Army of the Dead's Social Commentary Is Completely Different After 2020

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Zack Snyder believes that the social and political commentary of the upcoming Army of the Dead will hit differently after 2020. Snyder's zombie-heist movie will begin a limited theatrical run on May 14, followed by its official Netflix debut on May 21. The movie is being heavily positioned as a very different kind of zombie movie, and that extends all the way up to the zombies themselves.

Army of the Dead will follow a team of mercenaries, led by Dave Bautista's Scott Ward, who are recruited to retrieve millions of dollars from the zombie-overrun Las Vegas. However, the mission is made much more challenging by a new breed of intelligent zombies known as Alphas who now rule over the city. The zombie genre is well-known for delivering commentary on current events, and not only is Army of the Dead no different, but on top of throwing new undead killers such as robot zombies into the mix, it will also seemingly be more topical than most zombie films.

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In a Netflix Q&A released to Screen Rant, Zack Snyder spoke about the movie's premise of mercenaries pulling off a heist in the walled-off city. Snyder feels that the events of 2020 have made Army of the Dead even more relevant than it was before in light of how the year unfolded. Check out Snyder's comment below.

You’ve mentioned before that genre films can be the best vehicles for social commentary. What were some of the issues you sought to address in the film and does anything resonate with you differently now with the year we've just had?

I know when I go to Vegas, there have been a couple of times when I felt like I turned into a zombie, much like Romero used shopping malls to say that as consumers we were becoming zombies — that aspect was pretty straightforward. But recently it was all the talk of building the wall and what it meant to build walls and borders that gave rise to the refugee camps we see in the film. 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. 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, the humans are worse than the zombies.

Anyone who witnessed the last year's worth of events can see where Snyder is coming from here. In addition to former President Donald Trump's push for a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border, the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across the entire world all throughout 2020 and continues to be a big factor in 2021. Alongside Snyder's comments on refugee camps and curtailed civil liberties in the film, Army of the Dead's story clearly has plenty of 2020 parallels.

As Snyder also points out, zombie movies have long been vehicles for commentary on the issues of the day. Whether there's even more going on beneath the surface of Snyder's movie remains to be seen, though his allusions to Area 51's connection to the story do offer hints in that direction. However, for a movie that was filmed in 2019, Army of the Dead has seemingly taken on a whole new level of relevance well ahead of its 2021 release.