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Army of the Dead is a 2021 Action Horror film directed by Zack Snyder, co-written by Snyder, Shay Hatten and Joby Harold, and released on Netflix. A unique blend of a heist film set in a Zombie Apocalypse, it is Snyder's second film after Sucker Punch to be an original work and not an adaptation.

Las Vegas has been devastated by a zombie outbreak, and the city is now walled off to contain the outbreak. A group of mercenaries (some of them being veterans of the war to contain the outbreak) gets hired to venture into the ruins of the city for a risky $200 million heist on a casino's vault beneath the Strip. They have a 32 hour window to pull it off and get out before the city gets nuked to prevent the spread of the infection.

The film stars Dave Bautista as Scott Ward, Ella Purnell as Kate Ward, Ana de la Reguera as Maria Cruz, Garret Dillahunt as Martin, Raúl Castillo as Mikey Guzman, Omari Hardwick as Vanderohe, Tig Notaro as Marianne Peters note , Nora Arnezeder as Lily "Coyote", Matthias Schweighöfer as Ludwig Dieter, Theo Rossi as Burt Cummings, Huma Qureshi as Geeta, Samantha Win as Chambers and Hiroyuki Sanada as Bly Tanaka.

Unusually for a Netflix film, Army of the Dead was released in about 330 Cinemark theaters and 270 other theaters stateside on May 14, 2021 before the worldwide release on the streaming service on May 21, 2021 also saw the release of Army of Thieves, a German-American co-production prequel film directed by and starring Matthias Schweighöfer, which details Dieter's backstory before the heist. Snyder also has plans for Army of the Dead sequels, with the next film currently titled Planet of the Dead. A spinoff animated series titled Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas was announced in 2021, though it seems to have fallen in Development Hell.

The film is completely unrelated to Dawn of the Dead or any version of George A. Romero's zombie universe, despite the Title of the Dead, its zombies-related plot and Snyder's involvement in both movies.

Previews: Teaser, Trailer.


Army of the Dead contains examples of:

  • Action Survivor: The "Las Vengeance" crew of the opening credits were a soccer mom, a mechanic, a food truck chef, and a guy with a Masters in philosophy at the beginning of the outbreak. They ended up becoming one of the best search and rescue teams by the time Vegas is finally walled off.
  • Actor Allusion:
  • Advertising by Association: The trailer has "From Zack Snyder — Director of 300, Man of Steel and Dawn of the Dead".
  • Alien Blood: Most of the zombies have regular garden variety red blood, but some of them have sparkling bright blue blood.
  • All for Nothing: Really, the whole film.
    • Kate went ahead to find her friend Geeta in the city and Geeta dies in the helicopter crash at the end.
    • The entire heist as pretty much the whole crew is dead and Martin never got to bring the Alpha head to his boss which was the real goal all along.
    • The ending indicating nuking Vegas did almost nothing as an infected Vanderhoe is about to land in Mexico City and start a new outbreak. The only silver lining is that he, like all the other second-generation infectees, can only infect others with a less potent strain.
  • Area 51: The prologue starts with an Elite Zombie being transported from there. Two of the soldiers in the convoy, knowing Area 51's reputation, speculate as to what might be in the giant container they're carrying. (During this scene, two UFOs can briefly be seen behind the convoy.)
  • Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: Vanderohe does not seem to suffer from any of the effects of acute radiation syndrome, despite walking out of Las Vegas shortly after it was nuked. Then again, he's already infected, so not only is he screwed anyway, the infection might be masking the effects of radiation sickness.
  • Asshole Victim:
    • Cummings is sacrificed by Lily to Zeus and the Queen and subsequently turned into an Alpha by Zeus, but seeing as he was a slimy, bigoted rapist, it's hard to feel bad for him. Even Lily notes he deserved to die, and no one, not even Kate, disagrees.
    • Martin betrays everyone and is kind of an asshole, so it's hard to feel bad when he's mauled to death by Valentine the Zombie Tiger.
  • Attractive Zombie:
    • The bunch of topless Vegas showgirls devouring a guy in his jacuzzi during the opening credits montage.
    • The Alpha Queen. Even with her rotten teeth and scary appearance, she still looks attractive, especially with her showgirl outfit that shows off her cleavage and her legs.
  • Auto Erotica: As the prologue reveals, the zombie outbreak happened because of a young newlywed couple deciding to have sex while driving, crashing their car into the military convoy carrying a zombie.
