Resident Evil – Wis[s]e Words

Resident Evil redux

Published on March 15, 2015Leave a comment

Alice versus patient zero

Unlike myself, Mr Moth has played and is a fan of the original Resident Evil games the movies are based on. Therefore he’s considerably more hacked off at them than I was, though I can certainly agree with much of his criticism:

3) Paul WS Anderson really believes the Umbrella Corporation is staggeringly incompetent.

Umbrella manage to wipe out nearly every human in existence but to what end? They’re a business and the undead are not a target market. By the fifth film it’s clear that the Red Queen is intent on destroying humanity. The problem is that humanity is well on its way to total extinction by the time of, well, Extinction. Las Vegas is a ruin, buried by the Nevada desert in just five years. There’s no coming back from that, but still Umbrella hold board meetings and employ receptionists (exactly how were they recruiting their staff? “Are you a zombie?” “No.” “Welcome to Umbrella.”). Their long-term plan made no sense, and it’s worth noting that in the games, humanity is in much better nick.

But that’s ok, because they were never going to benefit from it, anyway. Every single one of their developments got away from them in one way or another. The Red Queen goes rogue and kills everyone. The Nemesis turns goodie. The super-secret exit to their bioweapons lab is besieged by thousands of zombies, kept at bay by the thinnest of chainlink fences. The airtight lab they store their highly infectious weaponised virus in has aircon vents that link directly to the offices. If their underwater base loses power, all their soldiers go to sleep during the power cut. They leave hundreds of clones lying around of their most powerful enemy.

The Resident Evil movies really only make sense as spectacles, especially after the first one, which I still think was a rather good suspense horror movie even if there were plot holes there you could drive a zombie horde through. The overall story arc doesn’t make much sense and Umbrella has to be the most incompetent, pointlessly evil corporation in the world.

And yet, having watched all five movies over the last two months, these are still entertaining movies that have the redeeming feature of starring strong, female characters who aren’t undermined by their male costars, hold their own without becoming the usual bad girl cliche. It can be so much worse, as a look at the Underworld series, that other naughties action horror with female lead franchise, shows.

Resident Evil: Retribution

Published on February 28, 2015Leave a comment

Fake Alice closing the door on some zombies

Resident Evil: Retribution is the latest and so far last movie in the Resident Evil franchise. It starts with about ten minutes of recap of the previous movies, after which “Alice” wakes up as a housewife with a husband and a daughter. Cue a few minutes of syrup before the zombies attack. All of which turns out to be a danger room scenario, which the series is inordinately fond off.

Alice unchained

Real Alice meanwhile has been captured and is interrogated by evil Jill Valentine, which eats up a couple more minutes, before a power shutdown, which interestingly also shutdowns Valentine, allows her to escape. Despite the deadline she takes the time to pose here. To be honest, it is a nice shot of Alice in her badass uniform, against that white, sterile Umbrella corps background. Note the change in hair colour and length here.

Alice versus the Japanese zombies

The first real Alice set piece sees her re-enacting the zombie infection of Tokyo, which we know from the last movie but which is news to her. The last zombie facing off against Alice is in fact patient zero. This shot shows off everything I like about her: calm, cool, in control.

Big Wesker is watching you

Enter Wesker, the scumbag villain from the previous movie, the one who made everything worse and is now reassuring Alice that really, honestly, he’s on the side of angels and it’s the Red Queen AI who’s been behind the Umbrella Corp’s actions. Turns out she wants to wipe out the human race, which considering their track record in the previous movies, means she must be carrying out Umbrella’s true wishes.

Leon to the rescue

Wesker has sent a team of professionals to the rescue, including floppy haired Leon, who’s a much more important character in the video games. Here he’s just another bloke with a gun.

Soviet zombies shooting up capitalist Moscow

As the series has progressed, the bullshit has increased, from zombies to super zombies and here we have zombies intelligent enough to use weaponry and jeeps, something not seen in previous movies, so why now? Because it looks cool, probably, and normal zombies aren’t much of a threat anymore.

