I thought it was ok, nothing great but not sorry I watched it. In fact I felt exactly the same way as I did after watching X-Men Apocalypse, the intro story we got in the first five minutes would have made a much better movie.
It was ok, but I couldn’t help feeling that there was a better movie trying to coalesce, that never did. I don’t know if that’s because of the filmakers’ shortcomings, covid limitations to rewrites, reshoots and re-edits, or problems with replacing Tig Notaro. Apparently she never met with the main cast and all her scenes were shot by cheating the angle, green screens, and soft focus with doubles. They did a good job, I don’t think I would have noticed if I didn’t already know, but I wonder if there were original scenes that they just couldn’t duplicate that would’ve made it better.
Couple of thoughts. Word of God is that the blue stuff has meaning. They do show Geeta in the chopper after the big bad is gone and the blast wave has struck it.
I think that the movie we got, pared down to such a five minute piece, would’ve seemed like it should make for a far better movie… In fact, I’m convinced that’s how it started out: a collection of cool scenes and set pieces, loosely unified by a story sketch (‘what if zombies, but heist’), which then however was never really fleshed out. Hence, we got set pieces with nonsensical connections stitched together awkwardly.
I enjoyed this Penny Arcade comic on Tig Notaro’s inclusion in the movie (one of the bright spots in my opinion).
Had to go read up on this since I had no idea how they could possibly just CGI a new character in, but apparently she was replacing Chris D’Elia, the guy typecast as “cool pedo” who turned out to be one irl.
She never met any of the other actors, which is both amazing and sad.
Yeah, my confusion was that I thought they just created the character out of thin air, it made more sense when I realized she was replacing someone already there.
They clearly did a decent job with the editing because I didn’t notice anything out of place while watching it (some people apparently did, but I wonder if they already knew about it and were looking for misplaced shadows, or whatever).
I knew she’d been added in but not that she wasn’t actually present, but that’s obvious if you go back and look at it.
It is sometimes. Her opening scene stands out as an obvious edit. The shot of Dave Bautista and the other actress is clearly zoomed in and trimmed because the original actor(like, the back of his head) was in the shot.
The clip is right here and look how close they are to Dave and the other actress.
And then I learned today that there are UFOs in this movie? Did you catch it? UFO? Army of the Dead - Zack Snyder | Netflix - YouTube
This movie was an awful slog interspersed with occasionally amusing scenes. Zack Snyder‘s insistence on ascribing trite motivations and maundering soap opera dialogue to his characters is maddening, and it slows everything down. Also, the further you moved into the movie, the more open plot questions there were, until they accumulated into a big steaming pile.
I did like the relationship between safecracker and tablesaw guy, even if all the endless loop conversation made it obvious what was going to happen at the end. Though among the many strange plot devices, it sure seemed like safecracker had time to squeeze through the door.
I did like that coyote woman warned them what would happen if it rained, and then it didn’t rain. Chekov’s shamblers nicely sidestepped.
The tiger was excellent.
I would only watch a sequel if he could keep it under two hours and 15 minutes.…
ETA The UFO clip is cool, I did not notice that. Also, I did not realize that Tig Notaro had been added later.…
He never did use that saw, did he?
They used it to try to cut themselves out after Dillahunt locked them in, but it was the coyote using it.
So, after I watched the movie, I thought I remembered a shot where we see a glow coming from inside a zombie’s skull after a headshot, which is why I conjectured we were supposed to be seeing pyrotechnics illuminating the skull.
However, online recaps and screenshots clearly show that there are some scenes where a few of the Alpha Zombies, but only a few, have glowing eyes in a scene where none of the others do. And there is at least one very brief but clear shot of a zombie that has been headshot that clearly show metal and circuitry. So…I dunno. Apparently a few of the Alpha Zombies were cyborgs, for reasons? I guess?
I’d almost think the glowing eyes was a CGI cop-out, where they originally intended to give all of the Alpha Zombies glowing eyes but gave up after a few animations, due to time, cost, or sheer laziness, but considering they digitally inserted an entire actor in multiple scenes, I don’t think that was it.
It seems to me, as others have pointed out, like Zack Snyder had a notebook full of cool zombie set-pieces, and threw them all into this movie, regardless of whether they actually made sense in context. Or bothering to even try to make them fit. I’m guessing that “cyborg zombies” was one of those cool ideas, and he put it in just because it was cool, and never figured out anything else to do with it, so…randomly, some of the Alpha Zombies are cyborgs.
And, considering that Deathlok is the most prominent cyborg zombie I can think of, and this is a Zack Snyder movie, it seems like we came close to a sideways, backhanded cross-over between the DCEU and MCU.
Since the convoy was coming from Area 51 and Zeus had dog tags, I’m going with some kind of Kree-special forces volunteer experiment that went very bad. Vegas is a magical place.
I found this was a fun movie; just don’t think too deeply or everything falls apart (so like every zombie movie.) Yes, it’s full of wildly unbelievable stuff like zombies or a President tweeting plans to celebrate the 4th of July with a nuclear weapon.
Well, the convoy was being followed by UFOs.
I thought it bounced between being complete trash and being completely forgettable. There were like 9 seconds where Batista fights a zombie hand to hand that I thought was alright and the rest was a waste.
Netflix hasn’t done any action movies that were great, IMO, but both Extraction and The Old Guard were fun. And the former was very good for 40% of it. This? Nah.
So I watched the first of, possibly, many prequels and it was OK. Safecracker guy in a heist flick/quicky romance/fish out of water comedy mashed togther into…something, that was…OK.