Army of the Dead. The best movies of 2021

This is Zack Snyder's return to the roots, and we must admit that those roots are not yet rotten. Army of the Dead is exactly what the creators promised in the trailers: a flashy zombie movie. Snyder's film delivers on the promise well enough that it couldn't be left out of this list. The critical voices, and there are some, derive mainly from inaccurate expectations towards the film. In its category, The Army of the Dead is a worthy successor to Dawn of the Dead, and it doesn't try to mindlessly copy the solutions and techniques of the original.

What is this movie about? It is an action movie set in very specific circumstances. The US government plans to use an atomic bomb to finally resolve the issue of the remaining zombies that have been isolated within Las Vegas. The owner of one of the casinos realizes, however, that there's still big cash in the city. He commissions a veteran of the war against the living dead to retrieve that money from an underground safe in Vegas. This is where the adventure begins, in which Dave Bautista first assembles a team for the daring heist, and then races against time and thousands of zombies.

Snyder purposefully plays with convention, mixes genres and repeatedly pokes the viewer with references to cult classics, such as James Cameron's Aliens. The Army of the Dead gains a lot when the viewer consciously chooses it and knows what to expect.