[Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop.]
Resident Evil (2002, d. Paul WS Anderson - crave)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004, d. Alexander Witt - crave)
Resident Evil: Extinction (2007, d. Russell Mulcahy - crave)
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010, d. Paul WS Anderson - crave)
Resident Evil: Retribution (2012, d. Paul WS Anderson)
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016, d. Paul WS Anderson)
PREAMBLE
I remember when the first Resident Evil film came out. Fans were not happy. But fans, especially the ones who rage extensively online (yep, even in 2002 it was a thing), are so rarely happy. Anything but a very literal translation is usually met with some form of derision. Resident Evil, the movie, apparently, wasn't anything like the video game (not that I would know). For instance, its protagonist, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, was not a character in the game (how dare they), and the movie takes place just as the outbreak is starting, sort of like a prequel.
Look, I've never played the game, probably never will. Of the many hobbies I have and things I care about, video games are far, far down the list (a few notches below crockery and just above marbles). Any adaptation of a video game has to work as a standalone movie for me, it can't be all about easter eggs and knowing winks or shortcuts in storytelling because the fans already know certain things. I always heard that the Resident Evil movies were not very good movies on top of being not-great adaptations of the games (including from Toasty who had some positive things to say about the first one (less so the second) here, and the third one (less so the fourth one) here, and then the final two here.)
Yet, in spite of being not very good, the Paul WS Anderson-era of Resident Evil bore six(!) films, earned a pretty decent amount of money every time, and apparently managed to build its own fanbase of appreciators. Something can't flourish for this long without there being some redeeming quality to it, right? Right?
I'll be honest, I've never really wanted to watch these (although I've always been curious about the one [edit: Apocalypse] where in the trailer Jovovich is running down the side of Toronto's City Hall ...that image has stuck in my mind) but two of my podcasts are recapping the series leading into the new Zach (Barbarian, Weapons) Cregger-directed Resident Evil adaptation this fall, so I figured...why not just dive in...?
ONE
I really did not like this first movie of this
Resident Evil franchise. I was bored and annoyed for most of the film. This is a bad sign for my viewing the rest of the series, which, from a quick gander at Toasty's reviews, does not seem to get a whole lot better (holding out hope for
Extinction).
Anderson is not a terrible director, but he's also not a great one. He's got a proficiency in B-movie genre fare that most others do not. His films look alright for their budgets and have ambition in the scale they're trying to operate in, but they mostly fall apart in the story. He's good at fashioning moments, bad at developing characters. Here he's playing with a horror genre (zombies) and turns it into an action movie that's basically aping Aliens. There's nothing scary here, and little real tension.
First, we're given a mystery. Someone has let the T-virus loose in the underground labs of the Umbrella Corporation. And then we meet Alice, who wakes up naked on the floor of a spacious tiled shower in a massive, creepy, mostly empty mansion with no memory of who she is. Another mystery...Alice, who the fuck is Alice? And then some spiky-haired douche (but not really a douche, appearances can be deceiving...poor Eric Mabius and his resting douche face) turns up at her door, says he's a cop (but he's clearly not...another mystery!), before a team of draped-in black special ops-types with heavy weaponry and night vision goggles come busting in (Colin Salmon, Michelle Rodriguez, and other zombie fodder).
They take Alice and spiky hair along with them as they board a train car inside the house! There's a train inside the house, guys! There they find another amnesiac, Spence (James Purefoy) on the train, which takes them deep into the Earth into a supposedly massive underground complex. The virus is loose, all the scientists and technicians and security that were there are now zombie-like flesh-eaters, as well as there being other security devices and experiments that are exceptionally dangerous.
Even though it's not a direct adaptation of any Resident Evil game, the film is basically like watching a video game. It follows the ever-dwindling group of characters as they traverse through the labs, fighting zombies and zombie dogs and "the Licker" (a so-so cgi effect in an otherwise largely practically-made film), among the escape rooms and other threats they face, all with the objective of escaping on the train before the lock-down timer goes off and they're trapped in quarantine forever. Hey, watching people play video games can be entertaining. This one, not so much.
