By Terry Cleveland
Zombies, guns, and nudity are usually good things when you throw them together in a movie, but unfortunately this not the case with Resident Evil. For some reason the style of horror is next to nothing like the games, which have a more methodical style.
The movie starts out with a depiction of the Umbrella Corporation who it turns out manufacture biological weapons and other assorted nasty things. The scene then shifts to a typical day at an Umbrella Corp. lab where various people are going to work and getting ready for the day. Then in a typically cliché fashion somebody decides to release a horribly infectious zombie virus (T-Virus) into the ventilation system and ruin everyone’s day. After some fun movie fatalities we finally get to the main character Alice (Milla Jovovich) who wakes up naked in a shower with amnesia (surprise!). She then meets up with an elite team of soldiers, who were sent to investigate the outbreak, and three civilians (Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, and James Purefoy ). The rest of the movie is then dominated by matrix-esque slow motion action sequences bathed in industrial metal music, and a boring plot involving a rogue AI. There also is a half-assed attempt to establish a hazy conspiracy involving Alice’s memories, but it is overshadowed by the obvious reliance on future installments in the series to fill in the holes.
One of the main reasons that the adaptation missed the mark so badly was the focus on action instead of survival. Normally this would be ok in a Hollywood movie, but when it comes to Resident Evil one of the most frightening aspects of the game is the uniquely savage breed of survival, where even as a player you are never sure if you will make it to the next room. The movie is definitely about survival, but more emphasis is placed on the hot ass kicking protagonist, than the actual atmosphere of the source material.
My impression of this movie was that the person(s) in charge of the production had either not played any of the Resident Evil games, or had and simply chose to say “fuck it, let’s just add some metal music and slow motion fight sequences”. I’m not saying that it was all bad though; there were definitely some recognizable references to the games, and a great scene where one of the characters gets cut into cubes of meat by a laser defense system, but these were not enough to salvage what little there is to this movie. Ultimately I’d rather play the games (even the bad ones) any day than watch this movie ever again.
2 out of 5 stars
© Terry Cleveland, 2011
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