  • Bait-and-Switch: A running plot point in the background is the government wishing to nuke Las Vegas off the map (and destroying all the zombies within), which is being protested by humanitarian groups. The final act begins with the heist team watching the news inside of Tanaka's hotel and hearing that the president caved in to the pressures to move the bombardment… by ordering it to happen it a whole day earlier so the protestors won't be able to do anything to prevent it. The team now has ninety minutes to GTFO of Las Vegas or become collateral damage to the "ultimate fireworks show".
  • Big Bad: Zeus the Zombie King.
  • Batter Up!: In an Imagine Spot detailing the planning of the heist, Ludwig Dieter is seen carrying a wooden bat with nails (the makeshift weapon you see in every Zombie Apocalypse "survival book" ever).
  • Blood Knight: The crew goes into Vegas to get rich but some of them clearly missed the excitement of fighting zombies and don't need much persuading to gear up for another fight.
  • Booby Trap: The casino vault has a rather unusual assortment of dangerous booby traps for a modern context. Dieter and Vanderohe figure its extent out by using a zombie to trigger them — the first trap shoots big darts, the second trap is made of machine guns, and the third has the room's walls crushing the victim.
  • Brand X: While many real Vegas casino resorts can be spotted, the two that are most prominently featured are both fictional. Bly's is the target of the heist, while the Olympus is the home base of Zeus and the alpha zombies.
  • The Cameo:
    • Zack Snyder's regular cinematographer Larry Fong (300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) appears as a Stage Magician on a billboard seen in Vegas.note 
    • Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer appears as a TV pundit promoting the Las Vegas nuclear strike.
  • The Caper: The film's plot revolves around a team being assembled to venture into Las Vegas in order to empty a vault of $200 million within 32 hours, before the city is destroyed by a nuclear strike. At least that's what Bly Tanaka wants them to believe, he just needed them to get Martin in and protect him long enough so he could get alpha samples.
  • Caper Crew: Ward puts together a team based on the needs of the heist, which features many classic heist archetypes:
    • The Backer: Tanaka is the person who brought the scheme to Scott and armed the crew.
    • The Mastermind: Scott collects the crew and gives the orders.
    • The Partner In Crime: Maria, who helps Scott find specialists and acts as his Number Two.
    • The Gadget Guy: Vanderohe, who rigs the explosives and has the most unconventional weapon of choice.
    • The Muscle: Guzman and Chambers: only really there because they're good at killing.
    • The Searcher: Lily sneaks them into Vegas and is their resident expert on the area.
    • The Driver: Peters acts as the getaway driver and ensures there is a Chopper on Standby.
    • The Safecracker: Dieter is one of the few people in the world that can crack Tanaka's safe.
    • The Fall Guy: Cummings is the rapist asshole no one will miss and is on the crew as a sacrifice to the Vegas zombies for passage.
    • The Inside Man: Martin, Tanaka's head of security that has knowledge of the building and the key card needed to get to the safe.
    • The New Kid: Kate, who largely invites herself and doesn't have any special skills (also Dieter and Chambers to a lesser extent, since they're newbies to zombie-killing).
  • Celebrity Impersonator:
    • In the opening sequence with the credits showing the start of the zombie outbreak in Vegas, a Liberace impersonator plays piano while a man gets devoured by a group of zombified topless dancer.
    • Later in that sequence, a zombified Elvis Impersonator gets crushed by the collapsing Eiffel Tower replica.
  • Celebrity Survivor:
    • An animal example. Lily recognizes the zombified white tiger as "Valentine", who had once been part of Siegfried & Roy's stage show.
    • Guzman and Chambers are a pair of social media influencers who got famous by staging zombie hunts around Vegas, and join the crew to both provide firepower and promote themselves.
  • Cheated Death, Died Anyway: Vanderohe is one of two characters to survive, having been shut into the vault by Dieter. He walks out of the ruined Las Vegas and makes it back to civilization with several bags full of money. Only to realize that he's been bitten.
