It’s an action vehicle franchise for model Milla Jovovich. I can’t believe such a thing exists.
Again there’s nothing new to say about this one. Last one did well, sequel green lit. That’s it, baby. Again, Paul W.S. Anderson wrote, though again he could not direct (too busy messing up a Death Race remake). Anderson, as producer, was ultimately upset with how Alexander Witt “mishandled” his precious, precious screenplay for Resident Evil: Apocalypse, so a new director was hired, more in keeping with Anderson’s particular…idiom. Russell Mulcahy was chosen for his incredible work on Highlander and, um, the fact that Highlander II: The Quickening also exists, I guess. Had this been 1986, that would’ve been a phenomenal choice.
Really, from a pre-production standpoint, there is little to say about the third Resident Evil movie. It carries the film series further from the games that inspired it, appeals to an increasingly niche audience, yet somehow makes more money. Most of the cast (of living characters) has returned. Oh, and the movie’s title was originally Resident Evil: Afterlife, before it was switched to Resident Evil: Extinction solely to confuse people in regards to the third sequel to come.
Normally, I’d lump Resident Evil: Extinction in the same stylistic morass as the previous Residents Evil, but that is not the case. It is 2007 now (it’s really 2010, but bear with me), and building your series off of The Matrix’s stylistic effluvia is now even more passé than it was in 2004. Hence some notable shakedowns occur in Extinction. As of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, it is actually acceptable now to fashion an action epic from your zombie movie, so there’s that. And the tech-noir posturing from before has been replaced with something my mind sees as western posturing. Mad Max and its ilk are now the primary reference points, since Extinction opts to be a post-apocalypse, post-Apocalypse movie. Notably, the little problems from before – impatient editing, mostly – are resolved. It’s even dropped the series’ omnipresent blues (it’s oppressively orange now – damn you, color filters!). And a subtle change has occurred in the scriptwriting – from cripplingly stupid to just balls-out nutbars. It’s still dumb-as-hell, but now the plot is so totally out of control, any handicaps the first non-functioning Resident Evil provides are no longer an issue.
Again we open on an eyeball, as Alice (Jovovich) awakes, nude, in a shower – Hey, waitaminnit! Quickly I check the Netflix envelope, and indeed this is Extinction, not the original Resident Evil. The movie goes on to suggest otherwise, though, as Alice runs through her same red dress mansion routine I am already over-familiar with. As this 90 minute movie leaks away in previous footage, Alice passes out the mansion’s front door to –
The laser hall (from the first). Hold up there! Okay, so Alice dodges the lasers that Anderson is so self-evidently proud of, then moves into –
The Raccoon City Hospital (from the second). Oh for the love of! Alice dodges a guillotine trap that was definitely not culled from Apocalypse, but rather from The Last Crusade, then a bouncing floor gun thingy…kills her.
Yeah, yeah, this opening isn’t as clever as they’d like. This is merely an Alice clone, which is promptly dumped by two hazmat scientists up in the desert, in a great pile of dead Alice clones. This is another of the wicked, wicked Umbrella Corporation’s underground facilities, with the greatest security system money can buy – a single chain link fence. On the other side is a reasonably improved mass of zombies, showing believable desiccation and rot. ‘Bout time this franchise got its central element remotely adequate!
Only now does Anderson deem to provide the franchise mythology to those viewers who didn’t just plow through the previous Residents Evil. Even though the second film, like the first, ended with the zombie-making T-virus unquestionably contained, Alice’s latest expo-dump tells us it wasn’t, simply because. There’d be no movie if the virus wasn’t loose, so it’s loose – alright. And the virus seems to have plot powers never hinted at before…For what was originally supposed to be a cure for a single girl’s busted leg, this thing not only reanimates dead tissue, but arbitrarily turns the Earth into a desert, and even gives the heroine telepathic powers. Okay, the reason for the last one: Matrix sequels did it. (Also, it’s 6 years in the timeline since Apocalypse – that is, it’s the future now: 2010. Just go with it.)
Once they’ve explained everyplace is a desert, we spend the rest of the film in a place that is already a desert: the Mojave. Alice rides alone on a motorcycle, scavenging as is an ersatz Trinity-turned-Max Rockatansky’s wont. She gets into an isolated opening action sequence involving hillbilly nutjobs out of Six-String Samurai and the series’ de rigueur skinless hound dogs.
But that isn’t what I want to focus on. I want to focus on how Alice got to this point. Last we saw her, she’d just been secretly released by Umbrella as part of their Great Wicked Scheme – apparently they wanted her loose. What they, and Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), really wanted with her was her blood. To create an army of hyper-intelligent Super Zombies™ – you know, to satisfy Umbrella’s post-apocalyptic stockholders, or market shares, or whatever. The only problem is…Isaacs already has her blood, hence the Alice clones, and hence he’s already home-brewing handcrafted, housetrained Super Zombies™! So…what does Isaacs still want with Alice? To make his pet zombies even superer, apparently. And again, Umbrella’s great Enslave Alice plan first involves letting her go – like the climax to a Disney pet bobcat movie or something…Logic never really lasts long in these Resident Evil flicks.
