Headscratchers / Army of the Dead

• So if zombies are intelligent enough to have a Queen can they have sex?
  • I doubt it. In fact, they might have evolved past that and discarded it all together due to, well, being dead and all. That doesn't mean they would be incapable of "Love/Affection" though.
  • On the contrary, the Zombie Queen and Zeus are fertile, as shown by the Zombie Queen being pregnant with Zeus' baby. That being said, this ability is only limited to Zeus and the Zombie Queen.
  • In that case, why would the zombies need to produce children at all? Why bother procreating if you can just make more zombies by infecting ordinary humans? Besides, wouldn't zombie babies not age normally, since they're already technically dead?
    • Zeus isn't a normal Alpha, he's even smarter and stronger than them, and mostly Immune to Bullets. Maybe procreation is the only way to create other apex zombies like him.
• In the opening the two surviving soldiers ran from Zeus but why didn't they just get back in that army vehicle?
  • They panicked, most likely.
• So if the whole was plan to get an alpha zombie head why not just tell the team about this ahead of time?
  • Tanaka may have been concerned that the team would try and take the zombie head for themselves. After all they were being motivated by greed and easier to run off with a head then stacks of cash. Another factor is that he used the vault as a carrot for them to get his man to the hotel with the escape helicopter on top. Planning for them to focus on that, while his man slipped away and used the helicopter to escape with the true prize.
  • There is also the fact that the military quite obviously would want for the plan to retrieve an Alpha to be left as secret as possible, which necessitated an excuse to hire the team. Like, that one gangbanger who refused to go, he wasn't a problem because all he knew was that a heist was going to take place.
  • This raises the question: If Tanaka has the support of the military, why don't they just send in a black ops team instead? If these guys are allowed to make a literal WMD in Area 51, sending a couple of troops to retrieve a head can't be that hard to get clearance for.
  • Most likely this simple fact. Soldiers would be missed if they perished due to being on the government's payroll. The heist crew would not be missed if they perished due to not being on that payroll. That is the difference.
  • It doesn't have to be soldiers officially on the government's payroll. The real CIA has a secret Blackwater unit consisting of former special forces soldiers going around killing people for it [1]. It's not a stretch to think that the military in the movie can easily assemble a unit like that, or just use the existing ones. Safe from oversight, not officially on the government's payroll, and if they get caught the government can literally just halt the investigation like they did the real CIA one.
    • Simplest explanation to that is that the CIA wasn't in the know, and they would have objected Area 51 developing super zombies. For all we know no government or military authorities outside Are 51 knew what is really going there, and they are not too keen on spilling the secrets.
  • There's a more simpler answer that people aren't considering here: the people they are getting were there at Ground Zero. They've seen the zombie horror up front, having to have had to rescue people and killing not just zombies, but zombies that used to be their family and friends. Finding out that someone wants to take what turned their families and friends into zombies and sell it as a bioweapon would be more than enough of a reason to not be involved, no matter how much money they were offered. If you were offered to go into Las Vegas to get an Alpha's blood and found out that it was planned to be sold to the military and possibly the black market, to be used to create more zombies after having seen/kill your family members, friends, and people you know who were turned into zombies, would you honestly be okay with that?
• Why nuke the city and risk the spread of nuclear fallout? Why not carpet bomb with napalm? Same effect, but no radiation possibly killing thousands of people miles away with radiation poisoning and cancer. And after this just have two rings of armored, bite-proof soldiers encircle the city, clean up the dead, finish off any surviving zombies and leave.
  • Perhaps a classic case of No Kill like Overkill with the military thinking that a nuke is best bet to make sure nothing remains.
  • The movie does have a guy on TV pointing out that Nevada has seen scores of nuclear explosion tests before as a defense for the government thinking this can be relatively safe for other areas (It is the desert).
  • It's also specified that it's a tactical nuclear weapon, which has a lower yield than the more strategic variety, and the combination with Las Vegas being a somewhat isolated location means that the fallout might not be that bad, at least in comparison to the existence of a constant threat of the zombies breaking out of Vegas. Also also, the President stated that nuking Vegas on the 4th of July would be pretty damn cool and kinda patriotic, if you think about it, so the best minds miiiiight not be in charge.