  • Complexity Addiction: Tanaka's plan is ultimately revealed to be needlessly complicated and this is why it fails twice. To recap, he sends a team of hired guns into Las Vegas by telling them they are going to the city to break open a vault containing 200 million dollars in cash, then during the heist his inside man would somehow procure an Alpha's living head, leave everyone else to die, and fly away in the repaired helicopter. The idea that it would have been far simpler and quicker to tell his hired hands the real objective so they wouldn't waste time and resources going after the vault, apparently never crosses his mind. Considering he is working with the military, it seems odd that he couldn't have found individuals willing to do the actual job, as opposed to the hit-or-miss chance that his mole would manage to complete the objective under the noses of the others.
    • To be fair, actually telling the crew would probably have resulted in them either dropping the job outright or killing him on the spot. Can you really imagine Las Vengeance going along with the whole "we'll restart the zombie apocalypse" plan?
  • Contrived Coincidence: Late in the film, Kate sneaks away from the main group to try to rescue Geeta, who's held within Olympus - a casino-turned-zombie hive with hundreds of zombies inside. Luckily for her, Zeus - who had just recently discovered that his lover, the Alpha Queen, was killed by Martin - decides to launch an all-out attack on the team who's holed up inside Tanaka's casino and takes almost all the zombies with him, conveniently allowing Kate to sneak inside Olympus almost unopposed, with only the recently zombified Cummings being her sole obstacle.
  • Cosy Catastrophe: After an extensive battle led by the United States Army, the zombie infestation is contained only to Las Vegas, Nevada. Meanwhile, life everywhere else goes on largely as normal; the zombie virus and the quarantine camps do cause problems, but people handle it the same way they handle ordinary issues, by protesting and trying to pass bills in Congress.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Van never really stood a chance against Zeus considering zombie viruses typically remove the brain's inhibitors that prevent humans from using too much strength and hurting themselves.
  • Death by Materialism:
    • The protagonists want to get rich so they deliberately choose to go into a city overrun with hordes of deadly undead. Even when some of them are killed, the rest continue on. In an extreme example, Dieter and Vanderohe see that their escape route is about to be cut off and still decide to stay and get more money. Kate is the only one who goes into the city purely for altruistic reasons. She is the only one to get out alive.
    • Averted by Damon who wants the money but values his life more, so he walks away during the planning stage.
  • Decapitation Presentation: Martin does this with the queen's head, intending to capture her for his boss to sell on the black market.
  • Devoured by the Horde: A whole bunch in the prologue alone. A bathrobe-wearing guy gets devoured by a bunch of zombified topless female dancers. An unlucky terminally-ill gambler (strapped up to an oxygen tube) suffers this fate at the hands of a zombie bachelorette party right after hitting the jackpot, complete with tokens raining down from the slot machine onto him and the zombies eating him. A paratrooper accidentally lands in a horde of zombies; all we see is the blood staining his parachute as it covers the scene. A mother and daughter are about to be devoured before a shipping container, part of the wall separating Vegas from the outside world, gets dropped into place on both them and the zombies.
  • Didn't Think This Through: Whoever thought it was a bright idea to deploy paratroopers into a city overrun by undead cannibals clearly never considered where they were supposed to land. The effect is something like Grubhub for zombies.
  • Divided States of America: It's implied the zombie infested Las Vegas is a lawless place that's no longer part of America.
  • Downer Ending: Kate makes it out of Las Vegas before the bomb falls and ends up with a small fortune to help Geeta's kids with, but is forced to kill her father as he turns into a zombie. Meanwhile, Vanderohe walks away with a good amount of money, but soon discovers that he's infected as he's headed to Mexico City, meaning that everything is bound to happen again unless he somehow kills himself before he turns. Either way, he's a dead man. Everyone else on the team dies, alongside Geeta, who Kate had spent much of the heist trying to save.
  • Dying Moment of Awesome: When Chambers is separated from the group, and the hibernating zombies around her start to wake, you expect she may get a couple of hits in before getting taken down. Instead, she fights fiercely and takes down dozens of zombies, solo, with a rifle and then a pair of pistols and a knife... Until she reaches the door and finds Martin locked her in. And she's still not done: she crashes through a window and takes out half a dozen shamblers around her with clean headshots. When she is grabbed and chomped into, she shouts for Guzman to just leave her, and gives an approving nod to him when he shoots the fuel tanks on her back, causing her and the undead around her to go up in a fireball. What a woman.
  • Eiffel Tower Effect: The film is set in Las Vegas, with landmarks such as (appropriately) the Eiffel Tower copy of the Paris Las Vegas casino-hotel, the Statue of Liberty replica and the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign.