Alice, who once started as a perfectly normal wire fu-capable amnesiac, has roughly followed Neo’s idiotic arc, as she is now a super-powered, telepathic, zombie-immune weapon of mass destruction, with clones. I cannot wait to see how they exaggerate her character for the fourth entry. But anyway, this unfairly advantaged protagonist means we have to spend time with a mass of new characters instead, who are relatable. That’s this convoy, picking up after the end of The Road Warrior, scouring the wastelands for food and plotline. Their head is Claire Redfield (“Heroes’” Ali Larter), which is the name of a video game character, and presumably nothing else. The survivors from Apocalypse are here, Carlos (Oded Fehr) and L.J. (Mike Epps, now distraught that there’s no other black man around to die in his stead). Jill Valentine is decidedly not here, because Sienna Guillory preferred destroying her career with Eragon instead. It’s “Dragon” with an “E!” Whoo!
There are some new characters as well, with names like Mikey, Chase and Nurse Betty. They’re all going to die. There is also bland blonde K-Mart (Spencer Locke), who looks distractingly too much like Ali Larter. They’re both going to survive, and eternally confuse me.
Down in Umbrella’s evil lair for this entry, the Umbrellites beam in to discuss plot exposition I’ve already worked through – the whole Super Zombie™ thing. Oh, and antibodies from Alice’s blood could permanently cure the T-virus. Umbrella doesn’t want to do that, oh no, simply because they’re the villains, and Evil – which overrides logic and such. No, they just want Alice to accomplish something they’ve already accomplished – idiocy!
Meanwhile, the convoy stops over at an abandoned Mojave motel (already a common enough Mojave sight) to look for supplies, and save the budget with a single set for a vast majority of the film. Carlos and L.J. search the buildings; L.J. finds a zombie. He’s managed for survive 6 years without screen time, but the instant his life is a movie again, he gets bitten. So L.J., despite a thorough understanding now of how zombies work, will get the old “Hide your zombie infection until it’s too late and you eat some of your friends” standard. Never let it be said Paul W.S. Anderson can pass up a well-worn genre cliché.
Back in the Umbrella labs, Dr. Isaacs runs one of his Super Zombies™ through the plot to Day of the Dead.
Claire’s convoy, still at the motel, makes camp for the night, with lengthy scenes depicting precisely how their existence conforms to preexisting post-apocalyptic genre clichés. I complained about how Apocalypse was nothing but incoherent action sequences, but you know what? Extinction could do with one of those right about now. I mean, we’re nearly at halfway!
Back in the Umbrella labs, Dr. Isaacs has an Alice clone in a bubble. This plot is kinda going nowhere.
Back on the surface, Alice – Oh right, Alice! – sleeps by her campfire, clad in what I can only call “survival chic.” She has – yup – flashes of memory, not to anything in particular, because they already filled in her non-starting amnesia subplot two movies ago, but because it’s a franchise staple. Her psionic activities get the attention of Isaacs’ monitoring devices, meaning that now the villains have a goal beyond exposition!
Our heroes (the convoy) don’t, though, meaning they’re still just lazing around that motel waiting for something to happen. And here it comes, in the form of – breaking out Anderson’s movie reference checklist – a Birds homage. The video games had zombie crows, so that’s the one new wrinkle this movie adds to its cinematic bestiary. Why, when you could include all the games’ enemies (and potentially even the whole of the animal kingdom zombified – which would be awesome), do you only give us birds?...Because it’s the bare minimum needed to satisfy fans. Then you can introduce the next game monster in your next movie, ad infinitum.
For what it’s worth, the crows’ attack on the convoy is the best part of Extinction. Even with birdly chaos everyplace, it’s the most coherently shot action sequence in the franchise, and it’s generously paced. This may be the best directed entry.
Everyone’s in dire trouble; you know what that means. It’s time for Alice to swoop in and lift Morpheus and the Keymaker off the exploding trucks – er…that is…use her telepathy to practice a little crow cremation. And now, halfway through, Alice can get involved in her starring vehicle – her participation is pushed back each time.
With Alice’s arrival comes our heroes’ goal – don’t write scripts without one! That goal? It isn’t using Alice to cure the T-virus, or anything concrete like that. Nope, like The Simpsons Movie before it, Resident Evil: Extinction simply posits Alaska as an Eden on Earth we all must go to – without The Simpsons’ satirical content. Alice claims there is some down-to-earth Alaskan town full of real and true Americans (Wasilla?). And now, everyone wants to go there.
