WARNING: Mild spoilers for Army of the Dead.
Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead has two UFOs in its opening scene; why are they there and what could aliens mean for the future of the franchise? Director Zack Snyder is no stranger to zombie movies, having launched his feature film career with 2004’s Dawn of the Dead, a remake of the George Romero classic that went on to be a box office smash and is often cited as Snyder’s most solid offering. Now, 17 years later, he has returned to the genre with Army of the Dead, a zombie heist genre mash-up that features a group of mercenaries attempting to rob a Las Vegas casino with the city under quarantine following a major zombie outbreak.
Originally announced in 2007, Army of the Dead spent many years in development hell until Netflix agreed to distribute the film in the wake of Snyder’s departure from Warner Bros. following his less-than-stellar experience working on the ill-fated Justice League. Since then, an Army of the Dead prequel film, Army of Thieves, and animated series Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas have both been announced, set to expand the franchise and, potentially, rival both the MCU and the DCEU in the realm of shared cinematic universes. Aliens, it would seem, could be part of this expansion, with Army of the Dead containing not one, but two UFOs in its bombastic opening scene.
Army of the Dead opens with a military convoy escorting an armored truck from Nevada’s infamous Area 51, a top-secret Air Force facility commonly linked with UFO conspiracy theories and, at least in fiction, said to house all manner of advanced technologies. Around forty seconds into the movie, two bright lights can be seen in the sky - the UFOs in question - which proceed to fly away as the convoy passes a “No Trespassing” sign. The armored truck is then revealed to be carrying a zombie, leading many to believe that Army of the Dead’s virus is extraterrestrial in origin (which would certainly explain the strange sparkling blue energy that powers the zombies).
These UFOs are likely an homage to George Romero’s seminal zombie movie, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, wherein it is suggested that the zombie virus is alien in nature, stemming from a Venus space probe that returned to Earth just prior to the undead outbreak. Many zombie works have riffed on this idea, though it actually originated in an earlier film, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), which is commonly cited amongst the “worst movies of all time” - a phrase sometimes used by detractors to describe Snyder’s own polarizing filmography.
Thankfully, Army of the Dead is receiving more praise than most of his superhero ventures and looks set to kickstart the director’s own cinematic universe, a universe that aliens could definitely play a major role in. Having departed the DCEU on a high with his long-awaited director’s cut, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Snyder may be setting up a similar genre-mashing, mythology-heavy sandbox for himself to play in over the coming years, one with more creative control and less studio interference than his much-maligned efforts in the DCEU. Whether the Army of the Dead prequel or animated series will feature any form of alien menace remains to be seen, but Snyder has certainly given himself a lot of Easter-egg-based wiggle room to explore more genres in future franchise installments.