Retro Review: The Other Resident Evil Films

 So when I said yesterday that "The Cap'n has a long and storied history with the Resident Evil franchise," I neglected to mention that none of it made the transition from old Blogorium to new Blogorium. Back in the days before twittering, the Cap'n was delivering bite-sized reviews ("fun" sized?) and when the time came to pick and choose what I thought people might want to read in the "official" Blogorium archives, 98% of all things related to Resident Evil didn't make the cut.

 Obviously there are the So You Won't Have To Reviews for the last two films, and I believe that there are brief mentions of Resident Evil in the "Mission Valley Years" retro review. The first film even made it on to my "List of Movies I Regret Seeing." That said, when I went to look back and see if I wrote anything about it, surely enough I did not. So I will now:

 I saw Resident Evil with two friends who, along with others, made up a consortium of movie-going hooligans known to terrorize otherwise sensible adults. They would pay good money to see Jeepers Creepers, 8mm, and Dungeons and Dragons, and we would descent like a pack of MST3k-aping hyenas, callously commenting on everything in the film. Think of us as the dinner theater equivalent of a Mr. Plinkett review and you have some idea why the ushers had to come down and yell at us.

 (Unrelated to Resident Evil, my favorite "Shush!" moment happened during 1998's Godzilla, when I launched into a tirade about how absurd it was that the French of all people would be equipped to wage war on fake American Godzilla. When I was justifiably hushed from a few rows back, I politely turned around and replied "well, you know it's true!")

 Seeing Resident Evil only made sense, because we played the games and the movie looked stupid and at that point in time WE SAW EVERYTHING. WE SAW IDLE HANDS AND AMERICAN PIE 2 AND THE IN CROWD, for crying out loud. There wasn't a movie so unwatchable (Loser) that we couldn't find an excuse to go see. Resident Evil at least had the pretense of kind of being related to something we liked.

 The movie itself, like every film Paul W.S. Anderson has been directly involved in (by that I mean directing in addition to writing) not named "Death Race", was tedious, over-edited, and underwritten. But, and I will never forget this as long as I live, it provided my friend with the opportunity to use the second most inappropriate nickname for female anatomy during the first of Milla Jovovich's full frontal nudity scenes (scenes which ended when the series moved to 3D, by the way). It is, in fact, inappropriate enough that I won't even repeat it here, but I'm sure the guilty party could be cajoled into putting it in the comments. *coughProfessorMurdercough*

 I tried to watch Resident Evil again on DVD with another friend of mine who hadn't seen the films but liked the games, and he fell asleep. I did not, and I feel like he got the better end of the deal in that situation.

 Now here's the funny part: I would imagine you think I hate all of the Resident Evil movies, but the truth is that I kind of like Apocalypse and (to a lesser degree) Extinction. What they have in common is that Paul W.S. Anderson didn't direct them, probably because he was off ruining Alien vs Predator and something else that wasn't Death Race*. He produced them and was involved in writing them, but in the hands of someone not named Paul W.S. Anderson, the first two sequels were kind of dumb, but had a kinetic energy to them, a vague sense of scale (especially in the third film), and action sequences that didn't make me want to fall asleep.

 The following link takes you to a review of Resident Evil: Apocalypse by our own Professor Murder, which features what may be my favorite SPOILER ALERT ever.

 As to Resident Evil: Extinction, a film that I have even less to say about than I thought I did, the Cap'n did manage to dredge this up:

 Resident Evil: Extinction - Here's the best instance of "yeah, like I was going to watch that", so I did it for you. What can I say? It's trying really hard to further the Resident Evil story from the first two movies, while trying to be scary and action packed. Well, it's not really scary. There's not a lot of action. What there is amounts to lots of shots of crowds of zombies, tons of people dying, and Milla Jovovich shooting and slashing anything that moves. RE:E has a decent sequence that reintroduces Jovovich as Alice, both as a cloned experiment and as the real deal, and it seems like the movie might be building to a really cool action sequence in what's left of Las Vegas. Then it abandons pretty much all of that in favor of a REALLY rushed "stalk the monster" sequence which makes up the last 3% of the movie. It's like someone said "we need to get this over with" when the movie's barely 90 minutes long, and it feels like a reel is missing or something. Still, I guess if you liked Resident Evil: Apocalypse, you might want to rent this.

 Also, it the following made it into my Year End Recap for 2007:


Resident Evil: Extinction - I'm on the record not liking Resident Evil. I think Resident Evil: Apocalypse was a dumb antidote to the "trying to be smart" first film. Resident Evil: Extinction has some good ideas that don't really get the attention they should. It doesn't help that the film feels like it's missing a reel near the end.

 And that's about it. I'm actually surprised that I remember the film at all, because it only really comes to me in fits and bursts. The kid named after a store, Mike Epps being eating by zombie crows, Milla Jovovich falling into some kind of trap with zombies, and the introduction of the Alice clones that Afterlife promptly did away with in its prologue. Wesker is in there somewhere, and I think Claire (Ali Larter) but don't hold me to that. I'm not invested enough to go back and be sure. Foggy memories seem to function best as it pertains to Resident Evil films.

