Resident Evil (2002)

Sex :
Violence :
Director Paul W. S. Anderson Reviewer :
Writers Paul W. S. Anderson
Starring Milla Jovovich, Colin Salmon, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy, Martin Crewes
Genre Zombie
Tagline survive the horror
15 second cap Alice journeys down the rabbit hole due to her paramilitary capturers, and then has to fight to get back out
Country

A ScaryMinds Movie Event Weekend

Review

"One of your group has been infected. I require her life for the code." - Red Queen

Alice wakes up in a shower cubicle with no memory of who she is or where she is. Wondering through a mansion she discovers photos of her wedding, a locked gun draw, and other hints as to her life. Reminiscing is cut short when a combat team crashes the party taking down Alice and some dude who is apparently her husband. Seems a virus has got loose in a secret lab below Raccoon City and the mansion is a front for an entry via train to the facility. Alice is a security agent employed by the Umbrella Corporation, who besides being the most powerful commercial entity in the United States has been playing clandestine development games with viruses and genetics.

Arriving at the facility the team, along with Alice and a couple of dudes, descend into the Hive, as the research facility is known intent on shutting down the facility computer which has gone homicidal and killed all the Umbrella employees in the underground base. Seems the computer, named the Red Queen, is very intent on containing the T-Virus before it can spread to the population of Raccoon City, at that point it will be non containable. Shutting down the computer the survivors of the team, the Red Queen has her own defences, find they have even more problems with the dead coming back to life as zombies and a genetically engineered creature on the loose. Time is ticking away; can any of the team escape the facility without being infected with the virus?

Resident Evil pretty much gets attacked by the sort of folk who should be defending the movie, we excused mainstream Critics and Reviewers here who wouldn't know a decent zombie flick if it leapt up and ripped a chuck out of their collective arses. Gamers are incensed that the movie developed by Anderson took from the original games, mucked around with the concept, and didn't include every nuance. Sorry different medium people, what works in a game will not necessarily work in the context of a movie, at best it adds unneeded diversions at worse it makes the movie utterly unwatchable. Play the games but view the movies at totally different beasts, a mutation perhaps. And of course horror fans seem to be incensed just on the general principle that it's Paul W. S. Anderson behind the camera, another Director who gets kicked from pillar to post because there's a bandwagon rolling down main street that the sheep want to flock to. While Resident Evil isn't the best zombie flick I've ever seen it certainly isn't the worse, in fact for our zombie weekend it was an excellent kicking off point, I'm sure there's much worse to come. So yeah Anderson's flick spawned a franchise that is still going strong at the box office but even so there's a lot of people bitching about it who in the next breath with wet themselves with excitement over movies like Drag Me To Hell. Grain of salt folks, people want to hate this flick regardless of actual merit, must suck for those people to see the franchise still rocking out at the box office!

Anderson delivers a grossly underrated zombie flick, get your arse off the bandwagon and give it a shot people!

So rolling in here to simply see a zombie flick with some action, some plot that makes some sort of sense, and if possible something cool. Not a lot to ask, even The Asylum can deliver on two out of three every fourth movie or so. I definitely got plenty of action, including the awesome Michelle Rodriguez kicking major arse, and Alice taking no prisoners. If action is what you want this flick has it in spades, including zombie feeding frenzies and monsters. Perhaps a tad heavy on the CGI, Anderson doesn't appear to be props sort of a Dude, but no worse than a tonne of other flicks sent our way each month. If you have seen either of the first two Alien movies you know what to expect here, para-military tough arses being whittled down one by one, someone with their own agenda, and a few civilians thrown into the mixture. That's pretty much what the doctor ordered and I was more than happy with the action.

While no doubt a bunch of pseudo scientists, you know the sort - they will pick holes in movies that they go into wanting to hate even though they actually have zero understanding of the particular holes they be picking, or, oh I don't know, literary illusion perhaps - will find fault with the science involved even if it does work within context of Resident Evil. Genetic manipulation bad in horror movie, that's about all we need to know. I was pretty happy with the setup, the final countdown, and the reason for things going pear shaped, some attempt was made to put it all into a coherent basket, that's all we really require. If you spend your time picking scientific nits out of each other's hair, then quite frankly you are in the wrong genre. Perhaps David Attenborough has something for ya down the documentary section. I'm simply appeased by any movie that sticks to its own theories and doesn't break them simply because the script required it. Internal logic is a far more influential aspect to a horror movie than quasi scientific analysis in my book of counted sorrows.

Definitions of cool might vary, each to their own, I hung out at the library during lunch break at high school, there is definitely some excellent stuff going down in this flick. Zombified Doberman hunting in a pack! Oh hell yeah, sign me on board that notion right here right now. Ms Jovovich and Ms Rodriguez kicking it major time, nice fu moves by Jovovich, I could dial into that each day every day. And who doesn't dig a well constructed zombie assault on a military unit getting out of Dodge. Anderson delivers exactly what we went in expecting to see and adds some icing on the cake for those of us that might want a tad extra in our movie.

Clearly gorehounds are going to be first in line for this flick, but don't expect Romero levels of viscera; Anderson is keeping it pretty tame. You do get some death and mayhem but internal organs are left intact. Sorry boys, but this isn't the renaissance of gorenography you may be expecting.

T&A is pretty much down to Mila waking naked in a shower and in a sort of hospital gown late in the movie. I'm sure a lot of folk are going to be going slow mo through certain scenes, and I got to say that strategy is not going leave you gnashing your teeth.

So kicking off our zombie weekend is, I guess, a standard of the sub genre that helped keep things rocking with decent box office returns. I originally didn't like the movie, gradually came to accept it works in its own way, and am now quite entertained by it. End of day it's a zombie flick with a bit of extra side dishes, exactly what are you expecting from it? Recommended to folk who want to be entertained, if you simply want to attack Director Anderson then knock yourself out, just don't bore the rest of us with your obsession.

ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ...

  A zombie actioner that delivers exactly what it promises!