Zack Snyder | Screenlife Reviews

You could argue that Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead way back in 2004 was one of the first projects to spark the renewed craze in the undead. Now 17 years and what feels like that many DC projects later Snyder returns to the genre that put him on the map with Army of the Dead, an original story of his own creation that sends a muscled up team of mercenaries into a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas swarming with zombies to pull off the ultimate heist. It may not hit the same terrifying highs of Dawn, but Snyder should be commended for his willingness to experiment within the zombie genre, bombarding the audience with a deep and (mostly) interesting lore that is ultimately overshadowed by the fairly rudimentary story within. The man may need to learn that less is more when it comes to his new favourite technique, but Army is ultimately an engaging and, above all, fun addition to the zombie canon.

If you thought an abandoned mall was a big playground for zombie shenanigans then prepare to be impressed, as Snyder transforms the adult equivalent of Disneyland into the goriest place on Earth, complete with Sigfried and Roy’s zombified pet tiger. The opening few scenes paint a gruesome and surprisingly humour-infused picture of the beginning of this particular zombie uprising, with flesh-eating Elvis impersonators and showgirls ravaging the town and devouring the population. Only once the city has been fenced off by the Government do we find ourselves face to face with Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), a former soldier tasked with the initial evacuation of Vegas who is now whiling away the hours flipping burgers and reflecting on his brutal past. When wealthy CEO Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) walks into his diner and offers him the chance to make 200 million dollars, Scott’s ears perk up and he begins to assemble a crack team to break into the vault deep within the Strip. Joining him are fellow veterans Maria (Ana de la Reguera) and Vanderhoe (Omari Hardwick), cowardly safe cracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), helicopter pilot Peters (Tig Notaro), YouTube zombie hunter Guzman (Raúl Castillo), Tanaka’s right hand man Martin (Garret Dillahunt) who may or may not have his own nefarious motives and Scott’s daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), who forces herself onto the team in order to rescue a friend from the zombified wasteland.

Once the team enters that wasteland is when Snyder’s true vision for the world takes shape. Alongside the traditional slow-moving “Shamblers” and more modern fast-moving, frenetic zombie are the Alpha’s, high-functioning undead generals within the literal army of the dead. Led by patient zero Zeus (Richard Cetrone), the zombies maintain an almost medieval hierarchy, serving their king and his queen as they defend their territory from intruders. When they enter, Scott’s team must leave a sacrifice for the undead as a sign of respect and this is just one of the fascinating deviations from the zombie norm that Snyder takes. Zeus is a legitimately intelligent and fierce adversary, strategically manoeuvring his subjects to intercept Scott’s team and leave no survivors. It isn’t exactly Game of Thrones in terms of the interactions within this hierarchy of zombies but it is different enough to be a whole lot of fun. Also did I mention the zombie tiger? Because yeah, there’s a zombie tiger and it’s just as awesome as you would think it is.

What isn’t as awesome unfortunately is the interaction between the humans. With the exception of the genuinely touching bond formed between the odd-couple of fierce soldier Vanderhoe and timid Dieter, no single character really gets much of an arc to fulfil. Bautista is excellent as Scott, and is the obvious choice to be leading these sorts of action-heavy films into the future, but he also packs a lot of emotion into his performance. Scott’s past is harrowing and has clearly left him with some serious trauma that has damaged the relationship with his daughter. When he senses this might be his only chance to reconnect with Kate, Scott tries his best, which boils down to offering her his share of the money and constantly quipping about opening up various sorts of food trucks. Great performance but not so great dialogue. This holds true for all of the supporting characters, who either have their own mini, incredibly predictable arc – like the obviously insidious Martin – or are assigned an intriguing character trait that defines them instead of their actions – like the immediately interesting Guzman, who seems to offer a hilarious commentary on modern gaming and streaming culture but never really does anything.

It’s worth mentioning Tig Notaro’s inclusion in the film as well, who replaced Chris D’Elia at the last minute after unsettling (to say the least) revelations emerged about the comedian’s private life. Having been superimposed into the film through some CG trickery, her scenes feel strangely disconnected from not only the rest of the cast but the movie in general, with a distractingly obvious change in background and the general feel of the film whenever we cut to Peters. Her performance isn’t bad, just not as noteworthy as the behind-the-scenes of her appearance. Fortunately the CGI is a great deal better in the realisation of Snyder’s vision of Las Vegas. The dilapidated ruins of Sin City are a visual spectacle, with all the recognisable landmarks in various stages of decay alongside their debaucherous inhabitants. There is a great deal of visual storytelling on display in the design of the city, with the walls keeping the undead in hastily constructed from shipping containers, wordlessly telling a narrative of the panicked response to the outbreak without the need for annoyingly overdone exposition.