  • Elite Zombie: In the prologue, the military is transporting an extremely powerful zombie capable of taking on an entire group of soldiers with his bare hands. He later becomes Zeus, the leader and most dangerous of the zombies, whose bites create the alphas.
  • Elvis Impersonator: A zombified one can be seen in the prologue. A non-zombified Liberace impersonator is seen slightly earlier, at the beginning of the outbreak.
  • Energetic and Soft-Spoken Duo: The soft-spoken Vanderohe and the energetic Dieter form an Odd Couple when comes the time to open the safe.
  • Eternal Recurrence: Upon seeing that a different heist team died attempting their mission, Vanderohe jokingly hypothesizes that the team is stuck in a time loop, doomed to ultimately fail in their heist while the threat lives on. This ends up foreshadowing the ending, in which the entire team dies and he ends up carrying the virus. If you look carefully, you may also notice the previous heist team are wearing very similar clothes and accessories...
  • Every Car Is a Pinto: In the prologue, the unlucky newlyweds' car explodes into a huge, dramatic fireball when it smashes into the military trailer.
  • Experienced Protagonist: The plot of the story takes place well after the initial zombie outbreak, and the majority of the team recruited for the heist are Vegas survivors who are already old hand at killing zombies due to surviving it. Notably, when Scott asks the team who hasn't killed a zombie before, only Dieter and Chambers raise their hands.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: In several exterior shots, the hanging bodies of paratroopers who never made it to the ground can be seen swaying in the wind.
  • Foreign Cuss Word:
    • The German Dieter pronounces "Scheiße!" (Oh, Crap!) several times.
    • The French Lily utters a "Putain!" (which is very vulgar and very much akin to "Fuck!", though it can also serves as Oh, Crap!) at one point.
  • Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: There are a few Alpha Zombies with brilliant blue glowing eyes.
  • Gratuitous French: Lily lets some French words out sometimes, like "Compris?" ("Understood?" / "Got it?") after speaking in English.
  • Head Turned Backwards: Happens to Maria Cruz courtesy of an Alpha neck-snapping her.
  • He's Dead, Jim: After the helicopter crash, Kate takes one look at Peters and then leaves her for dead.
  • Hellish Horse: Zeus' main method of getting around is an undead horse.
  • Hollywood Density: As is typical for heist films, money is treated as light and easily portable. In reality 200 million dollars in $100 bills would weigh 2,000 kilograms or 4,400 pounds, far too much for a small group of people to carry on their backs, or for a single small helicopter to lift. The money was never supposed to get to the helicopter. It was a distraction while Martin acquired the real prize, a living Alpha head. He would then steal the helicopter and leave the rest behind. Those that make it to the helicopter get there without so much as a single duffel bag.
  • Hollywood Tactics:
    • The convoy in the pre-credit scene. The four vehicles are tailgating, rather than being spread out with one vehicle taking point about half a mile ahead and one vehicle covering the tail half a mile back. There is no aerial support to keep an eye on things and give warning of possible problems. The soldiers were given no other instructions than "drive this truck from here to there", rather than "This is an important and dangerous cargo; stay alert and immediately report any events". And finally the advice from base is to run away from the superfast monster on foot, dragging your wounded with you, and not, say, stay in your armored vehicles and drive away fast.
    • The opening credit sequence is filled with this, with the US military dropping paratroopers over a zombie horde, helicopters crashing into buildings, personnel in an armored vehicle somehow getting infected and aircraft flying absurdly low with one A-10 nearly getting hit by the collapsing Vegas Eiffel Tower.
  • Homage Shot: The bus in flames surrounded by a zombie horde in the first wide shot of closed off Vegas. The climax of Snyder's Dawn of the Dead had the main characters attempting to escape onboard buses that ended up surrounded by a zombie horde.
  • Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The heist happens late on July Third. Lampshaded by the unseen President of the United States telling the press that nuking Las Vegas on July Fourth would be — in his own words — "really cool and the ultimate fireworks show, and actually kind of patriotic if you think about it," as he orders the nuking to be moved forward a whole day to prevent humanitarian protestors from doing anything to stop it.
  • Idiot Ball:
    • During his fight with Zeus in the helicopter, Scott is holding the gun right at Zeus's face, and doesn't pull the trigger. Instead, he just holds the gun there. This gives Zeus a chance to fight back and this ends up with him getting bitten by Zeus.
