Army of the Dead – Cinema Inserts

Poor Snyder

Yago Paris

In the same year, and barely two months apart, Zack Snyder has released two films on two different video-on-demand platforms, and with opposite results. The face of this coin is Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a mammoth project that has only been possible, as Raúl Álvarez points out on the podcast of Divergent cinema, because it has been released on a platform (HBO), as it would have been practically impossible to have gotten an economic return on the investment if it had been designed for the movie theater, as it is a four-hour film, with an almost more artistic look than entertainment. The cross corresponds to Army of the dead, a project that has also been released on a platform (Netflix), this time because it does follow the logic of this type of production: a television production and a pretense of immediate entertainment that you can forget instantly, once the film is finished. While the former aspires —if it has not succeeded— to be, by far, the most artistically elaborate work in the history of superhero cinema — taking into account the formidable work of framing, planning and lighting that the film presents—, the second is content to be a rehash of the zombie subgenre. In the same year, Snyder has signed what would be reasonable to defend as his best work and what is difficult not to understand as his worst film to date.

Army of the dead combine horror with heist-style comedies Ocean’s Eleven– A group of professionals must infiltrate Las Vegas, turned into zombie territory, and recover the money from the safe of one of its casinos, before the American army detonates an atomic bomb that is going to devastate the city. Snyder’s return to the undead narratives is the opposite of his debut feature, Dawn of the Dead. While that was a smart remake from Zombie (1978), full of portentous visual ideas and with a visual narrative that anticipated the best manifestations of the talent of its author, on this slope to find moments of value. Saving the credits scene and the sequence in which the group must go through corridors full of zombies in a state of hibernation, the rest is solved with the poorest resources of television production: a meager depth of field to hide a poor work of lighting, a constant use of close-ups and medium shots, as well as the use of the shot / counter shot, and an intensive use of montage to hide the poor construction of the cinematographic space. Army of the dead is the umpteenth example that proves that, for whatever reasons, the authors who work for Netflix offer works well below their capabilities.

ARMY OF THE DEAD

Direction: Zack Snyder

Distribution: Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Huma Qureshi, Omari Hardwick, Hiroyuki Sanada, Garret Dillahunt, Raúl Castillo, Nora Arnezeder.

Gender: horror, robbery movies. United States, 2021.

Duration: 148 minutes.

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