Army of the Dead (2021) (spoilers)
Tales about tough goals and major obstacles need to gather the right teams. They will fit the task. Here, nearly everyone on the team dies after failing to do anything they set out to do. By the end, when a man stares into a mirror, recognizes he is terminal, and says “fuck,” we can start to understand what is being accomplished. We, the living, have come to know something about the rest. We have also come to know something about who is speaking to us.
When you hand someone a blank check and creative freedom, the results can be like staring into a soul. Movies are collaborative — impossibly so — and the alchemy required to make them well is a formula we have not yet found. But nearly any movie will show to you the material circumstances that brought it about, if you look hard enough. They will let you know something about the ones who make them. And the smart ones might also tell you something about the world that birthed the work into being. To the extent any personal vision might make it into the inherently commercial enterprise of making people in seats feel things, glee and sorrow alike will tend to be equally evident. We will learn at least as much as we should.
Outside of Disney’s canon, there are two things of which we can be certain about every human life: that once one was born, and someday, too soon, one will die. You can cleave Zach Snyder’s filmography into those works that recognize these definitionally human limitations and those that ask what might lie in minds who can exist beyond these universal truths. Sometimes Snyder is telling stories about heroism and the myths that we make, the people who will live beyond death and thus beyond what waits. They lack our future and thus do not live our present lives. Other times his works reclaim the dignity of the doomed.
The more interesting stories (if not necessarily the more interesting movies) live in this second pocket of his filmography. There is an end to how far any of us might go, and it is out of our control, and at some point, we must face that. 300 is about the last stand of warriors told to fight an impossible force, and Sucker Punch is about the personhood one might wrest from abuse and imprisonment and confinement, even when there is no realistic escape. The staging of the stories betrays the sympathy. There is never even a hint of a sense that one near end or one far end deserves the greater share of our respect. We might learn from this that the dead do not lose their existence from being extinguished.
Yet even these most essential, universal aspects of human life — the beginning we all partake in and the end we all await — can be corrupted by specific circumstances. Categories scramble and confuse us. Here, the titular army arrives a little under an hour from the conclusion. They seek to avenge something that almost any culture would understand, something close to a jus cogens norm: the wanton, needless, murder of a pregnant mother. It is hard, in some ways, to discern how their cause is not just. Post-apocalyptic storytelling has embraced zombies as a means of causation, a way to explore something past society. Snyder here stages a zombie story where nothing whatsoever has fallen (at least recently). The unruly madness and hedonism of a particular plot of American land succumbs to a structured set of rules. The rest of the world could not care less. The character who most understands the various spheres of meaning inhabiting this film quite expressly states that she prefers the kind of morality that defines “their” existence to the one that defines her life free from their attention.
Free to map out any territory he wants, given the license and the resources, it turns out that Snyder wants to make genre entertainment in confined settings, works that reveal ourselves by the focus of our attention. Snyder also has always had an evident respect for the action filmography of James Cameron. Here it comes to the fore. Army of the Dead is the kind of movie where two characters find each other and finally reach a connection and then one of the two gets their head turned around by a sudden entrance from a shambling undead elevator visitor. That is to say that it is a wonderful movie, and that from here, it is, as we say, “on.” The guiding principle of how Cameron structures films — that cinema is about building to a 40-minute thrill-ride that sends everyone home — is for the first time realized in Snyder’s hands. The signal here, though, registers in a unique way. It is the announcement of a fate too exciting for us to ever experience, but also one never ours to grasp. The last stretch of this Cameron climax descends into a world that, very much unlike Cameron’s, doesn’t make sense.
This isn’t an accident. There are few earnest works this ruthlessly cynical about American society that care so much about being heard in ways outside of direct address. Even so, the characters — save perhaps for one — do not understand the full nature of what is going on. The movie plays with timelines in an extraordinarily strange way — itself a source of Internet fascination — but does not in any way depend on such theories to do any of the work. Almost everyone in this movie dies — hero, villain, extra — yet we get constant reminders that they are not proxies for “all of us,” in the way that post-apocalyptic stories tend to go. The last act that our most sympathetic character undertakes is to provide someone with something for a future. The pathetic inadequacy of his offering is mitigated only by the profound material impact it might have.
This is no aberration. There is a calm to nearly everyone about nearly everything that rings akin to the clarity of a deathbed patient summoning their last words. The short bond between characters who have names but are functionally the safe guy and the muscle guy reads as more genuine than being told longer relationships mean more. No one seems to buy, well, any of this.
For that reason, if no other, at a first glance, the whole thing might seem a little thin. We know, however, the depth of what has been done, and lost. Snyder, as always, refuses to ignore the world around the work, and when moments clash. When you make a choice to depict a zombie hierarchy and flesh it out, you grant personhood to the ones you are opposing. Much of Army is about the impossibility of such personhood carrying past those who directly observe its truth. The movie screens the familiar talking heads of MSNBC and Fox News and treats the government’s response as a function of the media’s perspectives. There are no cuts here to what might be going on in the nation’s capitol, what might be motivating the responses that dictate these characters’ tragedy. Yet we get ample glimpses. Bautista’s Scott at one point wakes up to a distinguished medal of some sort, once encased and framed in glass, cracked and shattered in a dingy room. American military officers are with Tanaka in the early going, and the decisions of men like them lead to the end of this movie. Everyone looks ready for the photo. A thing we do not to be told is that death is the blemish on anyone’s portrait. And we know, because this is Snyder, that the sympathy of the lens is with the medal, and not with the integrity of the glass.
One way to make works speak beyond their life is to premise them on certain fates. You can make us care by making it seem like it might count. These are not always pretty fictions, but what is pretty in Snyder’s lens is what is true. Snyder’s superhero filmography is not about deconstruction and it is not about cynicism. It is about an appreciation for how much of a difference it makes for a life to be beyond death. Gods are powerful because they can ignore death in a way that humans never should. They are psychological investigations. Here, hired to follow his own star, Snyder tells us finally what we should have realized all along.
It’s amazing to me that here, amid the cacophony of a genre zombie film, his intentions finally ring so clear. He wants everything to clang against everything else, loudly enough to find the individual registers. Everything here reads confident that time will tell, that the act he is responsible for is the clarity and fidelity of elements. “One can die and know that something more is to come” might mean something or it might just be a feeling, but it is something that a lens can capture with the right parts in front of it, and Snyder is after that high.
Movies entice by promising a journey, and sometimes those two travels line up neatly. For this movie’s characters — for us, by all appearances — bettering people, saving lives, making more meaning, all depends on money locked away in a place that has rules we don’t understand. Even the coherence of the time travel hints rests on financial decisions dependent on screentime, which is to say, the rest of some resource, which might well exhaust itself. Post-apocalyptic stories can read more optimistic than real life, and Army of the Dead pulls off the neat trick of staging itself at equipoise: it believes it has something to say, even if everything around it might suggest otherwise.
Here, in our real lives, everyone in the cast dies. The collapse may not look so different from things just continuing as they are. In all this we may benefit, perhaps, because our ideas and our conceptions need the scrutiny of real danger. Maybe we should pay attention. Some of us have told the rest what we all knew before — sometimes in the most roundabout ways. What matters is what might remain in our heads, in that last ember of a fading fire.
When we react loudly to the screen we are most often screaming about our own lives. All the more credit to those films that send it right back. The point of the trick is the reveal.
*****FN****: Thanks to Mario & Cassie for their help with this essay.
Accidental Jellyfish 