• Why paradrop people into an infested city? Couldn't you drop them a mile away and rendez-vous with other soldiers? Or maybe just drive in. This takes a little bit longer but then you're not dropping people into zombie infested streets.
  • The paratroopers may have intended to drop on safe rooftops and set up there, but missed for some reason beyond their control, like a sudden wind. This happened a lot in WWII, actually.
• If the sky above Las Vegas is restricted air space, how come you can fly out of the city but not in it? And even if Tanaka was lying about that, how come Scott and his team didn't put two and two together and call him out on that inconsistency?
  • I am not seeing the issue there. Approaching Las Vegas by chopper from any direction would take more than enough time for the USAF to detect and intercept the flight, whereas to leave the city they only needed a few minutes of flight time.
    • The military, the government, and the media have their eyes focused on Las Vegas, especially since a nuke is gonna hit it. Any potential aircraft in the city is gonna be detected immediately and struck down even before the nuke gets launched.
    • However as we saw it was a joint Tanaka\military operation to use mercenaries to get an Alpha zombie sample out of Las Vegas and lead the world to think that all zombies where eradicated. So they would have left instructions to turn a blind eye to any aircraft leaving Las Vegas , assuming that it was their inside man using their planned escape route with the sample they needed.
• Why did it take so long for Vanderohe to start showing signs of turning into a zombie? It's shown right in the opening scene that the process of turning is a rather quick one and the soldier bitten turns into one in just barely under a minute, yet it takes Vanderohe staying inside the vault for the amount of time it takes for the fallout of the nuclear bomb to start subsiding, travels across the desert and hires a private jet to Mexico City for him to start showing signs of turning. While it can be argued that the process of turning can be quicker depending on whether the bite is received from an ordinary zombie or an Alpha, it's implied that Vanderohe got his bite mark during his scuffle with Zeus in the entrance to the vault, so he should've turned quite quickly after that, so why did it take so long until he starts showing signs on the jet?
  • Rule of Drama. Scott takes far longer to turn after a bite from Zeus than the soldier in the prologue as well. You could probably handwave an explanation that Zeus' bites get less potent over time.
  • The soldiers at the beginning died from the physical trauma of their wounds. That's why they turned so quickly. A non-fatal bite is like a slow-acting poison. Vanderohe got a superficial bite on the arm which is why he lasted so long. Scott got a serious bite on the back of his neck. He likely died of blood loss and/or the bite being so close to his brain which is why he lasted longer than the soldiers but not as long a Vanderohe.
  • Could also be that the radiation from the nuke managed to slow the infection down, not enough to kill it, but at least keep him healthy for a lot longer than otherwise. Until the radiation got beaten by the virus and kicked up the infection again like usual.
  • Another possible Fridge Horror explanation is that Vanderohe genes were just right to become an Apex like Zeus, we don't know what made Zeus into what he is, that may be what he was trying to do with the others, make more like him.
• Why wouldn't Tanaka be able to provide the combination to open his own safe?
  • He might not know it. One common security technique is to regularly change the codes to places meant to remain extremely secure, and that would be handled by the casino manager and his people, not the owner. And when a zombie apocalypse is going on outside, "What are this week's security codes to the vault" are going to drop rather quickly on peoples' lists of priority.
  • Simple. He never intended for the team to get what's in the safe. Tanaka's real goal is to get a hold of an Alpha zombie head, a task that only Martin - his own inside man - knows about. The rest of the team is just there to keep him safe until they outlived their usefulness. The safe is just there to be an incentive to get the team together. That's why Tanaka didn't bother telling the team anything else other than there's a lot of money in it.
  • Technically true, but doesn't explain why doesn't Ward ask that very logical question the moment Tanaka says they are going to need an expert to open the vault.
  • If it is, then Tanaka could just lie and say that he didn't know it just like the above answer said, and that the team needs to open the vault the hard way by cracking it open.
  • Another possibility that no one took into account is that he actually doesn't own the casino. The vault, it's location, the traps, the generators and their locations are information he could have easily acquired, along with the security keys (which any surviving employees may have been willing to part with when given a little cash). Or, the security guy he sent in was, indeed, former security of the casino and he had those keys to begin with (and he got hired by Tanaka to acquire an alpha head). Head of security wouldn't know the vault's combination, and the actual owner may be dead (or not present in Las Vegas when the outbreak occurred, resulting in him just forgetting the combination). But then again, everyone here knows the vault wasn't the real plan.