The stuff about "who set the virus loose?" is painfully obvious, the "why" barely matters to the plot or characters. If Alice had her full memories from the get-go, nothing about this story would be different, and so the reveals of her past and what she knows feel perfunctory, and lack anything of interest or insight into her character. Beyond Jovovich being a performer Anderson's camera loves (Jovovich and Anderson would eventually marry), there's nothing to invest us in on Alice as a character (or anyone else for that matter) which makes it really bizarre to me that there's five more of these films with this character.
The good: Michelle Rodriguez, just a powerhouse presence.
- The digital map explaining the mansion facade, the train, and the underground lab complex.
- The laser tunnel sequence. Makes absolutely no logical sense, but the highlight moment of the film.
- The last shot, teeing up the sequel, a great shot, even if the sequence leading up to it is basically the same as 28 Days Later. Cribbed or parallel thinking?
TWO
Resident Evil: Apocalypse finds Alice leaving an abandoned Umbrella facility where she's been experimented on and now has superpowers (super strength, heightened senses and reaction time). The city is being evacuated because the plague is starting to run rampant. Apparently there's, like, only one bridge out of Raccoon City and there's a big fortified gate that can shut it down, so the Umbrella Corp. does just that, leaving many of their own people inside. One of the Corp.'s chief scientists (an overqualified and under-utilized Jared Harris, wheelchair bound and with the
tiniest of eyeglasses) is on the safe side of the wall but refuses to leave as his daughter is trapped inside. Using the city's ample surveillance network, he searches for Umbrella assets with the promise of helping them get out of Raccoon City if they rescue Angela.
Instead of giving Alice the assignment and letting her pick up new allies in this riff on Escape from New York, the story decides to spend a whole bunch of time with new characters like halter-top/short-shorts-wearing gun-nut cop Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), S.T.A.R.S. agent Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr) and spunky civilian Lloyd Jefferson Wade (Mike Epps). Much like the first film, none of these new characters are given much of a personality, and since we spend so much time away from Alice, we really get no character development with her either.
Alice was barely developed at all in the prior film. Here anything that changes her is strictly plot and/or world building (and maybe extruded from video game lore). Near the climax of the film, Alice has to fight the Nemesis beast (think a hulking, fleshy, zombie Robocop), who she discerns is spiky hair from the previous film, and she has an emotional breakdown (well acted by Jovovich, but nonsense in context...her and spiky hair spent maybe 8 hours together and barely got to know each other, why is she so attached?). By the end of the film Alice is dead and I feel nothing. But then she's resurrected and, again I feel nothing.
Apocalypse gets too hung up in all the wrong places. It wants to explore it's newly created mid-catastrophe environment but it's not in the slightest interested in the characters exploring the space or how they might be feeling in this situation. But, by the sheer fact that it's working in an open environment and the massive increase in scale, I actually enjoyed this more than the last one despite being a worse directed, acted and edited film.
I'm always delighted by seeing Toronto on screen and how it is used in movies. Here it's "standing in" for Raccoon City, but key T.dot landmarks like the C.N. Tower, City Hall, and our streetcars (not landmarks, I know, but iconic) are everywhere. Toasty speculated that Raccoon City might just be alternate-reality Toronto... perhaps a world where Toronto was annexed by the U.S. by force (one of the city's buildings is shown sporting an American flag), handed over to a massive corporation by a corrupt government as an experimental testing ground, and militarized (as well as flooded with guns...).
The good: The garbage chute escape.
- The City Hall descent.
- The ending newsreel that exposed the Umbrella Corp's evil deeds in Raccoon City, but then quickly dismissed as a hoax in the media (obviously Umbrella has the money and cache to influence the truth)... the most honest part of the film.
- Toronto.
THREE
Extinction opens not just rehashing but reusing Alice's awakening-in-the-shower-with-no-memory scene from the first film and then puts her in the laser hallway, which she escapes and then through into a clinic's hallway where there's a host of dangers that eventually kills her. Her body is taken above ground in the middle of the desert where a chain link fence holds back a significant amount of zombies. Her body is tossed into a pit full of other Alices. Like traversing through a video game, Alice must learn the patterns, die and try again. That's one way of introducing to us that Alice is a clone.