    • Peters' Changed My Mind, Kid moment near the ending would've been emotional if not for the fact that the wasted time it took for her to take off, come back, and pick up the survivors meant she couldn't take the helicopter out of the nuclear blast range in time, killing her and Geeta in the crash that followed. Worse yet, the time Peters and Scott wasted talking to each other instead of getting the hell out allows Zeus to catch up to them and leap onto the helicopter, which leads to Scott getting bitten and has to be mercy-killed by Kate later.
    • The film starts off with two: The first is the couple who decided that the best time for a blowjob was driving down the road, which lead them to drift into the lane with the military convoy. The second are the people in the front of the convoy. The driver and passenger in the lead vehicle were too busy having a conversation to pay attention to the road, and we don't know what the hell the semi truck driver was doing as he would have been able to see the car in the wrong lane as well.
  • Impaled Palm: Scott plants his knife in the hand of an attacking Alpha while fighting a bunch of them following the death of Maria.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: You might expect it of the more experienced protagonists, but both Chambers (who hasn't even killed zombies before) and Guzman are pretty good at landing headshots. Guzman even has his AK canted Gangsta Style, and shoots from the shoulder without using his sights, but he has no problem dropping Zachs with precision shots even when they're right next to his allies. At one point Kelly headshots six zombies in as many shots, and then hits Zeus in the head twice, unfortunately only denting his metal mask.
  • Incongruously-Dressed Zombie: The opening titles boast a host of zombified Vegas stereotypes, including a bachelorette party (complete with male strippers), showgirls (including the zombie Alpha Queen), and an Elvis Impersonator. Later in the film, there's also a zombie bride and some Hawaiian shirt-wearing zombies.
  • It Can Think: Alpha zombies, those bitten directly by Zeus, are intelligent and capable of reason. People they bite become shamblers, mindless zombies that just wander aimlessly in search of prey.
  • Karma Houdini: Other than not achieving his goal, nothing bad happens to Tanaka. The only witness who survives, Kate, doesn't know anything about his true plan because she wasn't there when Martin revealed it.
  • Kryptonite-Proof Suit: Zeus's helmet renders him impervious to head-shots, the primary vulnerability of his kind. His eyes are vulnerable, but the protagonists don't have aim that good.
  • Last Stand: The prologue shows that the military made one on the Vegas Strip, ultimately calling in an airstrike on their position.
  • Leitmotif: With music composed by one the trope's most prominent users, no less. Excerpts from Richard Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung are used when the safe (which has that as name) is first seen, then when it's opened by Dieter. More specifically, the excerpts are all from Siegfried's Funeral March.
  • Lethally Stupid: Someone in the government thought it was a good idea to transport Zeus in a small convoy with about only a dozen soldiers as an escort. The container holding Zeus is apparently weak enough that falling off the truck is enough to break it open. Thousands of people die as a result.
  • The Load: Mikey and Chambers are YouTube personalities hired for their supposed zombie-killing expertise, but it later turns out their channel is all show; Chambers admits that she's never actually killed a real zombie before in her life. Given the fact the first thing they do after they cross into Vegas for real is stop to take a selfie, you would be forgiven for thinking they are unprofessional idiots. However, when it comes to crunch time, they prove to be really, really good at killing zombies. Chambers especially, given her Dying Moment of Awesome.
  • Mercy Kill:
    • Scott Ward has a flashback that reveals that he had to put down his zombified wife using a knife.
    • At the end, Kate has to do the same thing to Scott after he's been bitten by Zeus.
    • Guzman shoots Chambers' gas tank, causing it to explode, in order to spare her the slow death of being Devoured by the Horde.
  • Militaries Are Useless: Shown best in the prologue during the battle of the Strip, but to be fair, they might have performed better if whoever was in charge of the troops hadn't been so incompetent in dispatching them.
  • Monumental Damage: The Vegas Strip is in a sorry state following the zombie oubreak and subsequent war to prevent a full blown Zombie Apocalypse. Then it gets reduced to ashes in the end.
    • The famous "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign is in a ruined state.
    • The Eiffel Tower copy of the Paris Las Vegas casino-hotel gets destroyed by A-10 attack jets.
    • There's also the decaying Statue of Liberty replica, which itself looks like a zombie after a while.
  • Multinational Team: At least two members of the team (the German Dieter and the French Lily) are not American.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • Once again, Richard Cheese is our guide to a wonderful montage of zombie-related shenanigans - in this case, carnage instead of hanging out in a mall.
