It occurred to me while I was writing this that nobody would ever want to read a ten-page review of a movie that everybody has already forgotten about, so with a keen eye for necessary edits and a curbing of my own tendency towards verbosity I managed to trim it down to twenty pages. I’m sorry.

Army of the Dead

There’s a shot early on in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead when a paratrooper, for some reason, is dropped directly into a horde of zombies. You could head-canon this weirdness away by telling yourself that he was supposed to land somewhere, uh, safer, but in the chaos of attempting to evacuate the few remaining humans from the grips of Las Vegas’s zombie apocalypse shit went sideways and our poorly-oriented flyboy simply became another casualty of both the end-times and the kind of flailing, just-jump-out-of-the-plane-and-I-promise-we’ll-have-a-second-part-to-this-plan-before-you-hit-the-ground style of playcalling that could only pass as a plan during the end-times. You could even go so far as to call this harrowing image good visual storytelling, as it successfully planted in your mind the seeds of a greater conflict: the fear and the fury and the sheer weirdness of what has engulfed the City of Sin and rendered the most powerful nation in the world completely impotent in its response. You could be chilled by how uncanny the apocalypse appears to be, how nearly dreamlike death has been rendered as incredulity, basic survival instinct, hubris, tacky architectural design, seemingly unkillable monsters, and more than a splash of post-modernism have been cocktailed together into something no one saw coming or has any type of logical response for, and against whose surreal inevitability an otherwise extremely pro-noise public has been reduced to a death-accepting fugue-state, the mind abandoning the body to a parallel kind of zombie-dom in order to spare itself the misery of feeling that first bite, to say nothing of the last. You would, in conjuring this meticulous and legitimately compelling framework against which to contextualize Captain Parachute’s demise, be doing an admirable amount of narrative heavy-lifting and some damn fine world-building, too. You would also, by this movie’s own standard of intellectual and emotional sincerity, be an idiot, a nerd, definitely a spaz, and absolutely deserving of mockery, because the idea that there’s anything going on behind the baroque nihilism of a soldier being lowered into a vat of hungry death, that there is some land of deeper thought made accessible by the grim privilege of its presented affect, is an absurdity to the nearly religious devotion that Army has towards greasy nothingness as the fundamental argument of human life, this depressing belief in the diarrhea-soaked destiny of all human moments, and the weird – and I mean fucking strange – sense of responsibility the film feels to not just advocate this dumbass pretend-philosophy but to do so with as much hideous glee as the obligations of narrative will allow.

(The real point of The Man Who Would Be Dinner’s oopsie fall, the detail that the movie truly wants you to focus on – and this point will prove to be bizarrely important as we go along  – is that there isn’t so much fear on the his face as he approaches his gruesome demise, nor the paralyzing realization of just how fucked humanity might be against these horrifying creatures, but rather a general air of shittiness – a strange, vapid petulance angrily exuded from his every doomed pore as Mr. Delicious floats on down to Murder Avenue, like he seems unable to actualize the very concept of death and views this whole, uh, bugaboo he finds himself in to be more of an inconvenience and embarrassment than the moment before the fucking lights go out. It’s like he’s just too dumb to realize he’s going to die, even though he really obviously is about to, and it renders his response completely incongruous with what’s going on around him. The drama and the import and the scope of human conflict uncorked by the zombie apocalypse may not have been lost on you, but they sure as shit were lost on him.)

Army of the Dead is a bad movie. It’s bad for a myriad of technical and conventional reasons, but that’s not a big deal. There are a lot of technically and conventionally bad movies, and some of them are actually kind of great. Many of them are at least good. But Army’s badness is fundamentally different from these other, more earnest failures, in a way that at times appears to only be tangentially related to filmmaking as an art form, though it may manifest itself in every aspect of said form; no, however much this movie may blow in the, let’s call it classical sense of the word “bad” (and by the truth-delivering light of the stars above it fucking sucks) it fails much more spectacularly, actually rather stunningly, at something more basic than filmmaking, something baked so fundamentally into the concept of storytelling – of existing, more or less, in any capacity that lists human among its features – that you wouldn’t even think to assess it the same way you would assess, say, the use of chiaroscuro in the lighting, or the internal logic of the screenplay; it’s a quality I honestly didn’t think could be a movie’s downfall because it seems like anyone capable of making a movie in the first place would have to have already, by definition, worked out its basic structure, if not its more compelling intricacies: the ability to use a single, sincere emotion to craft an environment across which basic empathetic engagement can take place. We’re not talking about something you go to film school to learn about, we’re talking about something you go to fucking pre–school to learn about, and are typically expected to get down right around the time you get good at remembering to raise your hand and ask to go to the bathroom instead of just shitting yourself.

