Zack Snyder's latest movie is going to Vegas, but not as we know it. Army of the Dead will be a Vegas heist movie in the vein of Ocean's Eleven and 3000 Miles to Graceland. The twist is that the team puts the caper into motion while the city of Paradise is under a quarantine lock-down. The government didn't cut Sin City off because of COVID. Instead, zombies pack the streets from curb to curb.
The movie's tagline is currently: "Always bet on dead."
Set to a remix of Kenny Rogers' poker music classic "The Gambler", the trailer sees Dave Bautista, a fry-cook with a military past, called in to lead a team of crims and cons into a zombie-infested Vegas. Their goal is to empty a casino vault before the zombies empty their heads of delicious brains. The zombies are 28 Days Later fast and I Am Legend smart, with what appears to be a full-blown society of the dead being run like a cult out of the heart of the strip.
If you were worried this might be another dark and gloomy movie a la Snyder's Man of Steel, you should breathe a sigh of relief when one of Siegfried and Roy's tigers turns up fully zombified.
The movie looks like a return to Zack Snyder's wheelhouse. Campy style-over-substance is where he excels (c.f 300 and Sucker Punch).
After wasting almost a decade on his ponderous attempts to make a "serious" DC extended universe work, he is going back to his roots. His first feature film was 2004's remake of Dawn of the Dead. And we're finally getting his vision of a sequel.
Release the Snyder Cut
Snyder's experience with Warner Bros has become part of the conversation on this movie. After he left Justice League to deal with a family tragedy the production ran away from him and the studio. An enormous internet campaign coalesced around the hashtag #releasethesnydercut. HBO Max eventually did just that, bringing out an all new cut under Snyder's direction and streaming it as a six-part miniseries.
IMDb currently list the plot for Army of the Dead as: "Following a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, a group of mercenaries take the ultimate gamble, venturing into the quarantine zone to pull off the greatest heist ever attempted."
When asked if Netflix has put this film through any similar shenanigans, Snyder was quick to reassure fans. Audiences get to see the Snyder cut of Army of the Dead upfront.
"This was the most gratifying experience making this movie," Snyder said in a Q&A on Netflix. "This is the movie. There are no other cuts of the movie. I didn't have to fight them. It was the opposite. This is the director's cut, and you're going to see it first. You don't have to see the bastardized version first, there's just the awesome version."
Variety has also reported that the movie will be getting a prequel film based around Matthias Schweighöfer's safecracking character from Army of the Dead. Netflix is also producing an anime series that will dive into the backstory of Dave Bautista's character. We all thought the zombie craze was over. Zack Snyder disagrees.
Featured image source: Twitter