    • A Casanova Wannabe sleazebag unwittingly fucks up our heroes' plans.
    • The most innocent and heroic of the team abandoning the main group to rescue someone and winding up endangering the whole operation, though, this time, the motive was a LOT more heroic and the heroes were already threatened by someone else screwing up.
    • Peters' apparent abandonment mirrors Steve's in Dawn of the Dead, though Peters had a change of heart, as opposed to Steve just being a lazy jackass.
  • Non-Uniform Uniform: The closest Las Vengance comes to a uniform is an American flag patch worn upside down, the universal signal of distress. The upsideown patch is later worn by the rest of the team during the mission.
  • Nuclear Option: The US government ultimately decides to nuke the walled-off zombie-infested Las Vegas. Crosses into Nuke 'em given how cartoonishly gung-ho the US President seems to be.
  • N-Word Privileges: Invoked AND averted by Tanaka after Deiter admonishes him for using the phrase "Easy Peasy Japanesey" and tells him to use the "Lemon Squeezy" instead. Tanaka starts to say it's okay for him since he is Japanese, but then decides this isn't an argument worth having and follows Deiter's lead.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • The dispatcher for the soldiers guarding Zeus in the prologue has an audible one when she realizes that the container they were carrying was breached in the accident, losing her cool and screaming at them to get out of there.
    • A paratrooper has a non-verbal one in the opening credits sequence as he realizes he's about to land in a horde of zombies, desperately firing his pistol at them before he gets Devoured by the Horde. Even Richard Cheese mutters “oh, shit” just before the parachute lands to provide a Gory Discretion Shot.
    • The team's reaction upon discovering that the government has moved up the timeline for the nuclear strike, giving them only ninety minutes to get the job done.
  • Only Sane Man: Damon, who, upon hearing the plan to invade a city of zombies, decides to just bail out on the spot, openly calling the rest crazy. Given how things turned out, he made the right move.
  • Our Presidents Are Different: Going by several of the military's decisions throughout the movie and his own quoted statements on the news, the US is run by a jingoistic moron.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: There are three types of zombies: shamblers, alphas, and Zeus.
    • Shamblers are your normal slow Romero-style undead, though the Vegas heat is noted to have an effect on them. Many of them hibernate inside, where they can be woken up by bright lights or loud noises, while those caught outside will dry out to the point that they're immobilized.
    • Alphas can not only run, but they also retain some of their intelligence and engage in social behaviors. They scream to communicate with each other, they show affection, one of them is seen dodging Scott's knife strikes in combat, and they are seen gathered not in a mindless horde but as if they're having a meeting, during which Zeus and the Queen are obviously being shown deference. They're also fertile, at least if Zeus is the father.
    • Finally, Zeus, the leader of the alphas, is stronger and more agile than any of them, capable of easily shrugging off getting shot (except in the head. Getting bitten by Zeus turns one into an alpha, whereas regular alphas can only create shamblers.
  • Poor Communication Kills:
    • In the prologue, the soldiers transporting Zeus are on "need-to-know" and are not told what they are transporting and what to do if the container is breached. They are thus easily slaughtered when Zeus gets loose.
    • Lily waits until after the team are inside the walls of Vegas to let them know the Alphas have intelligence and are not the shambling, mindless beasts the team assumed they'd be dealing with. This one, interestingly, ends up being a justified example, perhaps even an invoked one: they meet her when they are already about to go inside, theywouldn't have had time to actually plan around it, and they adjust to it pretty quickly. No one in the team dies because of it, unlike many other poor choices, and the one person who does die because of it is the rapist guard that she deliberately brought in to kill (and that was needed as a sacrifice to go on), who would have been unlikely to follow had he known what was going to happen to him.
    • Had Ludwig Dieter been clearer about what safecracking involved, the others wouldn't have interrupted him. Starting over delayed them 30 badly-needed minutes.
  • Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: The Las Vegas Strip has been walled off to contain the zombie outbreak, and the rest of the city is a quarantine zone with less extreme but still strict controls.
  • Race Against the Clock: Tanaka tells the team that they have a 32-hour window to pull off the heist, due to the U.S. army being set to launch a nuclear missile at Vegas so as to eradicate the zombie problem within. Halfway through the film, after they've arrived inside the city, this timeline is moved up by a day, giving the team only ninety minutes to secure the money and get out of the city.