In recent releases Snyder has a habit of picking a filmic technique that he is particularly enamoured with and plastering it all over his latest film. In Zack Snyder’s Justice League it was the comically overdone use of slow motion (which does return here, thankfully in smaller doses) but in Army of the Dead it seems as if the veteran director has just discovered focus. Perhaps it was a particular lens he took a shining to but almost every shot in the film messes around with focus to a degree, blurring in and out to maddening results. Entire scenes are often played out with a background blurred to such a ridiculous degree that it actually draws attention away from what is in focus. It doesn’t help a particularly emotional scene if the viewer is trying to discern if the background is a choice or if their TV is broken, in fact it detracts a great deal. He even goes the opposite, even more frustrating route of shooting a scene with the action out of focus, begging the question: why the hell am I watching a window frame in stunning 4K resolution whilst I can barely figure out if the zombie behind it is killing Dave Bautista or on a hot streak in a game of craps in Caesar’s?

After what seems like a terrible journey to releasing his much improved version of Justice League Zack Snyder has been turned loose on an original story with no interference from the studio behind him and it feels good to see him shooting for the moon. Not everything is a slam dunk in Army of the Dead, with some weak character interaction and strange editing choices but Dave Bautista’s casually cool and kick-ass presence and the exploration of a hierarchical zombie society and all the weirdness that brings is well worth your time. If Snyder chooses to keep playing in this sandbox, which it looks like he will judging from his multi-year deal with Netflix, then I’m excited to see how much further he can expand upon this universe’s lore and that of the zombie genre as a whole, as well as whatever animal he chooses to zombify next. Zombie crocodile please.

Army of the Dead stars Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Ana de la Reguera, Omari Hardwick, Matthias Schweighöfer, Theo Rossi, Nora Arnezeder, Tig Notaro, Garret Dillahunt, Raúl Castillo & Hiroyuki Sanada – Streaming on Netflix now.

Director’s cuts are not an uncommon occurrence in the movie industry. We’ve seen classics like Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now improve upon the already iconic finished products and some not as successful attempts (sorry George Lucas). Zack Snyder’s Justice League may be the most deserving of all for its director to be given a second chance, with the original 2017 film caught in a storm of personal grievances and restrictive studio mandates which eventually led to his replacement by Avengers director Joss Whedon. The resulting product was a surface level fight-fest, with nary a full character arc in sight, that attempted to please studio executives rather than the fan base rampant to see out Snyder’s vision, which began with 2013’s excellent Man of Steel. Finally, after years of vehement online support, Warner Bros acquiesced, allowing Snyder to present his full, gigantic 4 hour vision of the ultimate DC super-hero team-up on streaming services around the world. Does it live up to the hype? Yes and no. Let’s get into it.

For the uninitiated, the broad strokes of Justice League centre around Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) attempting to recruit a team of super-powered individuals to fight against the oncoming threat of Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), an intergalactic being hell-bent on destroying the Earth and cultivating it into an apocalyptic wasteland for big bad Darkseid (Ray Porter). In order to do this, he must collect the DC equivalent of the Infinity Stones, the Mother Boxes; three cubes scattered across the globe which, when combined, create an unstoppable force to change the planet to the user’s will. As the newly formed Justice League – now including Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) – clash with Steppenwolf, they begin to realise that their only way to achieve victory may be through some less than ethical means and a recently deceased Kryptonian.

Simply put, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the vastly superior version of the film, feeling like far more of a thematically and tonally consistent sequel to Man of Steel and Batman v Superman than Whedon’s cut. Narratively it is a very similar beast, with majority of the big action set-pieces remaining intact, but where Whedon’s version threw away character development and story in favour of quippy one-liners and mindless filler scuffles, Snyder restores these aspects, with a particular focus placed on the characters of Cyborg and Steppenwolf, two of the most underserved and generic characters from the 2017 film. Cyborg’s origin and relationship with his father is the emotional centre of the film, leaving the baffling question as to why Whedon chose to remove the only fully fledged character arc from his movie. Fisher is wonderful as the troubled half-man half-machine, conflicted over his feelings towards his father’s work that left him alive but cost him his mother and any semblance of a normal life. No longer does Cyborg simply become a hero after a pep-talk from Wonder Woman, but from some serious soul-searching and forgiveness, a theme Ben Affleck’s caped crusader learnt the hard way in Batman v Superman.