Shitty Shit vs. Being Shit-Shitty

This is a fascinating split to me, one whose inherent incongruities (a professional storyteller with nothing but contempt for the entire thing stories were invented to do) never fail to make me feel like I just tried to play the drum part on “YYZ” using only my fucking face, so I really want to be specific about what I mean: a bad movie is, to me, a human story told poorly – whether it’s stiff or inexperienced actors or an uninspired director or a disastrous shoot or lack of a budget or Brett Ratner or studio interference in the editing process or somehow Brett Ratner again or any other of the countless pitfalls a film can fall victim to as it attempts to mimic the quirky gait of the human experience. A bad movie wants to invoke feeling-by-proxy; it just doesn’t quite get there. There’s nobility in the effort, though, and I really mean it when I say that a lot of bad movies are worth our time. But Army of the Dead just doesn’t deserve even this qualified place on the podium. This is because it doesn’t just fail in the try, it doesn’t even not try at all, it – and I’m still at a loss as to how I can phrase this properly – actively fights against telling a human story, against even putting itself in a position to fail; it instead settles recalcitrantly from its opening moments into a self-consciously spiteful standard of interaction with its audience that, no matter how much I try to reconcile it away as the result of some technical failure, like gallows humor poorly implemented, or a director juggling more tones and styles than he’s comfortable with, or edgelord-iness, seems to come from nothing more than a place of real, actual contempt for anyone dumb enough to want to like this film. This is the angriest and most fucking miserable zombie-heist-action-comedy I’ve ever seen. Army of the Dead is a movie that wants you to feel dumb for liking movies. It wants you to feel dumb for liking anything. It’s not sarcastic, or grim, or challenging some sacred notions of propriety that us pearl-clutchers just aren’t real enough to appreciate – I’m not the dad from Footloose quite yet. It’s just that this movie truly seems to hate existing, a trait rendered even stranger and more unsettling when you consider just how much effort it puts into existing. It’s like Ouroboros swallowing its own tail but instead of doing so as anarcho-cosmic commentary on the unfathomable cyclicality of existence it’s more in the service of the grim satisfaction of being able to continuously desecrate your own body while never being granted the relief of death – or just the thrill of being able to eternally shit into your own mouth.

This is very weird, making a movie that is basically is a very expensive and expansive middle finger to the notion of making movies! Army is that kid sitting in the back of the classroom calling everybody else a faggot for trying to solve the problem on the board. And it’s that constant need to remind everyone watching, and to remind them on the grandest terms possible, just how little the movie cares about anything that I can’t fully wrap my brain around – in fact, I’d go so far as to say that Army’s carefully planned spite might be just about the only thing even vaguely interesting about the film, because there’s some psychological, maybe even emotional, bent that must be informing the decision to hate all things always. It makes me wish the movie was a different movie entirely, one that turned the camera around and became a Herzog or maybe von Trier-esque character study of the type of person who would try this hard to make a motion picture for the sole purpose of expressing how much they loathe the entire reason people make motion pictures.

A Master of His Craft

I’m not sure I have much to say about Zack Snyder that hasn’t already been said before. Dude’s weird. He seems genuinely pleasant in every media appearance I’ve ever seen him in, grinning and excitable and earnestly engaging with his interviewer as he explains to them that in his next movie Superman is going to disembowel Lex Luthor because holding yourself to higher standards than your opponent is dumb or that Batman is going to call Catwoman a cunt or that Watchmen is his favorite comic because it has rape in it. It’s like the dude was down in the emotion mines with the rest of us, drudgingly introducing pickaxe to rock while trying to understand this damned thing called life when he struck a vein that spurted out a noxious black tar that literally any other human would have immediately identified as misery, only investigating the gross pitch for as long as it took them to confirm their suspicion. But Snyder, being a card I guess, only threw back his head and screamed “Gold! Black Gold! And it’s all Daddy Snyder’s!” He remains immensely proud of his discovery to this day, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every else already knew about it, has known about it since the dawn of fucking civilization, and actively tries to avoid it. But he goes out in public wrapped in his tar-juice like a rapper showing out in full ice to show the world, baby, I made it. It informs everything he makes, from this movie to his bizarrely inhuman superheroes who have nothing but contempt for the people they only very reluctantly save, all the while doing everything short of asking one another, “Why can’t we just fucking kill everyone? I mean, we’re Gods, right?” I truly find the man fascinating, because he is endlessly impressed by his own incuriousness, like he concluded long ago that blitheness is a cultural Rosetta Stone that presents the world to you on its truest terms. Everything he makes is a towering monument to how far you can go, how tall of a structure you can build, if you just don’t give a shit about what you’re making, and if you’re secretly excited that it might tip over.