  • Raising the Steaks: A zombie tiger and horse can be seen amongst the other undead, having succumbed to the same affliction as well.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Immediately following Maria's death, Scott goes absolutely berserk on the bunch of Alphas responsible for it and kills them all, armed with just his pistol and his knife.
  • Safecracking: Ludwig Dieter is hired specifically for this, which also makes him the most valuable member of the team. Humorously using the very outdated trope of just listening to the mechanism in the safe in order to open it. Which wouldn't be possible with a top of the line vault safe like the one portrayed in the film.
  • Saw Blades of Death: Vanderohe carries a big portable buzzsaw, which can be useful to cut through either obstacles or zombies.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Guzman's friend Damon walks out of the heist in the planning stages the moment he learns that they're actually going into the quarantine zone and will likely fight hordes of zombies for real, not just for show in a somewhat controlled situation. Given that we never hear from him again, it can be presumed that he lives.
  • Sequel Hook: Vanderohe survives, only to realize that he's infected on his flight to Mexico City.
  • Serious Work, Comedic Scene: This is a mostly-serious Heist movie set in Zombie-infested Las Vegas, but there are a few moments that are Played for Laughs.
    • The opening credits sequence features numerous moments of Black Comedy, such as the song lyrics "Watch out, Elvis!" playing over a shot of a zombified Elvis impersonator being crushed by the replica Eiffel Tower.
    • Dieter is the cause of many instances of this trope, especially his interactions with Vanderohe.
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The sole survivor, Kate, only makes off with a small fortune after all that bloodshed, albeit enough to help Geeta's kids, though Geeta herself didn't survive. By the end of the movie, it seems as if Vanderohe is about to start another zombie outbreak in Mexico City. Had the heist not happened at all, then the zombies would all be dead for good and all the participants would still be alive.
  • Shout-Out:
    Cummings: Don't kill me, I have a mom!
    Lily: Well everyone has a mom, you cunt.
  • A Simple Plan: Invoked, complete with an imaginative montage, of how the team gets in, gets the money and gets out with no hassle. To no surprise, the plan goes off-kilter within minutes of landing in Vegas.
  • Slain in Their Sleep: When being led offtrail by Martin in the middle of a room with countless sleeping zombies inside the Bly's, Chambers has to kill a few of them that show signs of awakening. It still goes south and she resorts to blasting her way through them.
  • Sophisticated as Hell: A news report details how the president thought it would be "really cool" to nuke Vegas on the Fourth of July.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: The opening credits sequence of Las Vegas being overrun by zombies is accompanied by a jaunty lounge cover of “Viva Las Vegas” by Richard Cheese and Allison Crowe. Richard even comments on some of the events on screen, shouting “kapow!” as a helicopter crashes into the Olympus or “watch out, Elvis!” as the Eiffel Tower replica collapses onto a zombified Elvis Impersonator. As the song goes on, however, it grows increasingly downbeat and mournful, eventually turning into the Moody Trailer Cover Song version of itself in a manner akin to Crowe’s cover of “Hallelujah”, in keeping with the events on screen going from humorous and kick-ass to just plain bleak.
  • Spanner in the Works: The fact the Alpha zombies can think was clearly never in the team's plans.
  • Staking the Loved One:
    • Scott had to kill his wife right in front of their daughter Kate during the initial outbreak. It's a major source of friction between him and Kate.
    • At the end, Kate is forced to shoot and put down Scott himself after he turns.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
    • When ordinary human beings get put in immense high-stress situations with only split-seconds to react in a matter of life and death, they most likely will not pick the cold and logical course of action - instead, the Idiot Ball runs rampant.
    • Being a zombie in a desert location such as Las Vegas will eventually turn them into a mummy if exposed to the elements for too long, since even the alphas show signs of mummification with dried up leathery skin from the sunlight exposure and dry heat of the desert affecting them. Not to mention the shamblers, which will dry up to complete immobile mummies due to being too slow to even get away from the sun if left out in it. It certainly made the containment easier.
  • Take That!: The team’s use of knives to silently kill shamblers could be seen as one towards The Girl With All the Gifts, which has a similar scene featuring egregious use of the Hollywood Silencer.
  • Taking You with Me: Guzman, bitten and about to be mauled to death, pulls the pins on his grenades to kill the zombies coming for him and buy the remaining members of the team more time to flee.
