Video game movies…these are a relatively new phenomenon, dating back to 1993’s masterful Super Mario Bros. Still, audiences have already discovered the seeming truth: Video game movies always suck. Many an argument is given, how the nature of narrative in modern video games simply cannot translate to the narrative form cinema best employs, how it’s like watching someone else play, how the game plots are dumb in the first place. This is nuts. One ought to be able to readapt any viable medium for film – otherwise, the first Pirates of the Caribbean would be awful (I mean, theme park rides?!). Consider comic movies – A commercial and critical powerhouse for the last decade, they endured a lengthy and tedious evolution process, from e.g. Batman: The Movie to Batman to The Dark Knight. It was simply a matter of determining what to properly take from them, a task that filmmakers have yet to accomplish for video games.
Of course it doesn’t help that the business of films means only the least artistically inclined end up adapting video games. I ain’t even talkin’ ‘bout the dreaded Uwe Boll here! I mean, it all goes back the market. A video game is a recognized name, nothing more. Keep your budget low enough, and you guarantee turning a profit, so care is right out the window there. It’s product, and happy in that sinkhole. I think Cracked, as always, said it best.
While Paul W.S. Anderson is oft reviled as a more respectable Uwe Boll (?!), he may in fact be responsible for the most respectable of video game adaptations – Resident Evil. Boy, that lets you know how dire this sub-genre is! Not until Prince of Persia: The Subtitle of Nonexistent Sequel etched things up into mere ignored mediocrity would a greater video game movie be made. So isn’t it fortunate, if that’s the word, we have this franchise to represent its brotherhood here?
The Resident Evil game, known in its native Japan as Biohazard, debuted on the PlayStation in 1996. I have never played it, nor hardly any modern games; I stopped right around the time of GoldenEye 007, though my attention had been waning since the Super Nintendo faded away (I still play it today). No matter, Resident Evil is noted for pioneering the “survival horror”genre, effectively translating the George Romero zombie rules to a different medium. Within the game world, it is itself a ridiculous, impossible-to-track franchise. The only thing tougher than charting Capcom sequels is trying to work out a timeline for Legend of Zelda. I mean, the 7th Resident Evil game was called Resident Evil 5 – Does that make sense?! (This doesn’t even count side series like Survivor or Chronicle or Outbreak.)
Considering the games’ strong and unabashed Romero mimicry, isn’t it appropriate that George Romero was called in to develop the Japanese ad campaign for the 1998 release of Resident Evil 2? And that he was thanked with a request to do the script and direction for a feature film Resident Evil movie? As the man who invented the modern zombie, in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, who better to reintroduce the beasts to the big screen? – Especially since he and his creations were undergoing a lengthy hibernation. I have not read his draft, though maybe I should; here it is.
Survival horror ought to be the simplest game genre to translate to screen, especially since A) horror is easy, and B) it uses (Romero) films for inspiration. And apparently Romero had viable characters and scenarios to build on; reportedly, he was very faithful. Too much so, in fact. The producers, in their infinite logic, said by being so close to the games, fans would criticize it for being not close enough to the games…Okay. So Romero was fired. To quote Yoshiki Okamoto, Romero’s script wasn’t “good.”
(Romero’s hypothesis is that he wasn’t able to anticipate the producers’ invisible and unstated new direction for the series – That they somehow wanted a war movie, when he, a master horror director, had written a horror movie adaptation of a horror video game.)
Much like the later Alien vs. Predator, Paul W.S. Anderson was the savior who could extricate the property from development hell. This…this really makes no sense to me. At least two separate times, this notoriously poor screenwriter has been able to convince the moneymen his generic, toothless action pastiches were what audiences wanted. It’s market risk, man! ‘Tis the simplest thing to sell, especially in 2002: a Matrix parrot, same as 70% of all films out at that time, with the “name” brand to make it stand out. Appropriate or not, you cannot risk your property with a potentially off-putting notion like Romero’s. Horror? Pssshhh!
