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Zombies hit Las Vegas in Zack Snyder heist movie 'Army of the Dead'

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Andrew Marszal, Agence France Presse

<p>LOS ANGELES - After a decade making some of Hollywood&#x27;s biggest superhero movies, director Zack Snyder has returned to the monsters who made his name -- zombies, who this time have taken over Las Vegas.</p><p>In &quot;Army of the Dead,&quot; which hits limited theaters Friday and Netflix May 21, the desert gambling metropolis has been sealed off after being overrun by blood-splattered, flesh-chomping hordes of the undead.</p><p>A gun-toting group of mercenaries attempts to infiltrate the city to retrieve millions of dollars from a vault beneath the Strip, with just hours to spare before a nuclear bomb is dropped on Sin City&#x27;s grisly residents.</p><div><script src="https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&amp;version=v2.5" async="" type="text/javascript"></script></div><div class="fb-post" data-href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=470278044189482" data-width="auto"> </div><p>For a director who made his name with a 2004 remake of George A. Romero&#x27;s &quot;Dawn of the Dead&quot; -- which itself satirized rabid consumerism by setting zombies loose in a shopping mall -- it was an easy pitch.</p><p>&quot;It&#x27;s a zombie movie about a gang of zombie killers who go into zombie-infested Vegas to get the money out,&quot; Snyder recalled telling the bosses at Netflix. </p><p>&quot;So it wasn&#x27;t like they were like, &#x27;Oh, geez, let&#x27;s not make that movie. No one wants to see that!&#x27;&quot;</p><p>But for all its brash, high-octane fun, the movie -- an homage to genre films like &quot;Escape from New York&quot; and &quot;Aliens&quot;, and heist movies such as &quot;Ocean&#x27;s Eleven&quot; -- carries genuine emotional heft for Snyder.</p><p>It is his first brand-new film since having to walk away from directing the star-studded DC superhero epic &quot;Justice League&quot; in 2017 following the suicide of his daughter.</p><p>Snyder, 55, dreamt up the idea for a &quot;zombie heist&quot; movie years earlier, but rewrote it to center on the relationship between tough-as-nails father Scott (Dave Bautista) and his estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell.)</p><p>&quot;As a human being I have evolved from when I made &#x27;Dawn,&#x27;&quot; he told a virtual press conference. </p><p>&quot;And just having the relationship I have with my children and being a dad... that part of the movie really became a lot more important to me than maybe it was 15 years ago.&quot;</p><p>He added: &quot;Dave&#x27;s character is trying to reconnect with his daughter... yes it&#x27;s a zombie heist movie, but really in the end it&#x27;s a character movie in a lot of ways.&quot;</p><div><strong>&#x27;WORSE THAN ZOMBIES&#x27;</strong></div><p>Of course, other profound changes have hit the world since Snyder began filming &quot;Army of the Dead&quot; in 2019, which lend the film an eerie prescience.</p><p>The Covid-19 pandemic brought the 24-hour bright lights and casino floors of Las Vegas -- and Hollywood itself -- to brief standstills, while former president Donald Trump was booted out of office by US voters.</p><p>In the movie, Las Vegas refugees are shown quarantined in cages and subjected to random temperature gun checks by brutal guards, while partisan news channels ask, &quot;Quarantine: Truth or Scare?&quot;</p><p>The decision to drop a nuclear bomb on Las Vegas on July 4 comes from an unnamed US president who thinks the idea of fireworks on Independence Day would be &quot;really cool&quot; and &quot;patriotic.&quot;</p><p>&quot;There&#x27;s been a lot of crazy things that have elevated the movie in some way or other,&quot; said Snyder in the film&#x27;s press notes.</p><p>&quot;We wanted to focus on how a zombie plague would affect the disenfranchised and how the government might use something like a zombie plague to take away certain freedoms,&quot; he added.</p><p>&quot;The interpretations are completely different now from when we first started. But the catch-all for zombie movies is still the same: in the end, humans are worse than zombies.&quot;</p><div><strong>Related video:</strong></div><figure class="op-interactive"><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen" frameBorder="0" height="100%" id="ivsplayer01" scrolling="no" src="https://player.ivideosmart.com/ivsplayer/v4/dist/html/iframe-src.html?iframeid=ivsplayer01&amp;key=e8c22c015ca9eafa76f1e3edfa03c603&amp;spid=3001339&amp;vid=1528037" width="100%"></iframe></figure><div class="iwantbar">Watch more in <a href="//www.iwantv.com.ph/">iWantv</a> or <a href="//tfc.tv/">TFC.tv</a></div>

<p>After a decade making some of Hollywood's biggest superhero movies, director Zack Snyder has returned to the monsters who made his name -- zombies, who this time have taken over Las Vegas.<br /> </p>

After a decade making some of Hollywood's biggest superhero movies, director Zack Snyder has returned to the monsters who made his name -- zombies, who this time have taken over Las Vegas.

Zombies hit Las Vegas in Zack Snyder heist movie 'Army of the Dead'

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Zombies hit Las Vegas in Zack Snyder heist movie 'Army of the Dead'

Andrew Marszal,

Agence France Presse

Published May 12, 2021 03:18 PM PHT

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Army of the Dead

Zack Snyder

Las Vegas

zombies

Netflix

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