The world has wholly become an apocalyptic wasteland. The T-virus didn't just kill all the people but pretty much all life (vegetation included) on the planet. Where the first film was a James Cameron homage, and Apocalypse was largely a John Carpenter nod, this is George Miller Mad Max pastiche all the way.
Alice wanders the deserts. We learn mostly to evade the Umbrella Corp, who is trying to track her. We're really not sure what else she's doing out in the wastelands. Meanwhile, LJ and Carlos - who we met last film (no sign of Jill Valentine though) - are back, travelling the deserted highways convoy-style, looking for food and refuge, the safety of what remaining survivors they can find is their primary concern. They're led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), who has no specific objective other than survival.
Meanwhile, evil Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), introduced at the end of the last film as a head scientist at Umbrella, is back too. He answers to some dyed blonde dickhead who always wears sunglasses indoors (Jason O'Mara) . Isaacs has gone rogue and is doing projects off-book and consuming massive amounts of Umbrella's resources.
By the end of the first act, Alice has met up with the convoy, where she has to use her telekinetic powers to save the survivors (where'd those powers come from? Well, that's Isaac's experiments, changing the T-virus into a genetic enhancement, but only Alice clones seem to respond to it without it going horribly awry). The use of her powers trips alarms and gives away their location. There's a fight in Vegas wastelands where Isaacs unleashes a horde of experimental zombies and only a few survivors remain afterword. But now they know there's a helicopter and Alice found a book that tells of Arcadia, a location of, possibly, a zombie-free community in Alaska. So they need to make a full frontal assault on the Umbrella labs entrance in the desert to capture the chopper and for Alice to...I dunno, get revenge on Umbrella? Still not sure her motivation 3 films in..
Director Russell Mulcahy of Highlander fame attempts to inject some actual horror into the proceedings, but Anderson's script is still too invested in sci-fi, action, superheroes and world building for this to be truly scary. But this time around the director leans into his actors and lets them have moments which inform us as to who they are and who they are to each other, if not necessarily presenting a specific arc for any of them. Mulcahy gets better performances out of his actors than in prior films, but some of the tertiary performers and voice-over work is still quite terrible. Mulcahy's film also eschews the "electro-rawk guitar" soundtrack that still sounds so cliched and '90s for something more traditional and atmospheric (decent work here from Charlie Clouser).
The film ends with Alice facing off against a mutated Dr. Issac with Alice discovering the reservoir of clones. (Anderson clearly cannot get enough of his not-yet-wife)
The good: A murder of zombie crows are pretty much the only scary thing in 3 movies.
- Ali Larter makes for an effective stoic leader.
- The scene where you can see the plentiful highway traffic moving in the desert background...oops. Made me laugh.
- This one is much gooder than the prior two, I will have to agree with Toasty on that one.
FOUR
Ten years post-
Matrix and here we have Anderson's totally unapologetic
Matrix-riff as Alice and her clone army, clad in pleather and spandex, armed with samurai swords and automatic handguns, assail a tower complex which is Umbrella's Tokyo-based headquarters. So much slow-mo, so much bullet-time-on-a-budget. The blonde dickhead with sunglasses (no longer Jason O'Mara, instead Shawn Roberts aping the vocal fry of Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith), is the big final boss, having injected himself with the next evolution of T-cells. Only one Alice manages to escape on the plane with him before he explodes Toyko. He injects Alice with a serum that nukes her T-cells (and thus depowers her...just as the superhero boom is taking place? How curious). The plane crashes. Alice survives.
This first act could have been the finale of a whole other movie but I imagine they didn't have the budget for all the Alice duplicates for a whole film (and even still, here, it's a pretty dodgy effect anytime there's more than one Milla on screen).
So Alice takes small plane to Alaska where she seeks the Arcadia refuge she sent Claire and the others to in the chopper. There she finds a plethora of planes and nobody but an amnesiac Claire. Again, they could have built a whole movie around "Alaska" and what happened to the survivors from the previous movie, but Anderson sets it up and closes it out (sort of) in a matter of minutes.
Alice and Claire fly from Alaska to L.A., unbeknownst to them they are being tracked by satellite. In L.A. they spy a small band of survivors on the roof of a very large building which turns out to be an old prison. in the middle of L.A. Kay. Alice even without her super reflexes still manages to land the plane (The building is surrounded by zombies so it's the only place they could land...taking off again is a later problem).
There they meet a rag-tag group of survivors, including a wannabe actress, a big shot agent and his assistant, a creepo, a superstar basketball player (his fancy watch billboard is just across the way) and a prisoner who claims to be special forces and erroneously confined...and with the knowledge of how to get out. Turns out the prisoner is, improbably, Claire's brother Chris (Wentworth Miller) and not a dangerous offender, which would be more interesting if it was, like Riddick. If you think there's some tearful reunion or the sight of her brother would help with her memory problems or there would be any emotional or character-building resonance at all, you haven't been paying attention to Paul W.S. Anderson's career.
Anyway creatures get in, people die. Surprise surprise but the one's with plot armour make it out alive and to the Arcadia which is an Umbrella mobile lab on a container ship where all the survivors are now in stasis tubes for later experimentation. Oh and blonde dickhead with the glasses is still alive. He has a big brawl against our gang of survivors but is defeated, he escapes on a VTOL but accidentally blows himself up. Ha ha. Alice and friends commandeer the Arcadia only for Umbrella to send out an absurd number of VTOL assault craft to their location. The end.
The score shifts only away from the 90's rawk guitar of the first two films (but deviating completely from the third's more traditional score) with Tomandandy bringing their electronica sounds to the rawk guitar but toning the edgelord vibe down just a smidge. It's not outright awful, but it still feels remarkably dated for a 2010 movie to sound like this.
The good: Conceptually I really, really liked the opening sequence of an army of Alices. In actual execution it's pretty shaky. But a nifty opening that acts as epilogue to the prior film and prologue to this one.
- Happy Claire is back...I guess. Except in giving her amnesia they've stolen the grizzled wastelands veteran archetype Ali Larter brought to the character last film. She disappears for extended sequences here for no reason.
- Always happy to see Wentworth Miller, but Chris turns out to be such a big nothing of a character. (wait, these are the good?)
- Boris Kodjoe brings a lot of innate charm as pro-basketball player/athlete Luther West. It was a shame to see him killed, but then pretty awesome to see he survived. But we don't ever see him again in the remaining films so he's probably dead like everyone else.
- The interior of the Arcadia was pretty damn cool. A great set (which they obviously redressed three times over to look like three separate rooms, but hey, no shade cast...literally and figuratively).
FIVE
Colour me shocked. Resident Evil: Retribution's opening sequence was insanely awesome, a five minute slow-motion special effects extravaganza that tells the tale of Umbrella's destruction of the Arcadia and Alice's survival (of course) backwards. I repeat, backwards. It opens with Alice floating in the water and slowly pulls her to the surface and inverts her splash into the Pacific, back up to the boat two-guns firing. The Arcadia just being bombarded by a fleet of VTOL as the reverse slow-mo shows us all the massacre and destruction and the fight Alice nobly put up as it backs all the way to the closing shot of the previous film (also Jill Valentine [Sienna Guillory] is still alive but now working for Umbrella, but I didn't actually recognize her because of the 100% different look). This may just be the highlight of Paul W.S. Anderson's career. This could be the accompanying visuals to, like, a Radiohead or Bjork music video (we get a decent Tomandandy composition over it though). But I am also shocked that this ostensibly kills off Claire and Chris Redfield and undoes what little victory Alice managed to have at the end of the last film (just as the fourth film undoes what little victory Claire and the survivors had in escaping on the helicopter). But do we ever actually feel the weight or horror of these crushing blows? Hell no, that would involve Anderson having to invest in the emotions of the characters, and he's just not interested.