Let’s Start at the Beginning: The Origins of Ugh

I’ll give the man this, though: there is a purity to his dumb and pointless vision. A kind of “Michelangelo spending four years working on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling” level of studiousness about him as he frowns across his palate, his canvas, before finally settling on the Asparagus Green shade of shit that he wants to smear across the camera and then, nodding in agreement with himself, lovingly traces across the lens while thinking to himself “yes, yes this should invoke the desired emotion. To think I almost went with Chipotle-Red… no, no, you save Chipotle-Red for the third act, Snyder.” So with this master’s eye for miserable detail already locked and loaded we get into the business right from the jump, with an opening sequence I think is essential to parse in obnoxious amounts of detail in order to fully understand the breadth of this bizarre vapidity, this seeming contempt for all things:

Our movie about a father who deep down really does love his daughter and the daughter who just needs to learn to let him back in again starts with the holocaust of all car crashes caused directly by a woman whose name in the credits is probably “Whore” giving a blowjob to a man so stupid his name in the credits is probably “Potato.” Everyone is dumb and explodes, and the ones who don’t explode have their faces ripped off, and are therefore also dumb for not having the foresight to die in the explosion, which is at least a cooler and presumably faster way to go. My completely accurate synopsis aside, this insistence on not just kicking off the story with people like these but to render them with such hyper-focused characterization – and this absolutely qualifies as good, lean, efficient characterization – is actually essential in appreciating Snyder’s prerogatives. We could’ve started our film with its initial zombie already slowly making his way towards Vegas, shrouded in pre-dawn darkness, pulling interlopers and romantics and down-on-their-luck gamblers out of frame with the wet squelch of their final gasps and the vile clomp–clomp of violently ravenous jaws, all while the movie offers us no music, no rhythm, guides us only by the uneven footsteps of the walking plague approaching its teeming destination, picking off and creating more fellow plague rats as he goes. Maybe give this zombie a dog-tag tangled around his wrist to show that he’s already escaped the convoy that the audience might be hoping will show up before he hits Vegas. Or we could’ve done the whole convoy thing, but maybe the newlyweds are portrayed as actual humans of some kind, and they are only pushed off the road by the soldiers, nervously and ill-advisedly exiting their car to see what’s going on, and then tragically both witnessing and be made inaugural victims to the zombie takeover of Las Vegas.

But, no. The real focus of Snyder’s – just like his bizarre insistence on showing what a dumb asshole that paratrooper in the credits montage apparently is – is to highlight the complete uselessness of every single character in every possible capacity other than as the kindling they’re going to be used for in the explosion he will inevitably be killing them in. And this vileness is done so lovingly, with such a romantic’s eye for equating life to an overflowing toilet, takes such proud center stage throughout this entire opening sequence, that you can tell that’s where his true heart was at! The soldiers and the newlyweds are portrayed as dipshits with breathtaking efficiency, a level of storytelling skill that is prevalent literally nowhere else in the film, and on the rare occasion it is even attempted fails in the type of metaphorical car crash that puts the opening scene’s literal one to shame. It boggles me! It’s like the only, highly specific form of storytelling Snyder cares about or can even perceive of is one in which you’re downplaying rather than uplifting the lives of the very characters you’re supposed to be shepherding into our affection, if not successfully through the story’s conflict! It’s like he can fart the alphabet but still somehow doesn’t know how to read!

(Oh, hey, here’s another one: what if the two newlyweds were likable in some way, and that one gregarious soldier actually had a moment with them before they died, and his guilt over losing them causes him to also head back into the city for some reason at the same time Ward and his crew go in, and we have a kind of competition of interests between the piratic Ward and the now romantically-chastened soldier, and in the ensuing team-up – oh, fuck it.)

And this weird focus on tearing down the characters before the zombies can even get their clammy hands on them undercuts everything, particularly the things that should be riveting, be right in line with a fun R-rated zombie heist movie, and, most importantly, align perfectly with Snyder’s reputation as a stylish director. Take the movie’s inaugural zombie attack, which happens right after the convoy and the newlyweds tie for first in their game of Moron Chicken: our two doofus drivers stand there and watch as The Man Who Would Be Zombie King tees off on the assembled soldiers, fucking them up royally without much pushback. I’m not going to complain that we’re seeing the monster too soon because this obviously isn’t a “straight” horror movie where you’d typically withhold sight of the baddie until the very end of the first act. But for fuck’s sake, the zombie just stiff-arms a couple of soldiers in a completely flat shot while screaming; nothing is built up to, no tension is achieved or even attempted, no slow revelation of what is this thing, or even a sudden and horrifying reveal of the extent of its powers, timed right when the soldiers are letting their collective guard – to say nothing of their rifles – down and exchanging looks with one another of “guess we were just transporting some guy with bad skin…?” The movie’s first zombie, the vector by which we’d be transported into the movie part of a movie in a, you know, real movie, just kind of runs around screaming at everyone, the mystery or even basic import of the scene almost self-consciously drained away in favor of blowjob jokes and car accidents. It’s like Snyder blew all of his creative juices trying to make the newlyweds and the soldiers as repulsively inhuman as possible and had nothing left – whether it be skill or interest –  to offer when the actual inhuman showed up, instead just shrugging and saying, “I showed you that these characters are pricks and are supposed to die, and then they died; who cares how it happens?” And as we’ll see time and time again, in terms of pretty much every facet of this film’s construction, our director is more fascinated with showing us just how worm-like the worms he’s using as bait are than he is in harrowing us with the size of the incoming fucking fish.