Brief interruption so Isaacs can chat with the White Queen hologram which runs the labs. I’m not sure how much sense any of this would make without reference to the original Resident Evil – even then it’s not much.
The convoy cannot simply go to Alaska; they need supplies first. They need to pay a visit to the abandoned Las Vegas set all the advertisements promised us. Okay, fine.
Making this trek exposes Alice to the CGI Umbrella satellites we keep seeing in outer space – methinks they were rather proud of this effect. See, as part of Umbrella’s unexplained experiments on Alice in Apocalypse, she can be automatically tracked by their satellites – hence she’s been living “off the grid” in the inter-film interim like a common John Connor. But now they’ve found her, for all her telepathic bird-scorching, and have schemed something out.
One DVD skip later, Umbrella has made a Las Vegas delivery of Super Zombies™. They burst forth from a great big crate, leading the whole cast on a grand action sequence all around the Venetian, the lamest casino on the Strip. One expendable character heads to the Paris, Paris (or whatever it’s called), and climbs up a replica of a replica of the Eiffel Tower. And, okay, they’re “Super Zombies™” – this means they run, this franchise latching onto the latest bandwagon to come about since its inception. All in all, however, these Super Zombies™ have even less impact than the Uruk Hai, with their apparent superiority over regular orcs. And I’ve just said something exceedingly nerdy.
In the course of all this, Umbrella’s satellites home in on Alice, and use their satellitical powers to, er, freeze her right in place. It’s nonsensical, but so is Alice’s escape. See, she simply uses the power of her heart or some such to break free from the satellite’s grasp. Basically, this resolves an odd plot thread the ending of Apocalypse necessitated, which has no real place in Extinction. Way to plot ahead, Anderson!
How’s all this end up? Well, L.J. has his expected zombie-turning, days later than continuity suggests he should’ve turned – whoopsie! He bites Carlos; Carlos kills him. So now Carlos is gonna die, affording him a Noble Sacrifice later on. And all those Super Zombies™ are dead too, one scene in, after the plot played them up endlessly as the bees’ knees.
Oh, and those Umbrella masterminds were there too, to watch all this nonsense, and pick up Alice’s blood after her totally likely death. The result is Isaacs is also bitten, by a Super Zombie™. His helicopter speed ramps back off to the compound, where Isaacs proceeds to inject himself with a mass amount of anti-virus. But because it was a Super Bite™ (sounds like a fast food meal deal!), Isaacs cannot be healed, only mutated…mutated into the final boss for this entry – A finger-tentacled Ultra-Isaacs. If Apocalypse stole from Hellraiser for its monster, Extinction steals from Hellraiser II, specifically the Cenobite Channard. Oh, that’s embarrassing.
The convoy has a final plan for reaching Wasilla. They shall hijack Umbrella’s helicopter, which Umbrella wisely revealed to the convoy in their last genius attack. And that helicopter is currently hidden away behind one whole chain link fence. There’s only one problem – the scads of CGI zombies outside the fence.
This looks like a sacrifice for Carlos! (In a scene that, if my own amnesiac memory flashes serve, Zack Snyder did better 3 years earlier.)
Claire and the convoy overload the helicopter and take off for good, ‘cause it’ll be no problem getting that thing from Nevada to Alaska! Alice, meanwhile, pokes around and descends into Umbrella’s compound, understanding the latest secret to her existence (and the climax) await her down there.
Also Ultra-Isaacs.
One cut scene from the White Queen is all Alice needs (those Lewis Carroll references ain’t getting’ any better) for her big fight with the turd-man. It’s kinda an uninvolving (though coherent) fight, because Alice is superhuman and Ultra-Isaacs cannot be injured. Meaning whatever excitement we get is from the special effects guys tossing the remaining budget all over the place. There’s also dialogue, which is a rarity in these films even when it’s not an action sequence. Isaacs claims his latest plot-convenient mutation absolves him of the need for Alice blood, so bye-bye villain motivation – apart from being typically violent for no good reason. Oh, and the fight moves through the mansion replica, on to the laser hallway this series cannot get enough of.
The lasers come and slice Ultra-Isaacs into seventy, which is apparently his one and only weakness, because this immortal monster dies. Then the lasers stop juuuuust before an Alice slice. We know, it’s the White Queen, right? ‘Cause she’s the all-powerful HAL computer program down here? Nope! That would’ve made sense, meaning Anderson went with the other option – one of Alice’s clones saved her.
Alice makes a business call to the remaining Umbrellites over in Tokyo. “I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries.”…Wait, that’s The Matrix! Well, the gist is the same. And Alice has the Alice-power to back herself up –more of herself, in the form of her clone army. Hey, that one’s like Star Wars!
And that’s Resident Evil: Extinction.
Related posts:
• No. 1 Resident Evil (2002)
• No. 2 Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
• No. 4 Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
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