Then, as these films do, Alice explains, in brief, everything that came before...all the twisty-turny plot bits from four movies, in large part to remind us that cast members from the first, second and fourth films exist. As such this film will see the return of Michelle Rodriguez, Colin Salmon, Sienna Guillory, Boris Kodjoe and, of course the blonde dickhead with glasses is back. After Alice's recap, the open sequence plays again, only this time in forward motion at regular speed, and it's, like, a 60-second sequence that moves far too quickly to be impressive.
Alice is captured, wakes up inside an Umbrella facility which is a massive sealab somewhere off the coast of Northern Russia. She's set free by Ada Wong (Li Bingbing) with the aid of blonde dickhead with glasses who, surprise surprise, no longer works for Umbrella and is now trying to take it down (we only learn at the very end of the film that the AI "Red Queen" is trying to destroy all of humanity). A team of special ops agents including Luther, Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb) and Barry Burton (an overqualified Kevin Durand) invade the facility to blow it up and hopefully rescue Alice and Ada beforehand.
Unlike the prior 3 films which just layer plot point upon plot point, this one goes back to the simple action-movie premise of "escape the facility alive", and has very little in the way of plot, and just the tiniest smidge more characterization, but only for Alice, who discovers that all of the testing simulations in the facility involve clones, sometimes clones of her, and sometimes those clones are mommy to a precious little deaf girl. So now Alice is a mom, even though not really, and once again it's unclear how or if the memories of clones are transferring to Alice (though it sure seems they are).
If Anderson is aping other directors' works with each film, here he's in his Zack Snyder mode, where most of the action sequences seem to be operating in slow motion. Anderson's compositions aren't as pretty as Snyder's, but they are just as illogical (why did so much of this need to be in slow-mo? What is the dramatic impact of it being in slow-mo?). Is it all just to pad the film out (this is about 10 minutes longer than the previous films which all clocked in at a tight 90 minutes or so).
In the end, Alice and her "daughter" and a few chums escape, head to Washington DC where blonde dickhead with glasses (Shawn Roberts still doing that Agent Smith impersonation) is sitting in the Oval Office and injects Alice with the T-virus again so she gets her powers back. He says she's the ultimate weapon in humanity's last stand against the Red Queen, and we pan out to see the city completely beseiged by zombie creatures of all sorts. I really don't know how one woman is supposed to turn the tide against all that.
This was the worst entry since the first, just action sequence after fight sequence, greenscreen nonsense around every corner, not a lick of character development here. Bringing back all the greatest hits characters from prior films amounts to little or nothing at all. If anyone, Jovovich included, has more than a dozen lines of dialogue, I'd be shocked. There's next to nothing here, no purpose for it existing beyond it resolving the end of the prior film and setting up the next one. Alice could literally have fallen in the water off the Arcadia and woken up in Washington and we wouldn't have missed, really, anything.
The good: That opening sequence.
- I want to say it's nice to see Michelle Rodriguez back, but she's sorely misused (though not as badly as Colin Salmon who might as well have just been a mannequin for all he contributes).
- It was good to see Luther back, RIP.
- I love a sealab, and I love a sealab blowing up.
- Maybe my favourite parts of any Resident Evil movie is the skeletal wireframes that show us the set-up of the Umbrella Complexes.
SIX
Like the other films, Alice provide an opening monologue for
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. But instead of being a catch-up of the prior films Alice provides us some key background details on the origins of the Umbrella Corporation and the invention of the T-cells and how it all started getting out of control. It's information barely even hinted at before now explained in 4-minutes of voice over after 14 years and five films without it. It provides a certain context to what came in the past films, and would have been information any decent production might have provided us in the first, or at latest, second film in the series.
Also like the other films, The Final Chapter begins by usurping the end of the prior film. Washington D.C., where we ended Retribution, was "a trap" according to Alice, and is now almost completely obliterated (it looks only marginally worse than what Trump's done with the place). Alice and a few creatures and the air raid sirens seem to be all that's survived (so, you know, her "daughter" and the other survivors from the last film...all dead).
