ARMY OF THE DEAD
After years spent toiling in the superhero world, the filmmaker returns to the bloody territory of his debut for insane genre mash-up ARMY OF THE DEAD
Get yer actual Snyder Cut here! Empire travels to the Atlantic City set of Zack Snyder’s return to zombie mayhem. Blood! Brains! Bautista!
IN RECENT YEARS, Zack Snyder has become more famous for his association with the slick comic-book visuals of movies like 300, Watchmen and what will be — with the imminent release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League — his Superman trilogy. But that’s not where he started. He earned his bones in the film business by directing 2004’s amped-up, James Gunnpenned remake of George A. Romero’s classic zombie flick, Dawn Of The Dead, which perhaps lacked Romero’s satirical bite, but more than made up for it with heavy-metal splatter and an opening sequence for the ages. And that zombie itch hadn’t been fully scratched. Hence Army Of The Dead: his long-awaited return to action horror, with an idea that has been gnawing away at him for over a decade.
“We were going to make it with another director [Matthijs van Heijningen Jr],” Snyder says, speaking to Empire on the New Jersey set of the film back in April 2019. “And then I was talking about ideas with Netflix, and I just mentioned it and everyone went, ‘What the...? Yes!’ I didn’t want to do the old script, which was
much more earnest. I liked that for someone else, but the stakes were different for me.
Dawn is a deconstruction, and this movie feels like a double deconstruction.”
Despite the title, Army Of The Dead isn’t linked to Snyder’s previous movie, or Romero’s movies. Nor is it a part of any of pre-existing Of The Deadiverse (though Netflix, and Snyder, are so confident that it will be well-received that a prequel focusing on Matthias Schweighöfer’s character, directed by Schweighöfer himself, has already wrapped). Instead, it mashes together The Dirty Dozen and Ocean’s Eleven, and adds in a few thousand zombies for good measure. Taking place in a Las Vegas walled off from the rest of the world six years after a zombie outbreak, it stars Dave Bautista as Scott, a mercenary tasked with leading a team to half-inch millions of dollars from a casino vault before the area is nuked to kingdom come. “It was always Vegas,” says Snyder. “I like the Sin City aspect to it. That’s appealing to me. People have been known to make questionable decisions in Las Vegas.”
That’s how we find ourselves in New Jersey, watching Dave Bautista killing a bunch of flesh-eating ghouls. “Raise your hand if Dave kills you!” yells Snyder to a group of heavily made-up zombie extras, just before a take in which Bautista leads his team into a casino (with Vegas off-limits, it’s played today by Atlantic City casino Showboat). Today, that team includes the likes of Ella Purnell (as Scott’s daughter Kate who, as bad timing would have it, also finds herself in the city on a mission of a different kind), Ana de la Reguera, Garret Dillahunt, Omari Hardwick, Schweighöfer and comedian Chris D’elia, who has since been replaced, with some technical jiggery-pokery, by Tig Notaro.
Advancing into the main casino area (with many of the slot machines played by cardboard cut-outs), they’re attacked by some straggly shamblers. Snyder, who as well as directing is either operating a B camera himself or shining a powerful torch at the ceiling as an extra light source, rehearses the action with his cast, making sure they all know which zombie they’re putting down. “Does anybody not know where their zombie is?” he asks. “Does everyone know who they’re killing?” They do. Take after take, the team marches in and silently dispatches zombies, with an AD shouting whenever they’re meant to be shooting. Now and again, Bautista yells, “BANG!” in lieu of a gunshot. That will be added in post.
“I’m a zombie fan,” says Bautista, in-between takes. “I tried to get on Walking Dead for years. I said I would come and play a zombie for free, but they said, ‘You’re too big!’” But he’d been talking to Snyder about another movie when Army Of The Dead came up. “For me, there had to be something special about a zombie film for me to sign up,” he says. “What sets us apart is the heist. But there’s a whole bunch of different layers to this film.”
What those are will be revealed in due course. But, as Bautista and co face off against this army of the dead, expect twists galore, bloodshed aplenty, and a big old bodycount. “It’s just unapologetic, unabashed madness,” adds the director. Release the Snyder cuts.