 Now you have a better idea of my "long and storied history" with Resident Evil, and perhaps that give some context to why I think the fourth and fifth movies are gigantic turd sandwiches you don't need to see. Ever. 


 * I'm not kidding or being sarcastic about Death Race. I actually think it's the one good movie he's ever made, one that openly embraces its schlocky nature and is actually fun to watch. It is the antithesis of the type of movies Paul W.S. Anderson usually makes.

So You Won't Have To: Resident Evil - Retribution

 
 Cap'n Howdy has a long and storied history with the Resident Evil franchise, and while I'm not proud to say I've seen all five films (three of them theatrically), I have seen all five of the Paul W.S. Anderson VGINM* "adaptations" of the Resident Evil games. Now, until the character of Alice (Milla Jovovich) appears in a Resident Evil game, it's not actually an adaptation of any game so much as cramming in characters, monsters, and locations into a vaguely related story.

 As I mentioned in my Resident Evil: Afterlife review, the series is getting to the point where it's almost impossible to know what's going on if you haven't played the games. Afterlife, in particular, was chock full of unexplained plot elements you could only follow if you had finished Resident Evil 5, even though the movie itself had nothing to do with the story of Resident Evil 5. So while the movies don't bother copying the increasing theatrical nature of the games, "What Script" Anderson just takes things that wouldn't make any sense and using them as significant plot devices, like why returning hero Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory from Resident Evil: Apocalypse) is now a villain working for the eeeeeevil Umbrella Corporation.

 But it doesn't matter, I guess, because people that still come to see Resident Evil movies at this point are either slavish in their devotion to the series or want to see how much stupider the films can get. I can't help the first group, but for the people I know who make a habit of seeing these as an example of "how can they make it worse than the last one?" you can sit Resident Evil: Retribution out. I promise. Allow me to explain.

 Resident Evil: Retribution isn't a movie. Resident Evil: Retribution is a 95 minute trailer for whatever Anderson decides to call Resident Evil 6, since he already used up "Apocalypse," "Extinction," "Afterlife," and "Retribution."

 How is it not a movie, you ask? Well, a movie has a plot, generally speaking one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Retribution is missing at the very least two of those, and the other bit barely qualifies as "story." Filler, maybe.

 There's no retribution in this "film," by the way, just a lot of recycling of elements from other Resident Evil movies, and the appearance of two characters from the games who hadn't yet been dragged into this mess, Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb) and Barry Burton (Kevin Durand)**.

 Let's take a look at the "beginning" of the "story" of this "film": Retribution opens with the battle between Umbrella and Alice that Afterlife left as a cliffhanger already underway.

 Backwards.

 Yes, as in "played in reverse" and in slow motion in its entirety, until the helicopters approaching the boat Alice, Claire (Ali Larter) and Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller) were on at the end of the last movie. Then we pull back into a room full of monitors while Alice explains the last four movies to us (I'm not kidding) in order to catch us up to the battle we've already seen, which then plays out (in slow motion) but forwards this time.

 If that wasn't bad enough, after Alice is knocked into the water by a helicopter she causes to crash because we had to see the shotgun that fires quarters one more time, she wakes up in a suburban household with different hair. And she's now married to Carlos (Oded Fehr), but his name is Todd now, and they have a daughter, Becky (Arianna Engineer) who doesn't appear to be deaf but they still communicate with through sign language.

 None of that really matters because this is all a prelude to Paul W.S. Anderson's remake of the opening of Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead. Why? Because the Resident Evil films are in theory based on the Resident Evil games which were, at one point, about zombies. So we need zombies attacking the suburbs, zombies who run fast and break down doors and cause cars to crash and explode in almost exactly the same way that it happens in Dawn of the Dead. Because people liked that, right?

 Almost everything that happens in Resident Evil: Retribution seems to be based on that idea. People liked seeing zombies attack, and they liked the big guy with the hammer / axe from the last movie. They loved the Licker, so that's in there too. And hey, let's bring back Michelle Rodriguez (Rain), Sienna Guillory (Jill Valentine), Oded Fehr (Carlos), Boris Kodjoe (Luther West), Bingbing Le (Ada Wong), Colin Salmon (James "One" Shade) and The Red Queen, played by a different little girl than in the first film although I honestly thought they just made a shitty digital version of the effect from the first film.

 Oh, and Wesker (Shawn Roberts) is back, but this time he's a good guy.

 "But didn't Shade die in the first movie? Don't they show him dying during the exposition scene in Retribution?"

 Hey! I told you that it wasn't necessary to see this movie and you did it anyway?

