The automobile industry was born in 1886 when when German inventor Karl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen. In 1908, Ford Motor Company made the Model T, first car that was made available to the masses. What if the movie industry was fully established by then? What kind of movies would have been made about this strange machine that takes you places with such incredible speeds? Here’s an idea. A family leaves for a picnic in their newly purchased car and it breaks down due to flat tire or no gas. The hero overcomes great difficulties, fixes the tire (or brings gas while fighting lions and bandits on the way) and the family resumes their vacation. The plot seems silly today but it would have been thrilling to an audience that would be coming to the theatre in horse carts.
If you think that’s too far fetched, look carefully because that’s what is going to happen with space travel movies. Apollo 13 was about a daring rescue mission of a space flight gone wrong. The Martian told the tale of a botanist stranded on a planet. Stowaway tried to combine these two plots but it was clear that it was running out of steam. The parts of space flight that were shown in great detail in Apollo 13 – the countdown and launch – had become somewhat routine in The Martian. In Apollo 13, Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) manually performs the manoeuvre to connect the command module to the Lunar module. In Stowaway it is done automatically. As space travel becomes routine, the novelty is going to wear off and we will have human stories that happen in space. For instance, a murder on a spaceship or lives of children who are born in space and so on.
While watching Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, I realised that the same thing is happening to zombies. Zombie movies began to gain popularity in late nineties and late 2000s and 2010s. Train to Busan (2016) was the ultimate zombie apocalypse movie while Shaun of the Dead (2004) was a brilliant comedy take on the subject. Again, it is clear that something new is needed in the genre. How many times are you going to show the journey of protagonists fighting through a zombie outbreak?
In Army of the Dead, Zack Snyder presents a different take on zombies. (By the way, how many hats does Zack Snyder wear? Not only is he the co-producer, writer and director, he is also the director of photography.) As the credits roll, you see Las Vegas inhabited by zombies. A group of people try to escape and are killed one by one. Zack has condensed the story of many previous zombie movies in the title sequence, so what’s left? Well, since the zombie town is Vegas, there is a casino vault that holds $200 million and is up for grabs for anyone who can take it. One caveat though. Not only you have to fight the zombies, you also have to do it before the military deploys a tactical nuclear weapon to wipe out the whole city. So what began as a zombie apocalypse movie is now a heist movie with a twist of zombie.
This has opened up several interesting possibilities. The zombies are no longer typical zombies. Instead, some of them have some kind of intelligence. They have hierarchical structure with an “alpha” group of zombies that rules over others. You also have zombie animals – a zombie tiger roams the streets.
This is fascinating because instead of painting all zombies with a broad brush stroke, you now have a zombie culture. In future, you may expect stories that depict the nuances of this culture. What daily struggles does a zombie go through? Do they have feelings like humans? Army of the Dead says yes because the alpha male is sad and vows revenge when his girlfriend is killed by humans. Literature is way ahead of movies in this area. Zombie romance novels like Generation Dead by Daniel Waters or Bone Song by John Meaney are quite popular.
Romance, apocalypse or heist, zombies are here to stay.
Army of the Dead is streaming on Netflix.
