Why Army Of The Dead's Zombies Will Be Unlike Anything You've Seen Before

The first trailer for Zack Snyder's hotly anticipated Army of the Dead dropped this week, and the flesh-eating fiesta promises to be one of the director's most excessive movies to date. Considering that Snyder is known for his bold style and grandiose action sequences, that's saying something. However, as he showed with the Dawn of the Dead remake, the filmmaker knows how to deliver an entertaining horror experience that benefits from these qualities. Army of the Dead will undoubtedly be self-indulgent and wild, but that isn't always a bad thing.

Taking place in Las Vegas, Army of the Dead follows a group of mercenaries led by Scott Ward (Dave Bautista). They decide to carry out a heist in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Committing an ambitious robbery is difficult at the best of times, but it just seems implausible when the undead are roaming around, ready to bite your arm off at any minute. Then again, some characters have carried out heists during hurricanes, so anything is possible.

A heist film set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse is an interesting and original idea, but genre-mashing isn't the only element of Army of the Dead that will make the movie stand out from the pack.

Zack Snyder has a history of exploring morally grey areas. That's why he decided to turn Batman into a homicidal maniac and give Superman a gloomy makeover in the DCEU. Unsurprisingly, Army of the Dead won't feature clear-cut heroes and villains. In fact, as he laid out in an interview with Empire, the zombies in Army of the Dead might be more heroic than the mercenaries. Humans are more than capable of being pretty awful, after all.

"Alphas have consciousness and they're self-aware and they're not like us. So I wanted to create this moral ambiguity about whether or not humans that we love in the movie crossed a line," Snyder revealed. "Was there a thing that they did to the Alphas, when the Alphas were minding their own business? And therefore, do the Alphas have the moral high ground? It muddies the water, in a good way." Dave Bautista described the undead as "f***ing zombie superheroes" and praised their athleticism. Dawn of the Dead showed that Snyder isn't interested in slow creatures, but the zombies in Army of the Dead seem like they could enter the Olympics. Now there's an idea for a sequel.