Which brings us back to the opening credits montage. You know, the one where the paratrooper thing happens. I’m not going to parse it frame-by-frame because it’s a whole lot of the same thing, so I’ll just jump to something at the end that caught my eye: remember how I said Snyder’s real focus during the “paratrooper missed his mark and missed it fucking hard” moment was the Vacation Dad-levels of anger with which our flyboy appraises his imminent demise? Well that happens again, right at the end of the sequence whose accompanying track I can’t recall but was probably “Viva Las Vegas” because choosing literally anything else would cause all the knowledge in the universe to suddenly and magnificently blast itself with the forgotten rawness of the Old Gods directly into Zack Snyder’s brain and cause him to be able to see in five dimensions and finally achieve his ultimate form or whatever. Anyway, we see another group of soldiers and another Humvee, and they are, also inexplicably, surrounded by thousands of zombies on all sides. Head-canon, it’s to visually represent the insurmountable task they’re up against, whatever, whatever. The point is shit goes south again, and the apparent squad leader is the last one left. He mounts the Humvee in a desperate attempt to prolong life, which is actually a refreshingly human move to make, and – oh, for fuck’s sake, there’s that angry scowl again! Once more we are not pulled into his conflict and invited to share the horrifying pain and fear he must be going through – or even partake in the gleefully fun sadistic thrill of watching his demise safely, from a distance, outside of his grim fiction, on our comfy side of the movie screen – because he apparently has no conflict to share with us because once again we have a character who seems too dumb to conceive of death as an idea, let alone a mechanical inevitability, and subsequently just seems annoyed that he’s going to have to take one of those open-eyed no-breath-y sleeps that everybody else seems to be taking. No brave face or moment of stoic bravado or desperate invocation of his wife’s name or his husband’s name or his kids’ names or God’s name or his fucking dog’s name. He just looks pissed off, like he hit traffic on the way home from work. And what’s the last thing that he does end up saying, a word that we can clearly read from his lips because the camera deliberately lingers on him long enough to let us see it, much the same way it lingered with gleeful spite on the paratrooper’s descent?

“Motherfuckers!”

You’ll Have to Excuse Me, I’m New to This Planet

In between my moments of explaining away these decisions with “Zack Snyder has deep-seated anger issues that manifest themselves, like a problem child, in self-destructive behavior” are moments in which I think the dude’s brain just doesn’t work right. It’s like he’s never met a person before. It’s George-Lucas-and-the-prequels-levels of unfamiliarity with basic human interaction if George Lucas also had the uncontrollable urge to kill all things, everywhere, ideally with a spoon, to really make things grim and slow and to ruin the concept of spoons for everyone forever. To prove this urbane and understated argument let’s just keep chugging along and hop into the final part of the opening montage, when all the fodder-characters have been killed off and we start to sprinkle in shots of our protagonist characters, who are also just fodder characters but with larger biceps and louder haircuts.

The introduction of the traveling meat-buffets who we will follow from one unconnected plot point and gloriously arbitrary personality metamorphosis (more on that in a minute) to the next until the movie ends with Zack Snyder literally blowing up all of creation with such callousness and boredom at his own inevitability it’s like if Slim Pickens didn’t even bother waving his hat around when he rode the bomb to the ground is, actually, kind of cool. The gross panorama of mayhem that characterizes the first part of the montage slowly gives way to a more focused but also delightfully wordless retelling of what some of our protagonists were doing during the Fall of Las Vegas (spoilers: it was Heroic Things). I will admit my head perked up a little bit from the coma my brain was trying to will itself into when it seemed like something approximating both technical structure and a coherent emotional framework was being crafted from the vistas of many-colored-but-still-somehow-kind-of-gray barf this movie had so far been finger-painting with and probably sneaking the occasional taste of. Hey, maybe the rest of the world is being portrayed as irredeemable to make our heroes nobler in the contrast! Maybe there is a method to this madness, and we’re actually going to get a scene that isn’t designed for the sole purpose of ending in a literal car crash and then we, as an audience, will finally be able to connect to something – nope! My mistake!