  • Tank-Top Tomboy: All of the female members of the heist. Chambers in particular plays it up with a very fanservice-y, midriff-baring version of the outfit, and given that she's a social media influencer, it's likely that she deliberately invoked this trope. Kate, on the other hand, is a downplayed example, as her outfit was her work clothes. The only female member of the group who averts this is Peters, due to her being the pilot and her character originally being portrayed by a man.
  • Title of the Dead:
    • Army of the Dead, obviously.
    • In-Universe, Mikey Guzman's YouTube channel where he kills shamblers for fun is called Guzman of the Dead 420.
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • As you might expect, quite a few people are killed and/or turned into zombies due to their own stupidity, but special mention goes to the two soldiers driving the lead vehicle of the military convoy transporting Zeus in the prologue. After being ordered by their superiors to get as far away as possible from Zeus's open container and subsequently witnessing Zeus escape and slaughter the rest of the soldiers in the convoy, these two geniuses decide to run away on foot rather than drive away in their still fully functional armored truck. Unsurprisingly, Zeus easily catches up to them and immediately converts them into the first two Alpha zombies.
    • Chambers thinks it's a good idea to openly tell Martin that she knows he's up to something and threatening to tell the others her suspicions only to him and nobody else. This only results in Martin getting the opportunity to mislead Chambers through a horde of shambler zombies, which eventually results in her death.
    • Chambers fights her way through a horde of shambler zombies on her own and jumps through a window, running out of ammo right as she does with nothing but a few zombies in her way between her and her group. But her group does nothing but stand there and watch as the zombies close in around her, and none of them try to save her, even though they're all armed with guns, which results in her death.
  • Trumplica: Although he's never seen, what we hear about the jingoistic, thoughtless President of the United States who thinks that it would be (in the president's own words as read by the news presenter) "really cool" and patriotic to nuke Las Vegas on the evening of the Fourth of July seems to be a Take That! to Donald Trump himself, who was in office while the movie was filming. Sean Spicer making a cameo lends the movie to the idea that Trump himself is POTUS in-universe.
  • Together in Death: The prologue features a mother whose daughter refuses to leave her side rather than escape, the two of them ultimately letting themselves get killed rather than have to lose each other.
  • The Unreveal: Some of the zombies have glowing blue eyes and one even appears to have a metal skull underneath their skin. Likewise, both Zeus and the Zombie Queen's child have bright blue blood. What exactly this means is never revealed. We also never learn how Zeus became, well, Zeus; he has dog tags, which suggests he might've been a soldier, but the only thing that's actually confirmed is that he was in Area 51 before the movie starts.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The newlyweds in the prologue who, mid-coitus, accidentally crash their car into a military convoy carrying a dangerous Elite Zombie out of Area 51.
  • Vasquez Always Dies: Almost to the point of parody. Lily, Chambers, Peters and Maria are trained, muscular and fit soldiers, and range from tomboyish to butch; all four die on the mission, while the inexperienced and more feminine Kate survives the entire ordeal.
  • Whole-Plot Reference: The plot of the film bears heavy resemblance to Aliens, only with zombies instead. A team of badasses, accompanied by a female protagonist who's a civilian and a shady man assigned by The Team Benefactor to oversee the mission, go into a hostile territory populated by aggressive monsters to complete an objective and gets killed off one by one when things start to go wrong. The shady man has a hidden agenda of recovering a sample of the monsters for his boss so that it can be weaponized and betrays the team once they outlived their usefulness, only to end up getting killed himself shortly after. The female protagonist later goes on a personal mission to rescue someone whom she cared very much for in the monster hive before escaping just before a nuclear bomb detonates and wipes out all of the monsters. However, it ends up being All for Nothing when she ends up being the Sole Survivor anyway (like Ripley in the opening of Alien³.
  • Wight in a Wedding Dress: Ludwig Dieter shoots a zombie dressed like a bride at one point in the bowels of Bly's casino.
    Dieter: I got the bride!
  • Zombie Apocalypse: Downplayed, in that the outbreak is confined to Las Vegas. Everywhere else seems to be more or less the same as in our world, though zombies are seen as pests in one of the team's stupid trickshot videos that gets him hired. The film's final scene strongly implies that this may eventually become the case for the rest of the world as well, as Vanderohe discovers that he's been bitten... just as the plane he's on begins to descend into Mexico City.


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