Okay, guys:
Army of the Dead. I watched all of this today.
I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it is one of the least self-conscious Zack Snyder films I'm aware of. He was just having fun with it, and it showed. No real pretensions. It has a few decent set pieces and character concepts on the zombie side (namely the Alpha King, Alpha Queen -- she is so awesome! -- and the zombie tiger Valentine). Also the opening set piece with the vehicle wreck is pretty decent and I wish the rest of the film had managed that kinetic action as well as humorous but horrifying tone.
But I felt also like the film didn't really know what it wanted to be. I wanted more pedal-to-the-floor action; instead we got a lot of dead space where not much is happening, and the action pieces were pretty straight forward in most respects. the film TRIED to add some character depth / poignant moments but the dialogue just wasn't up to the task and the script didn't really flesh out any of the characters much either, they were all pretty much stereotypes; some of the actors are good enough (Bautista included -- I think he is highly underrated as an actor, although a big part of his performance will always be his physical presence) to elevate the script a bit but it still just doesn't work.
So it kind of fails at pedal-to-the-floor, yet doesn't really go deep enough into the character drama. (Compare to Maggie, with Arnold Swartzenegger, where they decided to do a character drama about his daughter succumbing to the zombie virus rather than an action pic -- and it works tone-wise and interaction wise.) What about social commentary? Not really deep enough, although there were threads here to pull on. Humor? Not quite as funny as I hoped, but it did have some amusing sequences and Tig is part of the comic relief. Finally, what about zombie ecology/sociology? The story dabbles in Zombie social structure but never quite really gets into it.
So my issues with the film revolve mostly around how it seems to want to be a number of things but never fully commits and really nails any of them. I even expected close to all the characters to die (as a zombie film) and yet was kind of disappointed in how that all turned out too. Oh well.
The film does potentially set up a sequel in an amusing sequence.
I think it is worth watching on a whole but YMMV versus it being knocked out of the park.
Big call out again to Athena Perample as the Zombie Queen -- so awesome. And of course to old timer Richard Cetrone as the King -- I remember him from Underworld but he's done a lot of stuff since.
Dave Bautista Still Hasn’t Met Co-Star Tig Notaro Since She Was Digitally Added to ‘Army of the Dead’
Only in CGI Hollywood, sigh...
About that -- it was fairly seamless. There was some early stuff with, being aware of the CGI swap-in, me being able to recognize what was happening (lots of cuts between Bautista and Tig, and while they had a shadow in the corner of the shot to represent the other, you could guess they were stand-in's-- or there were a lot of scenes with Tig by herself.) However, the stuff at the end was much more seamless and I didn't even notice it.