Sundaymail Editor
OVER the past couple of days, I have had one too many conversations — debates, rather — on the entertainment value of the Zombie genre in cinema. But it is a close colleague of mine who gave me an interesting argument.
And here, I use the word “close” loosely.
“How can you scare people and call it entertainment?” he queried.
I will not bore you with the nitty-gritties of the tedious conversation; suffice to say that one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
While I do enjoy the casual zombie flick, the genre is played out, to borrow some urban slang. The films are often predictable, formulaic, one-dimensional and quite frankly, do not do enough to suspend belief.
However, every now and then Hollywood has been known to produce that one flick that turns out to be the exception to the rule.
Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead” is one such flick. The film opens with a military convoy, as it transports some form of secret cargo from one base to another. An accident occurs and the cargo, later identified as an alpha zombie, escapes and goes on to infect the entire convoy. The now-infected soldiers then move on to Las Vegas, turning the entire town into chaos.
Fast-forward a couple of weeks, Las Vegas, now dominated by a colony of zombies, goes under quarantine, with the United States government planning to bomb the town.
Before that, a wealthy casino owner, Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada), enlists a former mercenary Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) to assemble a group of men and retrieve US$200 million safely locked up in one of his casino vaults.
What ensues is a bonkers thrill-ride full of plenty slow-motion zombie kills, gunfights, tiger and horse zombies and plenty of laughs.
From a storytelling point of view, the film is imperfect. However, Zack Snyder’s brilliant directing and stylistic presentation covers up the flaws. If one is so desperately in need of a brilliant and compact story, then they should pick up a book and read. In film, sometimes imperfection is perfection. After the disaster that was Snyder’s directorial cut of the 2017 “Justice League”, this could be the redemption he desperately needed.
The zombie genre was Snyder’s very first outing, back in 2004, with the release of the now critically acclaimed “Dawn of the Dead”.
While he has been associated with hits like “300” and its sequel “300: Rise of an Empire”, DC hits and misses like “Men of Steel”, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Wonder Woman”, it is the zombie genre that first put him on the map.
As writer and director, he threw everything but the kitchen sink to make this fascinating movie. There is the heist element in how Ward and his men try to venture into hostile territory and retrieve US$200 million. Also, there is a little drama in Ward’s relationship with his daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) and large doses of comedy that come primarily from a new member of the team, Ludwig Dieterm (Matthias Schweighöfer).
Ward and “Power” alumnus Omari Hardwick do most of the work during the action scenes. Word is that this could be just the start of yet another shared cinematic universe, and Snyder teases the appetite quite well in as far as the mythology of his new zombies. There are so many questions left unanswered, especially insofar as the alpha zombie is concerned. Did I mention that there is a zombie-tiger, and more impressively, a zombie-horse capable of running faster than a helicopter?
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