 Well, then you know that it involves clones - thousands and thousands of clones, and not just clones of Alice - that was the pointless subplot in Extinction and Afterlife. In addition to creating the T Virus, the Umbrella Corporation also runs underground facilities that can replicate Tokyo, Moscow, New York City, and "Suburbia" to run "doomsday scenarios" using clones of virtually every major cast member you remember from previous Resident Evil films.

 With the exception, it would seem, of Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller, or Mike Epps***. They must have been busy that day.

 They developed this facility in an abandoned Russian submarine factory so they could film these scenarios and sell their bioweapons to global superpowers, thus creating the zombie apocalypse that we hear about all the time but rarely see. Seriously, if you think The Walking Dead is short on scale and scope, most Resident Evil movies take place in Umbrella facilities with white light paneled walls. Almost ALL of Retribution takes place in this environment.

 Now, this might just be me, but it seems like a MASSIVE waste of resources to clone thousands of people in gigantic underground facilities just to demonstrate your T Virus turns people into zombies with tentacle mouths, but how else are you going to explain to the producers why you need to film in Moscow, Tokyo, and (maybe) New York City?

 And now we come to the "plot," a term I use loosely because when you "adapt" a video game into a movie, that means you can leave out the "we need to get through this stage and this stage so we can rendezvous with this team and escape before the timer runs down and the facility blows up." Paul W.S. Anderson clearly missed that part of screenwriting 101, so that's literally what Alice and Ada Wong have to do - clear the "New York" and "Suburbia" sections of the Umbrella facility to meet Leon, Barry, Luther, and some other Red Shirts in the Moscow stage.

 That's it. Jill and clones of characters are in hot pursuit but none of them can die until our heroes get to the elevator, and a Licker shows up. Oh, and Ada and Alice have to fight TWO of the huge guys with hammer axes, because that's twice as cool, right?

 Now I'm going to ask some reasonable questions that aren't answered in Resident Evil: Retribution.

 Why is Wesker helping Alice? How did Umbrella attach the brainwashing mechanism to Jill? How did Luther escape from the tunnels in the last film and end up recruited by Ada's team? Why does Alice feel the need to bring along the clone of her nonexistent daughter other than to make part of Retribution also a ripoff of Aliens? Why does the Los Plagas virus now create zombie soldiers wearing Russian Infantry uniforms? Why are those zombie soldiers more interested in shooting people than eating them?

 If evil Michelle Rodriguez clone can punch people hard enough that we get an ESPN Sports Science-style CGI shot of broken bones and that also causes your heart to stop, why is Alice able to get up but Luther is (presumably) killed? If Wesker had the ability to restore Alice's superpowers at the end of the film when she gets to the White House, why didn't he have Ada inject her with it in the underground facility? Wouldn't that make their escape MUCH EASIER? In fact, since Wesker also still has his stupid super powers, why does he even need Alice to be the "ultimate weapon"? He took her powers away in the first place, and apparently decided that she needed them back when he took over as President of the United States? What the fuck is going on in this movie?

 Anyway, so Alice gets her powers back, Jill is returned to normal, and everything we spent the last hour and a half watching is basically undone. They go to the White House where Wesker is preparing for "humanity's final stand." There's an obviously digital camera pull-back that shows monsters preparing to attack Washington D.C., and we cut to black. That's it, movie's over. See you for Resident Evil: The Alamo or something like that.

 Imagine, if you will, that The Two Towers left out everything related to Helm's Deep until the last ten minutes of the film, then cut to the Orcs and Uruk-hai marching to the walls and preparing to attack, and then Peter Jackson stopped the movie right there. No battle, not this time. Sorry guys, it's been 90 minutes and my shift is over. We should totally get together and finish this in like two years. You cool with that?

 Okay, please stop punching me for comparing Resident Evil to The Lord of the Rings and answer the question.

 You aren't? Well, I'm sure you won't remember how you paid twenty bucks to see a 90 minute trailer when the next movie comes out. Why don't you go rent Death Race when you get home? That movie was fun, right? And Event Horizon! You always trot that out when people say "Paul W.S. Anderson never made a good movie in his life!" Now you guys make sure to buy the 3D Blu-Ray next month so you can relive when Alice shot the quarters at that pilots face again!

 So yeah. Maybe this So You Won't Have To review is suddenly causing you to NEED TO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW, but I can assure you that it's a waste of your time. What the previous paragraphs don't convey is how tedious, unengaging, and perfunctory the "action" in this "action movie" are. Not only does it not make any sense, but like almost all of Paul W.S. Anderson's films, it can't even be vexing in an entertaining fashion. It's just lifeless and bland, and it makes me long for the terrible yet gonzo charm of Ghost Rider.

 Yeah. Ghost Rider. Get it now? That's why I watched Resident Evil: Retribution.  

 So You Won't Have To.


 * Video Game in Name, Mostly
 ** To be fair, I didn't realize that was who Durand was playing until he pulled out his signature pistol, RIGHT BEFORE HE DIED.
*** Maybe you can't be cloned if you were eaten by zombie crows.