- Written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
- Starring
- Milla Jovovich
- Michelle Rodriguez
- Eric Mabius
- James Purefoy
- Martin Crews
With a $35,000,000 budget, Resident Evil is quite likely the most expensive zombie movie ever made (if I’m wrong, mail me and let me know what I forgot). Such a fact should have fans of the living dead doing the shuffle in the streets. Unfortunately, for all that, it appears that the script had a total allotment equivalent to half a box of day-old donuts and a carwash token.
The problem, see, is that it’s based on a videogame. And videogame’s just plain don’t have stories. Scenarios, yes, but not actual stories, because a story is what happens when characters meet events. And it’s hard to have developed characters in a videogame, because the “character” is a proxy stand-in for the player. Sure, we can have different powers and abilities and weapons for each, but that still doesn’t give us tangible personalities. And apparently nobody told the filmmakers that characters didn’t come as part of the package deal, because they sure as hell didn’t add any.
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Don’t let Tetris players design your security system. |
We open on a completely unnecessary on-screen prologue (read aloud for our convenience, which doesn’t say a lot for the producers’ confidence in their audience) about how, in fifty years, the Umbrella Corporation with be the great corporate Antichrist, with its fingers in every pie from computers to healthcare to military contracts. I believe the moral here is that, when you think about naming your start-up, try to pick a good one — you don’t want to end up with your company growing into a domineering multi-national saddled with a dumb-ass name.
We’re then taken to the massive underground glass-and-steel complex called the Hive, which resides just outside Raccoon City. (The moral here is that, when you think about naming your newly-founded town…) It’s a place where, among other things, they do viral research by fillng double-helix-shaped containers with colored liquid. Yes, double helixes, DNA, I get it. Gotta make the containers exciting, or no one will do science anymore? What, aren’t the colored liquids reason enough anymore? Well, maybe what will make it more exciting is the fact that, in a laboratory of angular metal fixtures, these viral containers are made of easily-shattering glass, so that when one is purposely thrown at a table edge, it shatters and releases the contents as a gas into the air ducts. (Just think of the tragedies that could have been avoided by Tupperware. Or even RubberMaid.)
We do get several effective scenes here as the self-aware computer, “Red Queen,” seals off the Hive to keep the virus inside. Claustrophobic office types get caught in elevators, gassed in corridors, and flooded by sprinkling systems (did the contractor who installed the sprinkler system know about the other contractor who designed the hermetically sealed room?).
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“I know the audience is supposed to be able to identify me easily, but could I please wear kick-ass black too?” |
I may seem to be dwelling inordinately on the opening scene. That’s simply because it’s the least disappointing part of the movie; there’s mayhem, menace, and death of minor bit parts. All of that goes downhill once we’re introduced to the characters we’re supposed to spend time with.
Part of the problem is that we don’t know who we’re being introduced to. Milla Jovovich wakes up in a marble shower, wrapped in the curtain (she sure does like entering movies nekkid, doesn’t she?), with total amnesia. This leads to a interminable sequence of her walking around this palatial mansion at night, touching things, seeing a wedding picture of her with some guy, finding some clothes, discovering a secret weapons cache… We’re talking two full chapters on the DVD here of her walking around blankly.
Eventually, she’s beset upon both by a cop (Eric Mabius) and a full SWAT team in gas masks who demand that she “report.” Naturally, being amnesiac, she can’t answer him, and the cop’s just kinda there, so the team decides to take the two of them along on their mission. What agenda wouldn’t be advanced by having an amnesiac and a law enforcement interloper along?
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The evils of chewing tobacco. |
Their mission, naturally, involves the Hive; the mansion is the secret entrance, and Milla is/was the operative living there to guard it, complete with her corporate-assigned husband, whom they find in the underground train that leads down to the Hive. He’s lost his memory as she has; apparently, Red Queen has gone both homicidal and silent, and one of its defenses was a nerve gas released in the mansion that causes temporary memory loss. Now this Umbrella-owned SWAT team is going down to find out what happened, since Red Queen isn’t saying.
Let’s stop right here and give ourselves some breathing room for the “Huh?” factor. The Red Queen doesn’t feel the need to tell anyone at HQ why, exactly, she sealed off the complex and killed 500 employees? And how would gassing the guardians at the gate help her any? (SHHHH! Down in front! Stop asking questions!)
So we head down into the complex with our generic SWAT team. Well, they’re not entirely generic; there are just too many guys with short dark hair. There’s hot Latino chick Rain (Michelle Rodriguez), and there’s a blond guy, and the black team leader (we never do learn his name — it’s not a racial slur if I say we should just call him “Sir,” is it?). Not that you should get too attached to those last two; on the way in to shut down the Red Queen, several of the team members including these two end up in a corridor guarded by a kick-ass laser which slices some bodies in two and completely dices the commanding commando.
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If this reminds you of Albert Pyun’s Captain America… I pity you. |
From here the remaining people — let’s see, Milla, her ersatz husband, the cop, Rain, and the SWAT tech named Kaplan (Martin Crewes), were there any generics I missed? — get in and shut down the computer, which tries to warn them off with a hologram of a little British girl. (Yup, that’s just what HAL was missing.) But as seems to fit her temperament, she doesn’t tell them exactly why they shouldn’t shut her down. As if true Americans are going to listen to a snotty little Brit. They find out soon enough, though: rebooting the computer shuts down all of the electronic locks, which releases — ZOMBIES! The T-virus released in the broken helix tube kills people and reanimates their corpses! Now they have to battle five hundred dead Umbrella employees, all very hungry and extremely pissed!
And, in a nutshell, that’s the entire rest of the movie. It’s based on a videogame, after all, so there’ve got to be tons of expendable targets to go down. There are also mutant dogs (showing up in a scene so pointless and divorced from the main action that it’s obvious they were included simply because they’re in the game), and further gengineered critters that bear more than a little resemblance to Carnage from the Spider-Man comics, right down to the prehensile tongue. And along the way, Milla gets back bits of her memory, enough to realize that she was actually working against the corporation because the corporation is icky. (What, exactly, was your first clue?)
So. We’ve got nonexistent characterizations (people really need to go back and watch Aliens to see how to do it right), an illogical computer, a lot of “just cuz” plotting, scenes that bespeak their videogame original far too loudly… and I haven’t even mentioned the anemic ripoff of Roger’s death scene from Dawn of the Dead, and other cliches (listen up! If you see someone you know to be dead shambling back toward you, do NOT stop and say, “Bob? Bob, is that you?”). But all of this really dances around the zombie fan’s biggest question: How are the zombies?
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“Don’t give me crap — I can outsweat any man here!” |
Distinctly underwhelming, actually. And that’s to be expected; despite having a pseudo-plot which involves zombies, Resident Evil isn’t a zombie movie; it’s an action movie with zombies. Given the high-octane antics that necessarily characterize a theatrical action movie these days (yes, there’s even a “bullet-time” shot), there’s no real chance for sepulchral dread here; the zombies are simply a lot of bodies, which equates to a lot of targets. They can’t compete for sheer spectacle, and the rare digital bits that are used to liven up the weakly generic zombie makeups actually detract; if there’s one department of FX that should remain completely practical, without CGI magic, it’s got to be zombies.
Tell you what. For the price of this new release, go out and rent both Dawn of the Dead and Aliens, and watch ‘em back-to-back. By the next morning, your memories of the night before will be pretty much like Resident Evil, only better.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 34, plus 474 other Hive employees (plus the sequel-setup conclusion)
- breasts: 1
- explosions: 3
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- spring-loaded crows: 1 flock
- spring-loaded SWAT team members: 3
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
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