Right when it looks like a movie is about to sneak out from under Zack Snyder’s stifling and self-consciously uglifying narrative gaze like a fart wondrously unleashed upon a packed subway car we are hit with another undercutting of whatever the hell this movie is supposed to be about at any given moment, but this latest nose-dive into the Sea of the Grim and the Uncanny is even more inexplicable because it appears to be the result of a sincere effort gone horribly, headache-inducingly wrong. I would even try to write the whole thing off as a joke but that couldn’t possibly be the case because if it was supposed to be a joke Snyder wouldn’t have the restraint to be nearly this subtle and would instead substitute in a more on-brand attempt at humor, like having a redneck wearing a t-shirt that says “AIDS IS FUNNY” call a woman a swear word before stepping on a landmine and blowing his own legs off and rolling around on the ground waving his leg stumps in the air and yelling “they gonna calls me Stumpy from now on! Still think AIDS is funny, though! Tell your friends: Stumpy the Redneck love AIDS!” and then a truck driven by someone in Klan robes and screaming the n-word runs him over or something.

Alright, alright here’s what struck me as so nuts: our heroes are introduced, like I said, doing Hero Things (pulling children from the midst of seemingly imminent zombie-death, helping immigrants file paperwork to get health care, etc.). This is fine and an uncontroversial example of Good Things to Put in Your Movie, especially if you want Likable Protagonists. But then it just gets weird in a way that I honestly am at a loss to chalk up to one particular motivation or another and instead am just attributing to “emotional incompetence.” During some of these Hero Rescue: All Part of the Job, Ma’am moments our protagonists will save someone, notice a bite mark on their arm, and then, their expression barely changing, turn their gun away from the zombies, train it on the person they just saved, and blow them away with a round between the eyes. This is very weird, as public executions are typically not included in montages of heroic behavior! And I know the defense that immediately springs to mind: “it’s done to highlight the grim realities of the job and the absolute chaos of the evacuation and the steely resolve that our heroes must bring to bear in order to save who it is possible to save”! This could be fine, if it – and “it” is murder, remember – was done with something approximating an emotional struggle on behalf of our heroes and filmed in the context of the necessarily complex tones required to highlight the awful reality of, you know, saving someone only to find yourself forced to euthanize them. But in this montage, in the hands of this director, none of that happens – everything is portrayed in these weirdly monolithic and unreflective shifts of behavior, like the characters only exist in the script a sentence at a time – so the above rationale simply can’t fully bail out or even make coherent tonal sense of these moments of cold-blooded killing. Have Ward tearfully implore a man with a bite mark to close his eyes before it happens, maybe, while one of Ward’s compatriots takes the man’s daughter and buries her face in his chest so she can’t watch, and then when it’s over our hero has a faraway look in his eye, seemingly barely cognizant of the next wave of zombies he has to confront, the next civilian he has to put down. Or better yet, don’t have public executions in your silly bang-bang movie! But no, we don’t get anything like that, any awareness of how completely incongruous with our protagonists’ Heroic Introduction this all is, how bizarrely blithe they are about everything.

(One of these instances in particular is lodged in my brain: at one point, our female lead saves a young black guy, notices that he has a bite mark and then, while he is begging her for mercy, just kind of shrugs and shoots him in the head. Does the camera cut tastefully away? do we get a lingering shot of regret on her face? Nope! The camera sits right the fuck there, reveling in the opportunity to show yet another idiot dying yet another idiot death, presented as dumbly as possible to maximize his humiliation for the audience’s, let’s go with “amusement.” For all the lovingly slow pans over characters whose last words are “motherfuckers!” we never get any corresponding camera work over moments when humanity or anything even vaguely relatable to a functioning human might be happening; Snyder films with glee the idiot who dies, not the remorseful woman forced to shoot him. Take note of priorities!).

And, amazingly, we still haven’t got to the part that in the hands of another filmmaker I would think was the punchline to the world’s grimmest setup, the part that makes me think I’m misappraising Zack Snyder’s nihilism when in reality he is just has brain worms or something. See, everything I’ve mentioned so far was only a psychopathic appetizer to the true Shangri-La of Snyder’s crazy. The capstone to the whole affair is this detail, which honestly caused me to turn my head so far to the side in order to make sure I was seeing everything correctly that I rotated completely out of my chair, stood on my head for a moment like the world’s most Jewish break-dancer, and then reseated myself after having completed an entire revolution of incredulity and brain-injury. Here’s the part that broke me: intercut with these moments of our heroes murdering people are shots of them after the conflict, still in their battle fatigues, tragically holding up photos of the fallen, many of whom they have most likely killed themselves! We’re fifteen minutes into a movie whose thesis so far has been “everybody is a dick and I’m glad they’re dying; you know what? fuck the zombies, I hope cancer gets them first” when suddenly we’re hit with shots that are meant to convey the seriousness and somberness of the moment! It’s like the ending of Miami Connection when, after our heroes have murdered everyone with karate and swords, a title card appears and urges humanity to abandon its violent ways. Miami Connection’s complete emotional incongruity had an excuse – they were all on drugs! What’s this movie’s?