Conceived initially as a prequel to the games, Anderson’s Resident Evil was ultimately placed in a separate continuity altogether, which was wise and/or lazy. Surely, it angered Resident Evil fans who were the franchise’s core base – for some damn reason, all video game movies feel the need to do this. In many cases (Uwe Boll), it’s because the filmmakers actively hate gamers, yet are compelled to cater to them. All that remains are scant references to the games (that I need the director’s myopic commentary to pick out), grafted to a generic new millennium zombie movie – without any of the better elements of new zombies. No running, no humor, no gore. None of that Romero social satire either. It’s just an excuse for the waiflike cast to fire off prop guns a bit – it’s really just a respectable House of the Dead (with more house). Oy!
An opening text crawl is narrated to us, indicating the illiterate contempt this R-rated film holds for its audience. It seems there is such a thing as the Umbrella Corporation, with their ridiculously evil fingers in all the pies: consumer products, military hardware, genetically-engineered zombie appliances, stupidly translated Japanese names.
We are instantly beset by the film’s two crowning traits: it’s aggravating and overeager rocktronica soundtrack (by Marilyn Manson, natch), and the color blue. Damn those post-production filters The Matrix popularized! This has to be the bluest film ever apart from I Know Who Killed Me (oh right, and Cremaster 1).
Like the turdly AVP, Resident Evil is the sort of movie which delays its establishing exposition (despite the tattletale opening text) for the duration of the running time, effectively replacing a true story with simple explanations of what we’ve seen. To make sense of such nonsense here, it helps to just lay all the cards out on the table. The stifling office environment (theme: blue) is actually the Hive, an ultra-secret Umbrella Corp. research facility so secret, even the people who are in it do not realize they are in it – I’m serious. It’s located deep in the ground underneath Raccoon City – a nickname I reserve for Eugene, Oregon. (The Hive, naturally, looks like a hive – or to my mind, delicious falafel meat on the spit.) Here in the Hive’s labs, secret even to the guys who have made the secrets, the T-virus is wantonly manufactured in cutesy-wootsy helix vials. One “accident” (or obvious tossing) later, and the T-virus is airborne, going through a completely bloodless mass slaughter of the Hive’s, er, drone workers. All this is orchestrated by the complex’s “HAL” computers, ‘cause modern youth audiences today, they don’t even need to know it’s a 2001 reference; give ‘em Resident Evil, and they’ll gladly huck out the old sci-fi classic. This is my least favorite thing about the movie – it shamelessly rips off from movies its core audience couldn’t care about, thus making these presumed morons think it invented the Romero zombie. Things like this and Transformers directly challenge our pop cultural literacy.
One bit of cock-blocking elevator schtick later, and everyone is gormlessly dead…
Alice (Milla Jovovich, a model with delusions of talent) awakes nude, as is her introductory wont. Conveniently to Anderson’s script, she has the amnesia – a wonderful conceit for a game that uses PCs as player surrogates, but rather more irksome in film where we want actual characters. And that name, Alice? It’s the first of Anderson’s shallow, sparse “Alice in Wonderland” references, which add no new layers to this wreck, but give off a strange stink of unearned pretension.
Alice creeps about her vacant, photo shoot-ready mansion, perusing common items found around the house: notes, framed wedding photos, secret armaments of firearms. Oh, and those HAL cameras are there too. We hear a noise. This is the closest the film gets to “creepy,” which augurs poorly for its horror chops. But the stifling non-action Anderson substitutes for tension is about to be shattered, rudely…
By a flurry of incomprehensibility! Within like three seconds, a dozen SWAT members have smashed in and arrested some other guy who is suddenly also there! Things calm down enough for the characters to attempt dialogue, only I cannot hear it over Marilyn Manson’s blaring crap-rock-atronics. Naturally, this pitiful music shall substitute at all times for adrenaline.
Yes, Resident Evil is an action movie, with some zombies (eventually) in it. And as an action film in 2002 (an age that people somehow thought at the time was “revolutionary” action-wise), it apes The Matrix something fierce (as stated). It’s saddening. Before that movie, in 1999, cinematic hacks were content to mimic Die Hard, in their desperate penis compensation. But with The Matrix, suddenly there was something kewl to steal from, in all its shallow, surface details – omnipresent leather, androgynous heroines, techno, a total misunderstanding of anime and Asian action tropes. Seriously, Resident Evil just feels like the product of someone who is desperate to be on the cutting edge, and is consequently several years behind at all times.
