Zombie films have lost their bite

Watching BBC journalist Nick Watt being confronted by angry protestors in the heart of Westminster this week, I immediately wondered how Dave Bautista would have handled the situation. Not that Watt looks remotely like the former wrestler turned film star. I just happen to have spent the previous evening catching up with Dave’s latest, a zombie film – and perhaps that’s what brought it to mind. Perhaps there’s a reason why zombies are all the rage again. We seem to live in an age of shambling hordes…

The film is Netflix’s latest attempt to match Hollywood’s summer fare. Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead isthe kind of big-budget ($90 million at the last count) genre movie that would have dominated movie screens for the long holiday just a couple of years ago. It is fast, gruesome, exploitative, and ultimately dumb schlock horror that’s mildly entertaining. Yet it is also, perhaps, a film so lacking a centre that it is entirely suited to the time.

Snyder’s movie is long, at two and a half hours, and takes its less-than-sweet time to hit generic conventions with rather depressing regularity. This is a mashup of better movies (including their titles), ramming Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness up against The Living Dead series by George R. Romero. There’s also little that’s novel about the story, which puts a group of mercenaries in the middle of a plot to recover $200 million from a Las Vegas casino during a biotech calamity caused by the US military. It’s the stuff of countless films and video games of the past two decades.

Yet what’s shocking – and perhaps so very contemporary – is how much of this is homage without the social commentary that made the originals so special. This attempt to relaunch a franchise (two prequels and animated series are to follow) has all the depth of a Disney ride. It’s a shame given that the film owes so much to the work of Romero and, particularly, his 1978 film Dawn of the Dead. That film began life as one of those films deemed a “nasty” during the moralising decade that followed (it was only released uncut in 2003) yet there was so much more to it. So much so, it earned a lavish remake at the hands of Snyder in 2004.

Romero had stumbled upon one of those rare archetypes that latch into the compulsions of audiences. A group of survivors from a zombie apocalypse take sanctuary in a shopping mall, giving them free access to all the necessities of modern living. If this is the latent dream of all us hunter-gathers in the audience, then it all might seem like a good way to spend the apocalypse until the unthinking dead start to follow the patterns of their old lives by flocking to the mall.

It’s the stuff of meaty (no pun intended) satire and it’s no surprise that Romero’s films are now remembered as social commentary. His most famous film remains The Night of the Walking Dead (1968) whose low budget production can detract from what the film is doing. It ends, famously, with the murder of a black man by a group of rednecks but, like the best satire, the moment is laden with ambiguity. Duane Jones’s character is mistaken for the undead and shot. Yet it’s not the anti-dramatic nature of the death that is shocking as much as the indifferent way the killing is treated. “Okay, he’s dead. Let’s go and get him,” says the leader of the posse. “That’s another one for the fire…” This is not how heroes are meant to depart a movie.

Romero himself shied away from offering any of this up for analysis, least of all his zombies. “They’ve always been a cigar,” he once told Vanity Fair. “The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon’s Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way. My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.”

Yet, undoubtedly, Romero was making films during Vietnam and post-Watergate, when America’s democracy was challenged by the notion that the politicians could be just as malign as the bad guys. That became a defining quality of so many movies of the 1970s and for good reason. A movie such as Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View was steeped in the political culture of the previous decade when political assassination began to feel normalised. The CIA had begun its shady experiments with drugs, mind control and, perhaps, worse, under names such as Project MKUltra. The zombie genre, then, is filled with these tropes, ranging from the authoritarian governments to the radicalised (often sexualised) zombies. Even the over-the-top gore becomes a metaphor for American foreign policy, which was to use greater and greater power to suppress a significantly weaker enemy.

What, then, might Snyder’s film say about America now?

The answer is surprisingly little and that, in its way, is so very telling. Snyder’s film draws few conclusions and chooses rather to labour around the crude oppositions. This is apolitical filmmaking, where allocating roles to the multitudes either hammering at the doors or circling above in their attack helicopters comes down to preference. Here, the Left and Right are interchangeable when it comes to choosing who gets to play rabble and who gets to wield the stick. It seems happy to leave the sides locked in opposition, represented early on by cameos from former acting chair of the DNC, Donna Brazile, and former Trump White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer.

What is left are the nuances where Snyder dabbles in anodyne politics. The result is as bland as the answer he gave The Guardian this year when asked about his supposed right wing politics. “I would say I’m a pretty liberal guy. I want to make sure everyone’s heard and everyone feels included. I don’t have a right wing political agenda. People see what they want to see.” This perhaps explains the subplot – so crude as to be politically ineffective – set around a migrant camp where a temperature “gun” in the hands of a government agent is reminiscent of an execution. Yet these are moments of passing fancy in a film that waves a hand towards the Culture War but says nothing.

Yet perhaps that’s the only reasonable position. Dave Bautista makes for a compelling lead, continuing to choose more interesting options for his film career than his wrestling origins might otherwise suggest, but even his muscular character is reduced to passivity in the face of a problem that cannot be resolved. “I’m in a tough spot,” his character admits when offered the chance to make millions. “I don’t like you very much, so I hate giving you the satisfaction of taking the job.”

The lazy excuse is to say that the callowness at the heart of the movie stems from its generic origins: that big summer blockbusters rarely do social commentary well. Yet that’s to ignore the success of so many films that at least say something as they entertain. Many better movies in the genre chose not to look away (Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland being outstanding examples). Yet perhaps this is where Snyder is at least capturing something of the zeitgeist.

This is the impasse we’re all in politically and that Hollywood, and now Netflix, are struggling to reflect. We’ve moved on from zombie movies that depicted people trying to make a normal life in a world gone crazy. Under Snyder’s reign, there is only the lure of the big bucks locked in a safe. Life beyond that is unfixable or, perhaps, closer to the truth, demands political choices that would divide audiences and which the filmmaker is ultimately unwilling to make.