sold myself to him like a €20 prostitute at a train station. Zack Snyder gets completely unleashed chains with a pumped-up opening, undoubtedly the best zombie opening in the history of cinema, followed by an entertaining introduction to the characters and the recruiting of the team members. No character is superfluous and the viewer cares about each of them. Matthias Schweighöfer may not be another Kano, but he handles the humor cleverly, the zombie make-up effects are amazing, the action is uncompromising and grand. Zack Snyder takes gore to the next level, and there may not have been a bigger carnage in horror since Evil Dead. I also have to praise the music and the occasionally unpleasant atmosphere (walking among hibernating zombies is downright beautifully horrifying, and I was reminded of Silent Hill). The fight with the tiger is the best animal attack since The Revenant! And the finale crushes balls like nothing in a long time, I was literally experiencing heart attack states. There are also plenty of interesting and innovative ideas here like zombie animals, intelligent zombies that know martial-arts, hibernating zombies, a zombie heist, pregnant zombies, and the traps in front of the vault. Of course, according to local ratings, people naively expected twists like in Game of Thrones and cry over how stupid, action-packed, brutal, and stylish it is. Well, I would prefer to lock them up in a pen among other sheep so they can watch another drama, preferably about a black lesbian, a woman of the 21st century, a vegan, a superior feminist, an influencer visiting Starbucks and swiping on Tinder in the evenings, with a son addicted to drugs and facing murder charges. Oh, that would surely be a more fulfilling experience. Hopefully, another great zombie film will come out in another six years. If Father 2 comes out before the sequel to this, I will vomit fire. 10/10. (21/05/2021)

What happened to the Zack Snyder who gave us Watchmen and Dawn of the Dead? It feels like success went to his head because making a mashup of a zombie massacre with an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist is a pretty wild move—even for a Hollywood director. And if I had to pick someone to pull it off, Zack would’ve been the obvious choice. But the brutally overlong runtime, average performances (even Dave Bautista could’ve been better), and a dull, uninspired script that brings nothing new, made this film a chore to sit through. The relentless action just highlighted how tiresome the whole thing was. I couldn’t help but compare it to Shaun of the Dead, which set the standard for zombie flicks. Army of the Dead lacked tight editing, a solid soundtrack (the ending didn’t save it, even if it was flashy), and, most importantly, a cast you could really root for. (25/05/2021)