Review of Army of the Dead (2021) by Greenisgood — 21 May 2021

TL;DR - IF Snyder can only step away from his need to try hard at making thoughtful piece of art every single time, I am confident that he can grow farther than just that director who can shoot action well. Army of the dead is the usual Snyder trying to flip the book on you but fails in the execution making it an empty, unsatisfying and lengthy experience.

The Good.

Snyder's style of film-making is more often then not always based around cinematography and shot composition. This also always translates into a visually interesting movie with a unique identity in it's look.

However, he focuses a little too much on this, usually keeping the story simple works well but AOTD story has quite a few sub plots,twists and turns and unexpected outcomes. This may be a positive point for a lot of viewers as this is undoubtedly snyder firing on all cylinders but this does not always translate well.

Bautista caught my attention in the short but great role of the protein farming replicant in Blade Runner 2049, he really made that whole scene work with him showing a great range. He is probably the best part of the movie slowly followed by the rag tag characters who had interesting personalities but sadly it's Snyder any character writing is near pointless he manages to actively make you not care about decently interesting characters.

The gore was fun, mixing CGI and practical and the the whole organized/alpha zombies part of the lore was a fun addition to feature-film zombie lore.

The Bad.

This film is such a bag of cliches one after another that you really start feeling the length of this movie. From the trailers it feels like Snyder finally got the point that he makes good action romps that need not take themselves seriously.

I went in expecting the same but I got an average main plot with too many under average sub-plots; held up together with a gigantic bag of cliches, all packaged with great cinematography and shot composition.

This movie bored the hell out of me, I saw every single twist and turn from miles away and hopefully Snyder intentionally made it so obvious. Because if he really intended to flip the script in earnest he really failed, even the nihilistic angle to it seems half @ssed.

Snyder is so hell bent on trying too hard to make a layered masterpiece but focuses on all the wrong things, takes all the wrong decisions with character progression and ends up making movies that are usually unsatisfying, tedious and exhausting to get through. He tries so seriously to make this masterpiece painting but every single decision ends up being generic, forced and thoughtless.

All in all if you are a zombie fan you will get something out of this maybe, rather you catch Alive or Train to Busan for more satisfyingly bleak zombie apocalypse settings.

If you are not a zombie fan but an action junkie as well you may find that the action in the movie is also scarce and generic.