The man the SWAT jerks have handcuffed is Matt Addison (Eric Mabius, “Ugly Betty”), whose personality quirk is that he wears a tie. You see how a video game renders people boring? Amongst the SWATs, who are mostly just obvious cannon fodder, is Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodriguez) – Of course, she’s cannon fodder too. I only know of one film Ms. Rodriguez has survived (The Fast and the Furious), only so she could die ten minutes into the sequel (Fast & Furious). And we’ll be anxiously awaiting her long-delayed death, for Ms. Rodriguez has this very irritating acting tic, her attempt at “badass,” where she simply dons a Droopy face, trying to hide her pupils behind her upper eyelids. It’s endlessly distracting.
Captain of both the SWAT and exposition is James “One” Shade (Colin Salmon, of the Brosnan era Bonds). As Manson’s screeching chords accompany our team onto a basement choo-choo train on its way to the Hive, Shade fills us in: The team is here to retrieve the Hive’s mind, and get it back out, ‘cause surely the ultra-complex complex’s own emergency shutdown procedure couldn’t do that on its own. If it could, though, there’d be no story, so there’s that. Alice was guardian of the secret Hive’s super-duper-extra-ultra-high-double-probation secret entrance, the train-toting mansion. Her amnesia is the result of the Hive’s shutdown…Makes sense to me!
Alice’s “husband,” Spence Parks (James Purefoy), is here too, also suffering the amnesia. That excuses him, at least, for a lack of personality. Alice too. What’s everyone else’s excuse? I mean, you’d think they’d learn how to make Aliens rip-offs by now – yeah, this also “borrows” from Aliens.
The team of interchangeable human bodies progresses further and further into the blue, blue confines of the Hive, accompanied by N64-quality CG to give us a sense of location to compensate for Anderson’s own inability to convey it via cinematography. I’m serious, it is mighty challenging to tell where we are at any given point. All the Hive’s uniform hallways look exactly the same, the sort of problem I thought died with Monogram in the ‘40s.
That HAL computer that’s all over the place? Let’s keep thinking of it as HAL, really, though technically this thing is to be called the “Red Queen.” Yes, Paul, I’ve heard of Lewis Carroll too! (Incidentally, referencing this book is another way Resident Evil recreates The Matrix.)
(Another amusing side note: By checking the credits, I’ve learned the names of the more inevitable future-corpses among this team. We have Blue, Brown, Black, White, Gold, Grey, and two separate Greens – Mr. and Dr.! Ah, Paul W.S. Anderson’s seen Reservoir Dogs!)
After about four more door openings, the team has progressed on to the seventh level, using one warp zone. Then Hudson – sorry, Black – open yet another door, and all of our most disposable SWAT members head right in. (Meanwhile, why’d they bring the two amnesiacs and the random tie-wearer along? They serve no purpose at this juncture.) So somewhere between four and eleven or so SWATs are in, yeah, a hall, when Anderson proves he’s also seen Cube – Good, at least he’s getting slightly more obscure. And how’s he prove that? A (blue) laser dissects all these individuals, in the most squeamish scene possible that can still earn an R-rating. I mean, it’s barely any more vicious than the punch-pulling Alien vs. Predator!
Speaking of, the whole of the Hive reminds me exactly of that Antarctic pyramid from Anderson’s other movie. It’s basically the same script, really, with zombies and xenomorphs proving effectively no different, and even the setting morphing and altering its layout in the same way. Amazingly, I now have less respect for AVP than I did before.
Anyway, the only surviving characters are Alice (of course), Matt the man, Rain the Rodriguez, Spence, and this one SWAT guy who looks exactly like Spence. A few others might be there too, but the editing’s awful enough, I honestly cannot say.