And for more evidence that Zack Snyder apparently doesn’t understand how human emotion works let’s go back to the World’s Dumbest Convoy from the movie’s opener. I know we’re backtracking, here, and we’re barely going to make it past the first part of the first act before I have to stop and just stare at the wall for a while until the room stops spinning and I can breathe again, but this moment has been stuck in my brain like skinny jeans on a not-so-skinny man and I need to get it off my chest before my brain completes its transformation into a hunk of gorgonzola and I am rendered useless forever: the two bantering soldiers who were driving point in the Death Convoy, Redundancies Are for Weenies Edition survive the crash, witness all the carnage and madness of the zombie’s escape, and then manage to escape themselves over a dune and into the night. They’re scared shitless and understandably so, as they’ve just watched a ton of people die and apparently monsters are real and one is almost certainly hunting them. Nice opportunity to let the hectic moment work its magic on the audience, let the fear percolate, really let us see these two in their most desperate and human and probably final moments, and make their demise – even if it is a fun, gnarly demise! – something impactful to behold. And then one of them gets freaked out by his own shadow or something (I’m still not entirely sure what happens), hits the ground, and both of them are laughing like drunk college freshmen walking back to their dorm, being all like, “ahaha, total fag move, bro! Afraid of the dark or something? What are you, a queer?” They just forget that a monster is hunting them, and that said monster has killed, like, a lot of people in the past minute-and-change. I feel like I am taking crazy pills, here! Is Snyder that emotionally incoherent, or are these two deliberately being portrayed as that dumb because he can’t kill off any characters without first reminding us, again and again and again, just how useless and undeserving of life everyone is? Remember, these two soldiers just watched all of their friends die and have probably experienced the collapse of their entire understanding of reality in the past, like, ten seconds. And now they’re both silly-bros! I have no idea if “emotional continuity” is a metric by which movies are supposed to be judged – it sounds more like a field that a therapist has to fill out on a psychological assessment form after meeting with a patient being held in solitary because he ate his grandparents or something – but this movie can’t reasonably check that box. Nobody ever exhibits the same emotion in consecutive moments, like the movie is so apathetic about its own events that the actors can only see a green-screen behind them and just have to guess what’s going on in the scene proper from how disconcerting of a grin they can see on Snyder’s face from the director’s chair. 

I Am a Meat Coat, And My Bones Are Its Hanger, or: A Box Full Of Stuff

And this pattern – more of a lifestyle choice, really – can be found growing, like a fungus, in the very foundational aspects of the movie, until we’ve reached a point where apathy hasn’t just seeped into the characterization but the basic structure of the film itself, technical aspects that I didn’t realize a movie could not just whiff on, but apparently not be bothered to care about in the first place. Let’s start with the characters, and how they are portrayed over the course of the story: after the opening montage, and after our elite special forces operative protagonist is reintroduced to us in his new life working as a fry cook because Zack Snyder read somewhere that audiences relate to a down-on-their-luck character (even if his down-on-his-luck-ness makes absolutely no sense), we’re introduced to the crew that will be going into the city together. It’s a heist movie, and the crew in a heist movie pretty much by definition has to be colorful to make it all work, and if this movie’s biggest flaw was following the beats of the genre too closely this review would be one-fifth its size, so I’m not going to complain about stock characters. But the movie either forgets the one trait given to each character or has let its apathy and contempt for storytelling pervade its structure so deeply it just assigns characters arbitrary lines entirely out of spite. We meet a YouTuber character at one point – why an elite soldier would recruit a douchebag from YouTube is never explained, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry – and he behaves exactly as you would expect in the first meeting. He’s an opportunist, a blowhard, a lowlife, seems to fundamentally not understand the danger of going into the city, and basically has “runs away from the group during a moment of crisis only to get his comeuppance a while later” nearly tattooed on his forehead. Got it, sure, movies. But then, at the big group meeting to go over the plan to rob the casino he is suddenly attentive, studious, damn near soldierly in his behavior, treating the two partners that he brings with him – presumably also douchey YouTubers – like trusted fellow warriors. And upon entering the city he is all business, sincerely caring about the only one of his two initial partners who came with him, and advising other members of the group to take the events around them more seriously.