Good and evil square off

Meanwhile, despite dying in the first movie, that bloke in the middle is Alice’s boyfriend brought back to life by the Red Queen, as are the other non-mooks there. Alice meanwhile has gotten fake Alice’s daughter. The woman in the impractical dress is Ada Wong, yet another mysterious bad ass from the games brought into what’s essentially a drawn out cameo here.

Good and evil square off again

The climax comes with an extended battle on the ice, as brainwashed Jill Valentine goes mano a mano (wait, that’s not quite right) with Alice, while Rain on the right (also killed in movie 1) goes after the rest of the team, now reduced to Ada, Leon and that rapper dude from the previous one. The one true strength of the Resident Evil movies remains that it has so many kick ass women in it: Alice, Valentine, Ada, Claire Renfield, Rain.

Alice meets Wesker again

The movie ends with Alice meeting up with Wesker again, who now is the most powerful man in the world, holed up in the White House, defended by Umbrella and US army troops, the last surviving humans in the world, the logical end result of all of Umbrella’s scheming through the previous movies. Getting stuck in the White House, not the most defensible position in the world, being a prime example.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Published on February 10, 2015Leave a comment

The infection hits Tokyo

If the Resident Evil movie series is good at anything, it’s at providing great looking images like this, set pieces that sacrifice logic for looks. Here we supposedly have patient zero infecting Tokyo with the T-virus, the first zombie to hit Japanese shores, but you would expect that after the destruction of Raccoon City and the subsequent spread of zombies over North America, Japan would be slightly more prepared for a similar outbreak, or that Umbrella would come clean about it. But no.

Alices attacking Umbrella

At the end of the last movie Alice promised Umbrella she’s visit them in Tokyo and she’d bring some friends. This is them. Alices and clones attack, loads of mooks die, not least from friendly fire as head baddie Wexler is not choosy in who he kills. It all ends with everybody from Umbrella and all the clones dead and Alice free to persue her quest for Arcadia.

That is a lot of the walking dead attacking that prison

Which turns out to be some sort of honeytrap, as she finds a lot of planes but no people, with the exception of a brainwashed Claire Redfield. They set off by plane along America’s west coast and come across a prison, surrounded by thousands of zombies, inhabited by a motly crew of survivors, most of whom won’t make it to the end of the movie.

you got to look good even after the zombie apocalypse

What struck me this time is how well groomed all these survivors are; Alice and Claire in full make up and pretty boy over there has kept his beard neatly trimmed. The Resident Evil movies always had a sense of style, but by now style has definately won out over substance. This is btw roughly were I first came in with the franchise, one late night after the football had finished. Back then I hadn’t realised how disjointed this movie was, one sequence stitched to another, or how much it was making up on the fly.

Knock knock

Case in point. This fucker. Suddenly there’s a supersized zombie king to make things interesting, a supernatural creature not seen in any of the other movies. This is something the movies have done before, when regular zombies are no longer enough, but it feels like cheating. Here it does what the run of the mill zombies couldn’t and break down the prison walls, functioning as catalyst to trigger our heroes frantic escape.

Surprise, surprise

They escape to the Arcadia, which Alice and co had learned was actually a ship sailing past the west coast, picking up survivors. It is of course a trap and of course it’s Wesker, who died in the first twenty minutes of the movie, who’s the mastermind, having infected himself with a new strain of the virus, keeping at bay with anti-serum and willpower. Cue massive boss fight including both the Redfields, Claire’s brother Chris having been introduced in the prison; a bit late, considering he’s once again an important character from the videogames not given his due in the movie series.

