NOOB FILM REVIEW - ARMY OF THE DEAD (2021) AND ITS SYMBOLISM

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

The destruction of the American iconographies, Elvis, Cadillacs, etc, and the culture of gambling and casinos, symbolize the insatiable greed for money and its religious status. Money is God and is worshipped by humans, enslaved by it, symbolized as zombies.

The head of the zombies is Zeus and the main casino building named Olympus is in ruins. It is quite clear that Zack Snyder is poking fun at Democracy itself. Or the impending doom for Hollywood.

I love how Mamat Khalid parodies it with zombies (who are mostly Malays) who cannot stand the brightness of the light shining at them. That to me symbolizes ignorance in the light of truth and knowledge. And they marched on singing the song 'Inilah Barisan Kita'. Mamat Khalid has made us laugh at ourselves.

The Malaysian equivalent of 'Zeus' is crumbling with his 'Olympus' and he will try anything to shield the 'light' pointing at him. So apt with what the philosopher Kierkegaard wrote of 'Ancient Tragedy's Reflection in the Modern.

Time is not linear. It is cyclical. Like the circle in The Hero's Journey and that famous quote by George Santayana, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” As the prologue in the film Braveheart, it says "...history may say that I am a liar, but history is written by those who hanged heroes..."

Symparanekromenoi, a Greek expression coined by Kierkegaard, translated as “Society of Buried Lives” who spiritually and mentally entombed. Zombies.