Despite scenes you'll probably never forget, such moments in Resident Evil make you conscious of what the rest of the film lacks.
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Two kinds of people will see "Resident Evil"--those who know and love the video game that inspired it, and those whose opposable thumbs haven't toggled anywhere near it. Count me among the latter.
Does that put a reviewer at a disadvantage? Not any more than one who's writing about a film based on a book he hasn't read, I don't think. I've seen enough zombie movies know that while this film by Paul W.S. Anderson ("Mortal Combat") has some nifty sequences, it also covers some awfully familiar territory. Like, "Night of the Living Dead" and "Dawn of the Dead" territory. In fact, George Romero was reportedly on-tap to direct this one, but dropped out because of creative differences. So you have a video game that's inspired by Romero's zombie films which in turn inspires a new movie about zombies which Romero almost directed.
The plot itself is pretty simple, though the science fiction is questionable--not a problem for video games, but for a movie? Milla Jovovich wakes up kinda nude in the shower (here's my first problem--if someone passes out because of a gas, how do they keep that towel so strategically placed?) and the "brief nudity" the "R" rating promises is a nipple shot so quick it could pass for a flash. She has no idea who she is or what's happening, which makes two of us--except for the nudity. As commandos in gas masks swoop in and take her away and the action continues for 20 minutes. viewers unfamiliar with the game will be going, What the?, until Alice (Jovovich) says what's on all of our minds: "I want to know who you people are and what's going on." And we get the explanation.
It turns out that she and everyone else is an employee of The Umbrella Corporation (whose name implies it could be even bigger than Big Brother). She was living and working in "The Mansion" with another operative pretending to be her husband (James Purefoy), part of an elaborate cover for an operation located a half-mile beneath the surface of Raccoon City. "The Hive" complex below-ground is a top, top, ultra-secret research facility where the corporation really makes all of its money developing nasty bio-warfare products and such. More than 500 people live and work there, but we discover that the chaos we witnessed in the opening was either an act of terrorism or a severe malfunction of the main computer that's responsible for the security of The Hive. Dubbed "The Red Queen," this computer may have gone haywire, possibly with outside prompting, killing everyone in the facility. And the commandos, along with the people they snagged from The Mansion, are trying to get in there and stop the computer before it does further damage (Uh, isn't everyone already dead?). And so the plot itself is fairly simple: a commando mission tries to set a charge under The Red Queen which would force the computer to reboot and presumably stop killing people.
The problem is those darned zombies, who turn out to be the same 500 or so people apparently rendered undead, somehow, by the gas that was released. And the zombie dogs, who are perhaps the coolest thing in this tries-too-hard film. They put the next level monster, a "Licker" (which we learn on the commentary also comes from the video game) to shame. The zombie dogs move realistically despite huge pieces missing, and they're infinitely more interesting than the humans, who seem more like the zombies from the old Miller Lite commercials. Aside from the dogs, the other truly memorable sequence comes when the commandos enter a corridor and are detected by the computer, who sics laser beams on them and slices and dices them as if they were vegetables and The Red Queen was a Vegematic. I take that back. There's also a pretty memorable demise scene that results when someone tries to use her head to help people out of an elevator. Aside from those memorable scenes, I found myself actually bored with all of the repetition: zombie pops up out of nowhere, can be felled by bullets, teeth trying to tear flesh, lots of shooting and screaming, blah-blah-blah. Much worse was Anderson's overuse of ominous music followed by a jumpy BOO-YA to surprise one of the characters. I mean, he went to the well so often on this that there isn't a drop of water left. And the dialogue was no great shakes. Example? Male cop: "You can't do this." Female commando: "Blow me." Not exactly "Rosebud."
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