Jill Valentine working for Umbrella

A happy ending? Of course not. Umbrella, for all its incompetence in actually keeping a world worthy to rule over, are very good at having plots within plots and just as everybody is freed and the Arcadia is ready to become a haven for non-infected humans, up pop their gunships again. And who should lead the Umbrella forces but Jill Valentine, proving that a turn to evil always comes with a worsening taste in clothing, as she has her tits out and wears a not very comfortable looking leotard/fishnet combo.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Published on February 8, 2015Leave a comment

a trench filled with dead Alice clones

You know, three movies into the franchise and I have to seriously wonder about how seriously the Umbrella Corp takes maximising shareholder value. So far, through their manipulative evil they’ve lost their super duper high sekrit research facility under Raccoon City, then Raccoon City, first overrun by zombies, then nuked to contain the outbreak and now at the start of Resident Evil: Exctinction we’re told the entire planet has been overrun. Society has collapsed, everybody but for a handful of survivors is undead and even the wildlife has been destroyed. So what is Umbrella doing? Staging elaborate tests for their Alice clones to run through and get killed. The end result is that trench full of dead clones. You do have to wonder about their priorities.

That is a flimsy fence to keep your secret headquarters safe

That danger room scenario wastes some seven minutes of an hour and a half long movie, only establishing that the bad guys’ base is in the middle of the desert, which is apparantly all of the US by now and that it’s surrounded by zombies kept at bay only by a flimsy metal chainlink fence. You’d think that the pressed mass of the zombies would’ve been enough to pull it down, but apparantly not. It also raises the question why and when Umbrella has been establishing all those super hight tech underground headquarters. This is in the arse end of nowhere, so they would’ve needed to bring in all sort of equipment and people to build it. For those of us living in cities with years overdue, far more expensive than budgeted metro upgrades, this seems unrealistic.

would you trust a diary you found at the feet of a suicide

Twenty minutes in, the macguffin driving the plot is introduced, a diary kept by somebody at the gas station that Alice stops at to refuel, after she escaped from the clutches of a hillbilly cannibal clan by introducing them to their zombie dogs. The diary talks about a safe zone in Alaska, free from infection, but the person who made it has hung themselves. Nevertheless, Alice is intriqued.

working for Umbrella is not the best career choice

So it turns out one of the things the bad guys are attempting is to find a (partial) cure for the zombie virus, giving the victims at least some of their intelligence back, curing their craving for flesh and making them into a docile work force for the Brave New World Umbrella wants to create. Needless to say it goes wrong. Needless to say yet another Umbrella scientist will find out first hand why working for Umbrella is a bad career move. It’s the casual psychopathery of the villains that makes you wonder why their mooks keep working for them, rather than just shoot the Umbrella board and lead scientists en masse.

Alice meets up with her friends from the previous movie

Meanwhile we’ve also been following Claire Renfield and her band of survivors scavenging for supplies, which includes some of the people we met in the second movie, including Carlos here. Alice comes back into their lives as their saviour from an attack by zombified crows, who’ve been feeding on the infected flesh of the dead. It’s the first and only time we see these crow attacks. This is the main weakness of this movie: it’s a series of set pieces that are supposed to overwhelm you with their awesomeness but fall short.

zombie party in downtown Las Vegas

What plot there is, is provided by Alice’s insistence they need to go to Alaska to look for Sanctuary, while the evil Dr Isaacs has become aware of her existence and wants to capture her for study. As the survivors go to Las Vegas for supplies, he sets a trap using his new, improved zombies. This seems wasteful but it’s Umbrella’s M.O. to kill off as many civilians as possible with each of their harebrained schemes. Here the plan is therefore to murder everybody including Alice and then take a blood sample. Things do not entirely go according to plan but it does allow some of the survivors to die a nicely heroic death.

Claire Renfield looking badass

It also allows Claire Renfield/Ali Larter to show off some of her badassery, which was badly needed. In the games she’s one of the more important characters of course and only introducing her in the third movie is a bit late. Interestingly she’s the third badass woman character to tag along with Alice in the movies, after Jill Valentine in the second and Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodrigues) in the first. Which is I think one of the main virtues of the Resident Evil series in both games and movies, that there are so many strong female characters in it, without too much of the usual nonsense surrounding them.