  • Another possibility is that Tanaka also knew of Dieter's real identity and previous actions of cracking his other 3 safes before. See WMG.
• Why was the military paradropping dozens of soldiers (armed with nothing but pistols!) right on top of streets swarming with zombies?
  • It's implied multiple times in the film that the President is a jingoistic moron who believes in Rule of Cool for using his military. He originally wanted to nuke Vegas on the 4th July because it would be "very cool fireworks".
  • As noted further up the page, environmental factors like the wind can scramble a parachute drop and cause them to miss the intended area. Alternatively, that area was clear when the drop was planned or initiated but zombies overran the area in the intervening time.
    • Problem is, nothing shown in the movie supports that. There are clearly several planes dropping paratroopers over an extensive area, as it being a D-day style invasion. Plus, that still would not explain why the soldier was so ill-equipped.
• What the hell was with the robot zombies?
  • I think it's simply just a mutation of whatever it is that Zeus does to make zombies (as there's a similar silver/blue glow around his baby when he pulled it out of the Queen's body before it died. Or became more dead than it was). But, some have suggested that the government had sent in some robotic zombies to observe what is happening inside the walls of Vegas.
  • It's possible that the zombies aren't reanimated by a virus but instead by some kind of nanomachines. The alphas are simply more compatible and get the additional benefits.
• If the whole thing is indeed a Time Loop, then that pose for an interesting question. Why on earth would the pilot be in the vault?
  • The best guess: the pilot was going to go up to the roof, but ran into trouble and forced them back down to the others. In fact, it's possible the alphas chases him, which lead to them dying. Another possible explanation is that the first "team" may have taken the chopper in and sat it down on the roof (which would explain how Tanaka knew where it was to include it in the model), and that the pilot may have gone with the rest of the crew to the safe because they may have originally thought it would be a quick in and out. The pilot leaves the chopper running while doing so, all of them dying and the chopper runs out of fuel, and Tanaka lied about the "restricted air space" and told them about the previous chopper. By saying there was restricted airspace gives a reason why not to give them a chopper, because if they had a chopper and found the previous one on the roof, they'd ask why the hell the previous one was there (by the time they find out about the first group attempt, they're already in the middle of everything anyway).
• Why does Lily spend several minutes cutting through a concrete wall after Martin locks the fire escape latch? It would have taken maybe 3 seconds to cut through that thin steel bar that holds it shut instead.
• It's eventually revealed that Lily switched the Alpha Queen's head with the bill counting machine in Martin's bag, possibly anticipating betrayal later which eventually does happen when Martin trapped her and everybody else underground, so why didn't Lily reveal what she did right there to coerce Martin into opening the hatch. That way, she could turn the situation around and put Martin in a lose-lose situation: either he lets her and the others out of the hatch, or leaves them behind along with the very thing he came here for and thus return home empty-handed.
  • She didn't trust Martin to just shoot her and the others then and there. She most likely switched the items to ensure when they returned from Vegas , Tanaka would keep his word. When he did she would have handed him the head. But seeing Martin trap her and the others, she realized that Tanaka had no intention of helping the camps and decided to let Martin leave empty handed. It is possible she was planning to use the head to bargain with anybody else in power she could find if she ever got out of Vegas, in order to help the camps. But ended up using it to preform a last stand instead.
• Why didn't Lily just give Zeus his Queen's head he would have died from the nuke anyway
  • Maybe as a last screw you to the zombie who she viewed as her own personal demon. One who she had to sacrifice other lives to in order to survive. An act that is both figurative spit in the face before expiring, as well as a final act of redemption.
• How does Guzman and his crew get away with having multiple social media pages, including a YouTube channel[2], showcasing their elaborate shambler kills? In one of the promo videos he reveals the area of Las Vegas they film in, so why hasn't the government stepped in to monitor the entry points in that area and try to stop them? As for Zeus and the Alphas, do they not care as long as they stay away from the Strip?
• It's established that zombies are attracted to warm flesh, but that the flesh doesn't have to be alive, as shown when the crew microwave a zombie arm and use it as bait. If that's the case, shouldn't all the zombies outside in the scorching hot Las Vegas sun be constantly eating each other?

---