Ciarán Hinds’ incompetent villain Steppenwolf is also reworked into a more sympathetic character this time around, less concerned with collecting macguffins to destroy the world than he is to serve out a debt owed to Darkseid and win back his place as the right-hand man of DC’s answer to Thanos. Sure this may be shown in something of a clumsy and eerily relatable way, with Steppenwolf communicating with his boss via a series of magical Zoom calls, but using redemption as a motivator following an implied betrayal of Darkseid makes for a much more interesting character. Steppenwolf’s revamp extends to the visual side as well, marking a significant upgrade for the creature who has gone from a poorly rendered, gladiator armour wearing alien to a ferocious, spike clad minion of death, worthy of the threat Snyder insistently reminds us he is to the newly formed league of heroes. The scenes involving Steppenwolf also showcase a new feature of the Snyder Cut: the R rating. Gore features heavily as Steppenwolf slices and dices his way through scores of Amazonian and Atlantean soldiers, who explode in puffs of viscera at the blade of his lethal axe. It’s an unneeded touch for sure, likely to alienate the ever-present audience of young children who come to these films to see Superman and Wonder-Woman kick butt without any evidence of actual harm, but it certainly fits in with Snyders MO of throwing everything at his likely last outing in the DC universe.

That’s right, all the quirks that come with Zack Snyder’s style are present here on a scale larger than anything we have seen before. That includes some truly cringe inducing dialogue, a return to the gritty, grounded characters of before (gone is the giddily childish humour of Whedon) and as much slow-motion action that the human mind can physically endure before exploding. Seriously, at times it feels like a quarter of the film is just slow-motion shots of our heroes narrowly avoiding a bullet or pushing something out of the way of harm. The lack of a restriction on runtime allows for all sorts of overindulgence on Snyder’s part, from an extended scene of hymns to Aquaman sung by an Icelandic village to an almost Return of the King number of endings, including the much hyped “Knightmare” sequence, which serves as an intriguing, if unfulfilling look at where Snyder’s proposed trilogy of films would have gone. Jared Leto’s singular scene as the Joker here is better than the entirety of Suicide Squad, even if it is about a fraction of the length of that mess, but doesn’t elevate the film significantly or warrant a complete viewing on its own merits.

The continued narrative of Superman continues to be Snyder’s greatest contribution to this iteration of the DC universe, even if he doesn’t lean into the character’s moral compass as much as in Man of Steel, with his endlessly positive message of hope ringing louder now than ever. It is genuinely exciting to see him return to save the day, and the touches of Hans Zimmer’s Man of Steel score in Thomas Holkenborg’s completely re-recorded and otherwise rather generic score are goosebump inducing during the climactic fight scenes. Cavill’s performance is one for the ages and the fact that this may very well be the last time we see him don the blue and red (or black this time around) suit can’t help but feel bittersweet, especially given this film’s lack of importance to the overarching DC story going forward, with Warner Bros declaring Whedon’s cut the canonical entry in the franchise. There is some retribution in knowing that Cavill’s last appearance as the Man of Steel isn’t marred by a digitally removed moustache (Google it) but here’s hoping it isn’t the last time we see him on-screen.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a fascinating experiment of a film. Whilst it is an undoubtedly good thing that Snyder was allowed to see out his full creative vision, the fact remains that this version of the superhero epic – whilst superior to Whedon’s – is at times a bloated, directionless cluster bomb of a movie, with the director let loose to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the viewer’s eyeballs: the good, the bad and the godawful slow-motion (seriously stop doing that). As a continuation of his previous DC work, this feels like a satisfactory, suitably epic conclusion, even if the epilogue scene doesn’t convey that sense of finality. While it is easy to look at the Snyder Cut as a win, it also represents something of the toxic side of fandom, where “fan ownership” of characters leads to the bullying of studios and individuals into getting what they want. I’m more than curious to see what Zack Snyder would do with the sequels to this film and I genuinely hope they get made, but only if the creative team has genuine interest and supports the project, not as a result of a bunch of bullish, entitled fans. When part of the fandom turns as dark as Darkseid’s minions, no one wins.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League stars Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Amy Adams, Diane Lane, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeremy Irons, Connie Nielsen, J.K. Simmons, Ciarán Hinds, Amber Heard, Joe Morton and Henry Cavill – Streaming on HBO Max in the US and on Binge in Australia now.