Army of The Dead Discussion

[Herbert Playz]

This post contains spoilers.

The world building was...unexpected. Especially because the movie is set in the zombie genre. All I was expecting were zingy one liners, great action and ridiculous amounts of gore. The movie had tons of this in it.

But it also spent a significant time with the worldbuilding. And because of that I find myself looking at the overall story, plot and character decision making much harder then I would have otherwise.

The worldbuilding!😅 Not that it was bad. On the contrary I found it to be extremely interesting. But it felt out of place. They spent a ton of film time concerned with Zombie patient zero, exposition on his queen and emphasizing patient zero's child and the fact that some type of zombie kingdom exists with a social hierarchy. But then all of a sudden they just decided to drop all that good build up for an epic shootout and escape scene. Why do all of that worldbuilding only to abandon it?

Also there were a number of plot holes that bothered me.

1. How on earth does Vanderohe(played by Omari Hardwick) survive at the end. Its a low grade nuclear blast. Even if the safe were to somehow completely shield him from the impact of the blast, the radiation would have surely brought him to his knees. There is no way he is able to just walk through the desert and catch a plane.
2. When Kate Ward(played by Ella Purnell) busts through the glass, even if she wasn't able to reconnect with the group due to the hordes of shamblers she could have easily told them that Martin(played by Garret Dillahunt tried to kill her. They were all within earshot.
3. The guys didn't have an exit strategy! It seemed like Vanderohe and Dieter just elected to stay behind by the vault. It was immediately obvious that they were in big trouble as they had no exit strategy. I thought that was ridiculous. Again, if this was some generic zombie movie that was just about ridiculous looking monster and over the top action then I just roll my eyes and say lets move on. But from the amount of worldbuilding that had already take place it was obvious that some very careful planning went into this movie, so this whole decision by the crew seems a little too sloppy. They could have come up with a better way for them to get cornered then for them to simply decided to stay by the safe where there is no exit.
4. The very beginning! Everybody is getting killed left and right. The two army guys get out of the vehicle and make a run for it and then for some unknown reason they just stop and sit still. At this point I'm like okay so you've just seen this thing run through all the bullets running at full speed and cut down all the other men. Why are we stopped? This is another thing that would be totally acceptable in the average run of the mill horror movie but not in a movie of this caliber. It just felt sloppy. It would have been much better if the other guy was severely injured and his friend just refused to leave him behind and the creature caught up with them while they were trying to limp away.

So in terms of a score I would give it a 7 out of 10. I liked were the movie was going with the world building I don't know why they started off with all the build up and just abandoned it at the end. But if you like action and if you like a bit of a twist on the traditional zombie movie check it out.