And speaking of his partner, we are explicitly told that she has no experience in combat, so of course a few scenes later she goes full Xena and ruins the shit of dozens of zombies, while also carrying herself like a battle-hardened warrior. I don’t think this is nitpicking. Nitpicking would be more along the lines of “Why aren’t they wearing ear protection when they shoot the guns? Guns are deafening!” This is fundamentally lazy writing. Characters simply exchange personalities on a scene-by-scene basis for apparently no other reason than the production team never checked the character cards that had important details like “YouTuber character – douchebag” written on them. Even our protagonist isn’t exempt from this: Ward takes the offer to rob the casino because he wants a better life for his daughter, or redemption, or some nebulous Hero Motivation that we don’t really notice or care about too much in movies like this. Point is, he’s a solid dude. But when he’s recruiting his first partner – the memorable character of lady whose name I didn’t actually forget because I never learned it in the first place – he gleefully tells her he’s going to lie about what the total pull is – fifty million – so he can keep more money for himself. So he’s a douchebag? But I thought he cared about his team and was driven by Hero Desires and wanted redemption and – oh, fuck it, who cares. Best I can tell is that Snyder saw an opportunity to once again remind you how much he hates people, and if that opportunity involves blowing up whatever paltry characterization Ward was given to start the film then that’s a small price to pay to sicken the audience with deeper levels still of unctuous behavior.

Even the structural parts of the film drip with this bizarre laziness, and like so many things I’ve mentioned before I can’t tell if it’s a sick joke or just Snyder not understanding human emotions at all. Let’s take Ward’s defining tragedy: he loses his wife during the evacuation of the Las Vegas. Damn. Sometimes the simplest motivations are the most impact. But how the moment of her demise unfolds is completely incompetent. As the actually-kind-of-visually-cool-and-efficiently-done-except-for-the-unironic-murder-part sequence is winding down we see that our protagonists have saved everyone they’re going so save and are fighting their way towards the exit. Ward’s wife and the little girl she has in tow are right behind him, that last opening in the freight-container barricade that has been hastily built around the city just a few feet away. Since we know Ward has to lose his wife to give him a tragic backstory we wait for a zombie arm to reach up from an unnoticed crevice, or someone’s boot to get caught, or a necklace that Ward gave his lady before they went into the city to fall to the ground and the little girl foolishly goes back for it, or something. But Ward’s wife, who, and I cannot stress this enough, was right behind him, just kind of stops moving towards the exit, in a weird invisible-rope moment that looks like a scene from an improv-comedy show where the characters are told to pretend they are caught in strong headwinds. The film couldn’t even be bothered to come up with some reason for Ward’s wife and the girl to not make it to the exit so they just stop moving, coming to a halt literally in the opening where the last freight container will be dropped. And Ward? Well, Drew Carey told him that he’s experiencing headwinds from the exact opposite direction (Scenes From a Hat is always a riot) so he’s just kind of stuck in place, too. And then, in a completely flat shot, and I’m taking flat and wide, like Snyder really wanted to put it home for us, the crane operator just drops the last freight container on Ward’s wife and the little girl, and I swear to God all that’s missing is Ward’s wife holding up a sign that says “Yikes!” right before it hits her. And of course a child is murdered as well because did you really think a child wasn’t going to get murdered? I honestly don’t know if this is supposed to be hilariously grim or, like the intercuts of our heroes holding up signs during the earlier part of the montage, another structural detail – characters need motivation! tragic backstories make you sympathetic! – being handled with such apathy that it comes across like something from a junkfood-induced nightmare.

Also, I have to include this one before we go on to the next section (don’t worry, you’re almost done!) because while it doesn’t whiff on the same grandiose scale as the Death by Looney Tunes moment it is just so weird that I have to write about it: when we first meet the zombie queen, when she’s being offered the rapist as a sacrifice, there are of course plenty of things done completely wrong from a filmmaking standpoint: the queen is introduced in a bland close-up without the slightest cleverness in her reveal, the rapist-sacrifice never shuts the fuck up and, like so many characters before him, is apparently too dumb to realize he’s going to die, and so on. But the part that highlights how this movie’s apathy seems to have worked its way down to the basic editing level comes right at the end. After the queen and her goon take the rapist away Ward’s daughter hops on top of an abandoned bus and watches their retreat with a pair of binoculars. Again, a boring, flat shot, too much information given too soon, it demystifies the zombies to just frame them center-stage like that – but, whatever, that’s not what I’m getting at. The part that blows my mind is that the queen zombie looks right at the camera, gives a kind of “you mad, bro?” look, and then turns and runs away into the background for several seconds with the weirdest arm motion I have ever seen. I mean, these zombies are supposed to be horror personified, right? Wouldn’t you maybe cut the lingering shot of the actress running away from the camera, running with a motion so bizarre and clearly uncomfortable that it really seems like she didn’t know she was still being filmed? Just like with characters simply swapping personalities as the movie goes along it’s like no one even noticed any of these weird little editing mistakes – or noticed and just didn’t care.

The Soundtrack

If Zack Snyder wanted a song to play during a scene in his movie where someone chokes on a chicken bone he would somehow, some way find a song from the 70’s called “Oh, No, I’m Choking On A Chicken Bone” and unironically play it in its entirety.