Alice and friends

The climax of the movie has Claire and the remaining survivors escape to Alaska in an Umbrella helicopter as Alice fights off the now infected Dr Isaacs, killing him and warning the rest of Umbrella she’ll be paying them a visit. It’s a great image to end on, but it shows the absurdity of the whole series, the obsession it has with Alice. You’d think that after the apocalypse Umbrella would’ve lost some of its arrogance, but apparantly not.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Published on February 2, 2015Leave a comment

a line of sinister Umbrella cars moves into Raccoon City

Take a good look at the picture above. That’s going to be the last scenes we’ll see of Raccoon City spread out in the daylight. Soon the cars will go into the suburbs to collect the Umbrella Corporation scientists living there to evacuate them out, leaving the city behind to succumb to the zombie apocalypse. Once that happens it’s all crowded sets, claustrophobic close ups and darkness. But for now it’s still bright, sunny and empty, only those black cars moving in ominously.

Jill Valentine

Our first good look at Jill Valentine comes about seven minutes into the movie, after we’ve had the short recap of the first movie, the set up for this one, the black cars have picked up their cargo and the zombie eruption is in full process but not yet recognised. This is the first clear shot of her face, after she’s stormed the police office she used to work for and shot all the zombies being arrested there, her former co-workers still thinking they’re normal criminals. Before that we only saw her in extreme close up: feet in high heels climbing stairs, her arms as she turned on her telly and grabbing a gun when realising what’s going on, cropped shots from behind as she moves into the office and starts shooting. A much more action orientated introduction than that of Alice in the first one, naked and vulnerable waking up in the shower.

Olivera to the rescue. But she is already bitten

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a very different movie from Resident Evil; Aliens to its Alien, a survival action story rather than a horror story. The first took its time to start the action, ratching up the tension slowly. Here it starts almost immediately. The first fifteen minutes or so of the movie is all action scenes as we get to meet the main characters and see the apocalypse starting to gather steam.

Just another prick on a wall

All of which culminates in this scene, in which Raccoon City is closed off by orders of the Umbrella Corporation. It’s a scene that neatly encapsulates both the inherent inhumany of Umbrella and its executive corps, but also its inherent incompetence and stupidity. First of all, closing off the entire city biut for one, not very big escape route isn’t going to get very many civilians out of the city, but then Umbrella is more than happy to sacrifise its own troops on the slightest pretext, which doesn’t say much for the intelligence of its goon squads. And then there’s the arrogance of the main villain to stand there in his business suit in front of an armed, angry and scared crowd telling them they’re going to die. Had I been there with a gun, that fecker would’ve been the first to die…

Like a bat out of hell, Alice makes her entrance

Alice and Jill finally meet a third into the movie, as Alice saves Jill and co from an attack by some of the super zombies. As seen in the epilogue to the previous movie and re-established here, she’s been experimented on by Umbrella and turned into a superhuman. It’s another case of Umbrella stupidity because of the way they went about it. The shock ending of Resident Evil had her and one other survivor break out of the Hive, leaving it and its zombies sealed behind them, only for the company to attack them and immediately use them to experiment with the T-virus. Had they been slightly less muhahaha evil and taken the time to debrief Alice, they’d known what was waiting for them in the Hive, they wouldn’t have let the zombies reach the surface and this whole movie would’ve been much shorter.

Alice and Jill passing the Bechdel test

One of the things the doesn’t get much credit for is how well it passes the Bechdel test. Both Jill Valentine and Alice are competent, strong heroines who work well together and the only time they clash over a man is when they disagree about whether it’s best to kill an infected team mate immediately. Even the obligatory civilian tag along, reporter Terri Morales, is competent in her own way.

Obligatory end boss fight

It of course all ends in a fight to the death on the roof of some modernist office building monstrosity, as the main villain forces Alice to fight his super zombie monster that he’d already taken for a field test in the last third of the movie. The symbolism here is …not subtle… You got the heavy, bulky, (barely) remote controlled killing machine squaring off against the woman who throughout the movie has tried to keep civilians and innocents alive, no fighting for the lives of her friends and comrades. The forces of evil seem to have all the power, but Alice’s own innate compassion wins the day in the end.