Despite scenes you'll probably never forget, such moments in Resident Evil make you conscious of what the rest of the film lacks.
The main interest, really, comes from Alice's flashbacks that make us wonder about her position and allegiance in the whole affair. It certainly doesn't come from the commandos or their leaders (Colin Salmon, Michelle Rodriguez), whose Rambo posturing is godawful familiar. And yet, "Resident Evil" is hardly a stinker. It's what we at DVD Town call "a passably decent film, but not one to get too excited about," which makes it a 6 out of 10.
Video:
The 1080p picture looks very good, with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio stretching the film so it fills the whole screen on a 16x9" monitor. The techno-looking corridors and their blue lighting look especially nice, with a high level of detail and decent black levels. But at the five minute mark there was a bit of a glitch, and at the ten minute mark there was some momentary compression artifacts and pixellation. It self-corrected in a hurry, but still, the flaws are worth mentioning.
Audio:
The featured soundtrack (which is LOUD, by the way) is an English or Italian Dolby True HD 5.1, with additional tracks in French, Spanish, and Portuguese Dolby Digital 5.1 and subtitles in English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Sometimes there seem to be too many sounds all at once, making this a bit too cacophonous for my taste.
Extras:
The commentary track with Jovovich, Rodriguez, Anderson, producer Jeremy Bolt, and actor Jason Isaacs is a bit of a free-for-all. Jovovich and Rodriguez are interesting at times, challenging the director and asking why in the world he did this or that. But other times they just chatter on and on, and you can't really tell who's speaking . . . or why. At one point they even break into song, doing something from "Les Miserables." There's lots of laughter, too, though we're never included in the jokes. Not one of the best commentaries I've heard. Better is the visual effects commentary with Anderson and visual effects supervisor Richard Yuricich, who go scene-by-scene over their shots. It may not be as provocative, but at least it has substance.
Better still are the 12 featurettes on "From Game to Screen," "The Making of Resident Evil," "Scoring Resident Evil," "Storyboarding Resident Evil," and short-short features (under 10 minutes) on costumes, set design, the laser effect (one of the neatest), the train, zombie dogs (also very good), zombies, the elevator (nice), and an alternate ending playable with intro (interesting). Rounding out the extras are a few promo trailers and a pretty awful music video of "My Plague" by Slipnot. Was Kiss killed and replaced by zombies?
In the useless department, there's also something called "Blu-Wizard," which someone was definitely overpaid to develop. It's a program-your-own sequence of extras to watch separately or during movie playback. Why you'd want to do this is beyond me. First of all, it's a pain in the butt to go over all these things and then program it. Why not just click on the menu and watch them in order? It's certainly faster to use the menu than to go through this dopey "Wizard." And while you can program this disc to play the features during the movie, you end up pausing the film and have to take a detour. Why would anyone want to pause the film for so long? I don't get it.
Bottom Line:
Despite scenes you'll probably never forget, such moments in "Resident Evil" make you conscious of what the rest of the film lacks.
Video:
The 1080p picture looks very good, with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio stretching the film so it fills the whole screen on a 16x9" monitor. The techno-looking corridors and their blue lighting look especially nice, with a high level of detail and decent black levels. But at the five minute mark there was a bit of a glitch, and at the ten minute mark there was some momentary compression artifacts and pixellation. It self-corrected in a hurry, but still, the flaws are worth mentioning.
Audio:
The featured soundtrack (which is LOUD, by the way) is an English or Italian Dolby True HD 5.1, with additional tracks in French, Spanish, and Portuguese Dolby Digital 5.1 and subtitles in English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Sometimes there seem to be too many sounds all at once, making this a bit too cacophonous for my taste.
Extras:
The commentary track with Jovovich, Rodriguez, Anderson, producer Jeremy Bolt, and actor Jason Isaacs is a bit of a free-for-all. Jovovich and Rodriguez are interesting at times, challenging the director and asking why in the world he did this or that. But other times they just chatter on and on, and you can't really tell who's speaking . . . or why. At one point they even break into song, doing something from "Les Miserables." There's lots of laughter, too, though we're never included in the jokes. Not one of the best commentaries I've heard. Better is the visual effects commentary with Anderson and visual effects supervisor Richard Yuricich, who go scene-by-scene over their shots. It may not be as provocative, but at least it has substance.
Better still are the 12 featurettes on "From Game to Screen," "The Making of Resident Evil," "Scoring Resident Evil," "Storyboarding Resident Evil," and short-short features (under 10 minutes) on costumes, set design, the laser effect (one of the neatest), the train, zombie dogs (also very good), zombies, the elevator (nice), and an alternate ending playable with intro (interesting). Rounding out the extras are a few promo trailers and a pretty awful music video of "My Plague" by Slipnot. Was Kiss killed and replaced by zombies?
In the useless department, there's also something called "Blu-Wizard," which someone was definitely overpaid to develop. It's a program-your-own sequence of extras to watch separately or during movie playback. Why you'd want to do this is beyond me. First of all, it's a pain in the butt to go over all these things and then program it. Why not just click on the menu and watch them in order? It's certainly faster to use the menu than to go through this dopey "Wizard." And while you can program this disc to play the features during the movie, you end up pausing the film and have to take a detour. Why would anyone want to pause the film for so long? I don't get it.
Bottom Line:
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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[release]22488[/release]