I’m Not Dumb for Not Having Any Answers, You’re Dumb for Asking Questions

The paratrooper scene that I opened this review-screed with is repeated a lot throughout the movie. Not, like, the actual footage – although, please, no one tell Zack Snyder that you can just film one person dying horribly and then loop it indefinitely, that’s how Hitler used to pass the time – but the general idea of logic being entirely subordinated to a voyeuristic delight at death and its elongation for no reason, with “for no reason” being the essential part of the sentence. I think so much of my frustration with this movie comes from my brain’s desire to project some kind of logic, some kind of depth onto the joyless and bizarrely inert funhouse ride that Army prides itself on being – anything that will explain the bone-sure confidence with which each textureless, interminable scene is presented to us. But there really is nothing there, and I’m on pace to spend 8000 words trying to explain how many colors I can see in a black hole. To this end I’m reminded of the scene in which the Super-Cool-Reserved-Guy-With-An-Ulterior-Motive-Until-He-Inexplicably-Turns-Into-Vacation-Dad-Halfway-Through-The-Movie is murdered by a zombie tiger. This is, of course, a scene of comeuppance. He did a bad thing, and now cosmic tiger justice is being doled out. Fine. But just like the first zombie murdering those soldiers in a flat shot, just like the bland-as-hell zombification ritual that I had to cut my commentary of from this review because I’m already bleeding from my eye sockets and can hear the Reaper urging me to follow him to a quieter and more peaceful place, the death scene just goes joylessly on. The tiger tosses its victim around, a lot, and then some more, while the doomed man just grunts and seems equally nonplussed about his impending demise. It’s like a metaphor for Zack Snyder’s entire filmmaking philosophy: settle in on an idea that’s dumbly vicious and then just kind of… point the camera at it for a while. Why does the zombie tiger take so long to kill the guy? why doesn’t the movie just complete the dude’s comeuppance with a quick and morbid wit and let us return to the plot at large? Because killing someone slowly takes longer than killing them quickly, and if you’re looking for an explanation deeper than that you’re asking more from the film than it will ever be able to provide.

The End

Thanks for coming with me, if you did. If you didn’t, that’s cool, too. This kind of became a thing, and it was rude of me to just hoist a thing on you without warning. Even I think it’s too long, and what’s with all those run-on sentences? Thomas Pynchon can make run-on sentences work and, brother, I’m no Pynchon. Anyway, I hope if you did bail on reading this whole thing you’re outside doing something fun, because it’s gorgeous out today. Just a couple more points then I’ll be done:

For what it’s worth I don’t dislike movies just because they aren’t in the Criterion Collection – stay tuned for my Ten Things I Hate About You review! – I just find it so bizarre that someone would spend a hundred million dollars crafting a testament to his own contempt for, near as I can tell, everything that has ever existed or ever will exist, to the very notion of human engagement itself. Because that’s not a pontification on the nature of misery – it’s just directionless spite feeding endlessly into itself. And that’s not to say misery is off limits to storytellers! Storytellers can tell whatever story they want to tell; they don’t owe me anything. But this is a zombie heist movie, so it’s just so damned surreal to have this omnipresent vein of fuck running through the proceedings when I should be yucking it up at clever deaths and general zombie mayhem. I mean, wouldn’t a movie with such a premise almost by definition have some joy in it, some playfulness? Seven Beauties is a movie about misery, and it is a goddamned masterpiece. It also takes place during the Holocaust. The Alex Guinness version of The Ladykillers is all about characters getting offed in darkly humorous ways, and that film is a black-comedy classic. Those two films, fundamentally different though they may be, at least have – among their many fantastic qualities – a human backdrop against which the playfully perverse or the just plain depressing can take place. But you simply can’t make out any difference between the fore, middle and back-grounds of this movie because they’ve all been painted with the same sickly-gray paint. There’s no contrast, no tension between the images or the moments. That’s why I chose to recount the opening sequence in such annoying detail: to stress how crippled the film is from the word go by its own insistence on hating anyone dumb enough to exist in its universe, or dumb enough to watch its universe. This weird spite curdles the drama, farts over the monologues, reminds you how fake the CGI blood looks, causes the jokes to miss and miss hard, reminds you that it doesn’t really matter if any of these people die because they’re all so not just poorly realized but deliberately and spitefully never given realization in the first place that they don’t really have lives to lose, anyway. There is no drama because there’s nothing at stake, and there’s no comedy because there aren’t any people to share the embarrassments with. It’s a house built upon too smugly ironic a foundation to sustain the weight of its underserved confidence. I guess that can be considered a triumph of fatalistic barf-confidence to some people, but to me it doesn’t even qualify as a movie.