Taking his cue from 28 Days Later, Snyder used fast-moving zombies as the primary fright. In his Dawn of the Dead, an unknown virus sweeps across the country, leading a disparate group of people to quarantine in a mall while the plague takes hold. This film represents Snyder’s second foray with the undead: Dawn of the Dead, his 2004 remake of the George Romero classic, is coincidently prescient about the events of 2020.

With fast-moving zombies, big guns, and even bigger personalities, Snyder’s Army of the Dead will satiate the hardcore fanbase the director has accrued, even when his oversized ambitions slow it to a crawl. But both films brim with wonderful concepts, captivating setpieces, and obtrusive worldbuilding that shrouds the earnest merits behind their primary narrative: a fraught parent-child relationship. is about to drop a nuclear warhead on the forsaken city.Īrmy of the Dead’s whopping 148-minute runtime is tidy compared to the director’s 242-minute Justice League cut. They have to secure the money within 48 hours, because the U.S. He assembles a rag-tag group of former acquaintances and new faces for the mission, including his estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), and together, they head out on what seems like a near-suicide mission. Leading the team is the hulking Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), who saved the Secretary of Defense from the Vegas catastrophe and earned a medal, but is now flipping burgers in a low-rent diner.

In the basement of his former hotel sits $200 million worth of tax-free money, locked away in a nearly impenetrable safe. It’s the rare instance where a film’s climax occurs in the first few minutes.įollowing the unrestrained freakout, Snyder’s thriller dons the clothes of an epic heist flick: Months after the fall of Vegas, a rich hotel owner with government ties, Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada), enlists a group of mercenaries to infiltrate the overrun sin city. A dimwitted Elvis impersonator, wig askew, looks blankly over the carnage as Richard Cheese’s elegiac cover of “Viva Las Vegas” soundtracks the zany bloodshed. Slot-machine junkies bundling up their remaining pittance dodge the newly infected. And they’re consuming unsuspecting tourists just as quickly. In Las Vegas, flesh-eating zombies are beginning to outnumber the casinos.

During the opening credits of Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, you can nearly feel the director’s giddy smile stretching across the hedonistic melee.

Zombies in a casino