RESIDENT EVIL (2002)
Definitely looks like a fun game... I recently - as in, the past 36 hours or so - found out that all but one of this city's "cheap theatres" closed down in the last couple of months. So my plans to catch those movies which I was mildly curious about, but didn't want to drop too much money on have been, well, narrowed down. There's just one such theatre left, and holy crap, does the sound ever suck there. One such movie: Resident Evil. This movie is set beneath Raccoon City (you wouldn't think a place with a name like Raccoon City would ever get to be a bustling metropolis, but there it is) in a vast underground laboratory which they call "The Hive". Lots of illegal, nasty experimentation is going on down there, but according to the film's spoken prologue, the company which operates The Hive (and, from the sounds of it, a good-sized chunk of world affairs) doesn't let most of their employees know that. One can only assume that all of these employees milling about in the film's first scenes don't themselves call it The Hive; it'd be awfully creepy to work in a place called The Hive. Meanwhile, I'm wondering how these people get to work and back. There's a secret entrance via underground railroad from a remote mansion, but isn't there a front door where the nine-to-fivers come and go? Nobody mentions the front door. Anyway, somebody steals some nasty stuff, and deliberately smashes one vial of it, causing the entire complex to lock itself down (its security system is run by a merciless and recreationally cruel artificial intelligence) and kill everybody inside. Then the complex is infiltrated by a team of company-employed commandos and two people from that mansion (including star Milla Jovovich), though I'm still not clear on exactly why. Everything inside The Hive then tries to kill them. Resident Evil is based on the famed videogame of the same name, and since much of the movie plays like a big ad for said game, I do have to admit that in that capacity, it works; I'd really like to play this game. However, I haven't had a gaming console since the ol' Atari 2600, when I was the master of Yar's Revenge. The action in the movie is a mix of a number of things...a lil' bit of Giant Slimy Monster, a dash of Deathtrapped Chamber, quite a bit of Bloodthirsty Zombies Everywhere, and some Race Against The Clock (without giving too much away, I'm reminded of Robert McCammon's Swan Song, which begins with the nuclear annihilation of the entire world, and ends with a race against the clock to prevent...the nuclear annihilation of the entire world). There aren't a lot of zombie movies getting made these days (at least not many that make it to the big screen), and it's been so long since there were, the script (by director Paul Anderson) takes pains to explain to today's zombie-deprived audiences just what a zombie wants, what it does, and why you should avoid getting chomped by one. While every zombie movie is entitled to create its own "zombie rules", this one elects to just stick with the basic Romero-style zombies, and the verbal explanation is superfluous, especially when just what we have to worry about with the zombies is fairly clearly demonstrated on screen. The action scenes play like a Meshuggah song - everything's constantly starting, stopping, and re-starting, and if you came lookin' for "flow", you came to the wrong place. The start/stop thing is cool when used as a tool, but there's a reason I don't listen to Meshuggah: they're basically like this all the time, and it gets annoying. Likewise, Resident Evil. I can't tell if it's Anderson's "style" (I really liked Event Horizon; Mortal Kombat and Soldier, I can do without), or harsh MPAA-demanded cuts. This may end up being a more likeable movie when it inevitably gets released in a longer cut on video. Characters are largely irrelevant, as they're all basically here to die horribly at one time or another. But it would have been nice if I could've told them apart. There are, apparently, two women with long brown hair among the commando team, but for much of the film, I thought there was only one. Then one of them had her head cut off with a laser, and a couple of minutes later, the other one's still saying things like "blow me". (that this line comes from a woman is, I suppose, this movie's idea of a sense of humor) This actually pissed me off to no end, because her "tough-girl" schtick is really annoying and for that couple of minutes, I was really glad she was dead. Then she came back, goddammit! Most of the men pretty much look the same, too - there's the black guy, and then there's everybody else. I did like Jovovich, though; she's petite, kittenish, sexy in kind of a skinny way, but convincingly agile enough to fight her way through a movie like this in a way I'm not convinced of with, say, Angelina Jolie. The violence and gore is often cut away from quickly; sounds good as described, but yeah, it definitely looks like a hackjob to get away with that R. Cute Romero references (he was attached to the film for some time), very little in the way of winkwinknudgenudge-type shit, dialogue can often not be heard over the Slipknot-type music (again, this may be the theater's fault), and the plot's slight yet hard to follow at the same time. I shifted in my seat throughout, looking forward to going home, but when it was over, I drove home with a smile on my face. Go figure. I probably won't ever want to see this again unless I hear really great things about the restored stuff in the video release, but I've seen worse, especially when it comes to movies based on video games. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |