Why Army Of The Dead Has Some Viewers Panicking About Their TVs
Netflix's "Army of the Dead" comes at a perfect time for director Zack Snyder: his four-hour director's cut of "Justice League" garnered plenty of attention in the last few months and now his original zombie story is coming in hot this summer. However, his newest film is causing a buzz on social media for an entirely different reason than his epic superhero saga. In "Army of the Dead," Dave Bautista plays mercenary Scott Ward, who leads a crew of soldiers and specialists into the quarantine zone of Las Vegas to enact an elaborate heist of millions of dollars stored in a safe — the only problem is the horde of living dead occupying the city and the fact that they've evolved higher intelligence. Part father-daughter drama, part gory action-heist, "Army of the Dead" embraces its setting with zombified Elvis impersonators and undead tigers for two and a half hours of good fun.
There are plenty of small details audiences missed in "Army of the Dead," but one that did not go unnoticed was the army of dead pixels haunting certain shots. It was enough to make fans terrified for a very different reason than the growling horde.
The dead white pixels in Army of the Dead are a camera issue, not your TV
Fans across Twitter and Reddit have noticed that "Army of the Dead" has a few pixels missing from the picture, forming a sad little white spot in the midst of the action. It's very distracting: the dead pixels only show up in certain scenes, always in the same place, and, supposedly, only in 4K — but not in 1080p. At first, many fans thought their TVs were the culprit. On Twitter, user @uzionmain wrote: "Big ups to the one scene in ARMY OF THE DEAD where the camera had a dead pixel for giving me a f***ing heart attack that it was my TV ... Scarier than the zombies."
However, a quick Google search revealed to fans that they weren't alone in seeing these white pixels on-screen — it's a problem with "Army of the Dead," but not anyone's TV. On Reddit, user I_am_Nic posited that it's an issue with one of potentially three cameras the movie was shot with, writing, "[Y]ou can clearly see it in Dave [Bautista's] reverse shot when he sits down in the diner at the beginning of the movie." Other users pointed out that they've seen dead pixels in a handful of other Netflix productions, including "Shadow and Bone," "The Irregulars," and "Jupiter's Legacy." User xevilrobotx wrote, "They'd be there for some scenes and then not on others. Came and went, but always back on the same few pixels when it would be there." In the Reddit thread, fans speculated that perhaps it's a RED Monstro camera sensor that's to blame — both "Army of the Dead" and "Shadow and Bone" were shot with RED Monstro — but they were surprised no one caught the obvious white spots during post-production.
At this point, it's only a matter of time before #ReleaseThePixelCut begins trending.