Army of the Dead director Zack Snyder has offered his two cents on why zombies are perfect tools for social commentary.
“It was really important to me from the beginning of this process right now that we make sure the social commentary is in [Army of the Dead], because that’s part of the genre,” Snyder told BadTaste.It. “As you know, [we] use the zombies to hold up a mirror to ourselves and that’s really why I feel like they’ve endured in such a great way cinematically or in the zeitgeist and pop culture. They teach us about ourselves and I thought that was a really important aspect of the movie. [When] you see it, I think that it’s obvious we really spent a lot of time trying to make that really make sense.”
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No stranger to the world of zombies, Snyder made his feature directing debut with 2004’s Dawn of the Dead, a remake of George A. Romero’s classic 1978 satirical horror movie of the same name. A few years later, Snyder revealed he was working on a spiritual sequel titled Army of the Dead, only for the project to collapse in the late 2000s after Warner Bros. backed out over concerns about the budget. The film was eventually acquired by Netflix in Jan. 2019, based on a revised script draft that Snyder had developed in the intervening years.
When asked if he had worried about Army of the Dead being perceived as derivative following the explosion in zombie-related media in the 2010s, Snyder admitted, “Y’know, no, because I knew that I was just going to do it my way and I knew it would be different from anything else out there. It’s very particular to the way I see. It’s very particular to the way I like to construct [films].” And while he voiced his “huge respect” for recent zombie films like Train to Busan, he insisted “[Army of the Dead is its] own thing and exists in its own way… Even the cinematic deconstruction of the genre is particular to this movie.”
Directed and co-written by Zack Snyder, Army of the Dead stars Dave Bautista, Garret Dillahunt, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Raul Castillo, Tig Notaro, Theo Rossi, Matthias Schweighöfer and Ana de la Reguera. The film is now streaming on Netflix.
Source: YouTube
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