Much like last film where suddenly blonde dickhead with glasses turns out to be Alice's unlikely ally, now the Red Queen finds Alice and asks her to help unleash an anti-virus which will stop the infection globally. It's located in the wastes of Raccoon City. The Red Queen predicts within 48 hours the remaining 4000-iish humans left on Earth will all be dead. So Alice is given her maguffin as well as her quest and her time constraints. And the promise of ending the T-virus plague also means ending her own life.
After the cut, we find Alice has been driving for 12 hours and still has 418 miles to go (... if Raccoon City is Toronto, that's only 477 miles away...what has Alice been doing all this time? And if she's travelling on Interstate 64, she's going the wrong way. Also, I have to presume that most of the remaining 4000 humans left are Umbrella goons). She's picked up by Dr. Isaacs (turned out she killed his clone in Extinction) who's just out roaming the wastes in a convoy of pretty rad-looking mobile battle tanks. She escapes and with 17 hour to go arrives in Raccoon City, which has a big crater in the center of it from the nuke.
She's knocked unconscious, again, and wakes up to find Claire Redfield and a handful of highly agitated survivors. With Issacs' battle tanks and the crawling hordes of zombies behind them on their way, there's yet another threat level to Alice getting into the Hive and recovering the anti-virus, and, unexpectedly, answers to everything she's ever wanted to know (also, as Toasty pointed out, involving a whole lot of retconning of the answers sort-of given in Apocalypse and the way the Wesker/Isaacs relationship was portrayed in Extinction... I could be upset if I, or even anyone involved in making this stuff, actually cared).
At first I thought Anderson might be channelling I Am Legend with a "last (wo)man on earth" tale, and, frankly, that could have been a pretty good take for this film. But Anderson's ADHD kicked back into high gear and there's side quests galore and a cast of new (and old) survivors who get no development but exist only to be killed. Yet, somehow, this is much more focused than any of the previous films. Well except for the fact that Anderson's opted for a Paul Greengrass-esque hyperactive editing style (gone is the slo-mo of Retribution, now tracking the fight choreography and action is the challenge).
The ticking clock gives The Final Chapter a decisive through line, and returning to Raccoon City and the Hive where it all started finds the series coming back full circle. It's by no means an opera but, in the process of Alice getting the cure and defeating the Umbrella Corporation, she finds her origin story and the answer to her true purpose all along. I mean, she been a pretty blank void for five films, having answers as to why and giving her a sense of progress for the first time is quite rewarding.
The good: hey, character development!
- Claire's back!
- A clear purpose for this story.
- Answers, background, details!
- A plethora of neat set-pieces, actually.
- A somewhat satisfying resolution.
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FINAL THOUGHTS and
I honestly wound up liking this whole experience far more than I thought I would even if only two of these movies even come close to touching an objective quality of "good". The fact that Anderson wrote the whole series and had pretty tight control over it means that, in spite of everything, it's got a pretty singular voice to it (if not necessarily vision)...one which cares very little for its characters or happy endings or internal consistency/logic. It's never not an action series, and it only seems to flirt with its horror elements occasionally, and probably flirted with bringing in actual video game elements just as much (and when they were brought it, whether specific zombie creatures or characters, they're almost all ...whaaaaaat? Character designs from the video games seem quite out of place in the world of Anderson's Resident Evil.)
I found the films and their weird pacing and flow both challenging and charming. Almost everyone Alice encounters dies, even when it appears as if she's saved them. The way in which Anderson undoes all of Alice's good work is kind of hilarious actually (it would be more upsetting if we had any real reason to care about any of them). There's an insane amount of gun violence in this film, a real "guns solve everything" mentality to the pictures (even though, clearly, guns solve nothing), and it was always at its most interesting when the characters had to use hand weapons or makeshift weapons than guns. The underlying moral is corporations are a lot scarier than zombies are...a sentence which gives me a weird sense of deja vu. I'm not sure I'll ever come back to these films, but I did indeed get some entertainment out of watching them.
RANKING
- Resident Evil: Extinction
- Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
- Resident Evil: Afterlife
- Resident Evil: Apocalypse
- Resident Evil
- Resident Evil: Retribution
