Army of the Dead

Despite a desert-set prologue that uses knowingly overwritten dialogue to prickle memories of the Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer era of Summer blockbusters, Army of the Dead ends up looking a little further back for its structural inspiration. As with director Zack Snyder's debut feature, Dawn of the Dead, Army is the zombie parable repurposed as action cinema, a model (in both instances) heavily indebted to the works of James Cameron. Most obviously, Snyder's latest harkens back to Aliens, a hysteria-inducing masterpiece, quoted here both verbally and mechanically. Sadly, neither of these grammatical reproductions manage to exceed, or even meet, the thundering excitement minted back in 1986. 

Other, earlier, influences bubble to the surface over the course of the piece, films typified by the tension created when well-equipped (American) intruders find themselves out of their depth, in someone else's territory. John Boorman's Deliverance and Walter Hill's Southern Comfort the alpha examples in a sub-genre that works through the Stateside trauma of the Vietnam War by proposing a cultural and technological façade, then allowing them to crumble in the face of a determined, indigenous, force. Army cedes the territory of Las Vegas to Richard Cetrone's musclebound progenitor monster and the children born from his mouth and loins, offering up a primal society of undiminished body-poppers who stand apart from their dried-up, deactivated, brethren lying in state at the city's limits. As with Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, the undead are given routines and something resembling a social class. 

These zombie categories are rooted in a hereditary infection based around a pathogenic half-life that determines that those directly bitten by the source of the infection retain the ability to run and, seemingly, apply basic reason. Conversely, the cases originating from the slathering disciple creatures resolve to a shuffling mass of braindead chompers, content to pack themselves into cool, dry, places, awaiting stimuli. Just as the Dawn of the Dead remake built its threat off the back of the raging sprinters seen in Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Days Later, Snyder's latest also accounts for recent, popular, depictions of massed rot - specifically the undulating lines of regimented dead who departed from The Land of Always Winter in the later seasons of Game of Thrones. 

Computer generated assistance allows the director and his special effects departments to expand the reach of reanimation beyond appliance covered Homo sapiens to include a decayed, but still predatory, white tiger and a collapsing stead for an armoured zombie chieftain. Army of the Dead then is a pastiche, a swaying structure barrelling through sequences and set-pieces with a demented sense of abandon, anchored by Dave Bautista's broken-hearted father. Despite the film's massive length, Snyder and co-writers Shay Hatten and Joby Harold still produce a series of harsh gear shifts; grinding transitions that place expert characters in situations where it's baffling that they don't object to corporate tomfoolery sooner or stammering confessions, squeezed into scenes, that play like roughly applied garnish designed to put a harsher spin on an imminent mangling. 

For a film about a small team of mercenaries invading a walled-off city, danger is neither constant nor mounting in Army of the Dead - an early warning from Nora Arnezeder's Coyote that precipitation will reactivate mummified throngs seems to herald a thunderstorm or a reactivated sprinkler system that never actually trickles to life. Snyder, also working as his own Director of Photography, seems less concerned with this kind of diegetic minutiae, using the film as a further opportunity to perfect his deliberately imperfect approach to digital portraiture. As with the claustrophobic talking heads between Batman and Joker that brought Zack Snyder's Justice League to a close, the director shoots faces coming into and out of focus; human and animal skulls as topographical landscapes, textured with peaks and valleys, framed by distorted instances of intrusive light.