Alice and that other guy (who’s named Chad Kaplan, by the way) go to the Red Queen’s overdesigned CPU, where they throw the One Ring into the fiery pits of Mt. Do- I mean, where they retrieve the computer’s data. This prompts the creation of a little holographic British girl, to issue warnings of the vaguest and least helpful sort. Kaplan’s actual justification for this latest reference (to the future, somehow, and Terminator Salvation) is a doozy: It is “a holographic representation of the Red Queen modeled after the head programmer’s daughter.” Suuuuuuuure…
Removing Red Queen’s data opens up all the doors throughout the Hive. And before you can say “AVP was more efficient than this,” the complex is swarming with piles of the least impressive Romero zombies ever. Seriously, Anderson just told his hired dancer extras to “do whatever.” This man – he cares about his art!
The zombies function by the most basic Romero rules possible. To wit, they’re slow, headshots kill ‘em, and a bite turns you into a zombie. That super-deadly T-virus, once airborne, has somehow gone into remission in precisely this genre-specific way. Now, the problem with nearly every zombie movie is watching the heroes learn the zombie rules ever…so…slooooowly. Okay, I’ll grant these folks do not understand that the freshly-bitten Rain has but one character arc open to her, but Anderson seems to think the audience doesn’t know it either! That’s what I mean when I say Resident Evil is aimed at viewers with no foreknowledge of cinematic history, which it wishes to supplant. It’s sickening! And after a zombie shootout that offers no interest, one of the SWATs (one I hadn’t realized was still alive) gets the driest variation of Captain Rhodes’ Day of the Dead kill I’ve ever seen. What’s with Anderson and gore?!
For no particular reason (I think it’s a reshoot), Alice alone wanders off into the labs. Maybe it has something to do with the post-filtered flashbacks she occasionally gets, when the plot deems she may have some of her memory back. Oh wait, here’s the reason Alice went here: to be harassed by a pack of skinless doggies (blood hounds – heh heh!). And a zombie too, just because. It’s a mini-boss.
Apropos of nothing (except those memory flashes), Milla Jovovich is now an action heroine. She shoots the sweet doggies with astounding accuracy, and damn it, was that bullet time stuff really necessary?! ‘Cause really, Matrix wannabes at this budget just come across like Kurt Wimmer movies! But uh oh! Alice is out of bullets, and there’s one more enemy on the screen. This is a problem only stupidity can resolve:
This nonsense over, it’s time for a little more back story exposition to clue us in. Matt, the guy who has less business being here than Topher Grace in Predators, is involved in corporate espionage. He had worked out with Alice, pre-amnesia, a way of ridding the Umbrella Corp. of their T-virus and blah blah blah. Matt now suspects her of betrayal, what with the zombie hordes and all, and the movie is desperately wishing we’ve all forgotten there’s a second amnesiac around to take all the blame for this later (spoiler).
Oh, and there’s a time limit for everyone to escape. (What would a cliché-ridden movie be without one.) See, as a rather extremely delayed shutdown , the Hive seals its outer doors seven hours after zombies first happen. Of course, it could’ve done it immediately, only…we’d have no movie then! There are a few too many of these problems here.
Around here, everyone returns to the Red Queen’s CPU (save point) for five minutes of zombie exposition. Stuff most people figured out back in 1968!
Another rather unmotivated zombie “action” sequence follows, in a sewer this time in place of antiseptic hallways. It’s damnably confusing. I chalked off nearly every character as dead at some point here, except…No one dies! Fat lot of good that scene did us!
Alice gets another of her convenient flashes, having apparently maxed up to the next level, and earned a continue. You see, now she knows the Hive houses a secret chamber full of 1-ups – er, anti-viruses. Okay, we’ve got an item to get now – It’s nice for our characters to have an objective for once…All that rather dropped away for about half an hour there.
It’s around here where Spence, getting a plot-convenient flash of his own, remembers he’s a bad guy, and that he’s already stolen the anti-virus – it’s back at the train. Off he goes, when the game’s – er, film’s – Big Boss reveals itself. A so-called “Licker,” the result of combining the T-virus with pure human tissue and Japanese insanity, descends from the ceiling in all its CG glory, and does Spence in by…by…Well, Spence is totally undamaged in another scene, so presumably the Licker just sanguinated him via some subtle means…And licked him, I guess.
The rest are trapped in the labs. The Red Queen appears on a monitor, promising to release them if they kill Rain – since she’s carrying the virus. Instead, Alice smashes the Queen’s HDTV, which is presumably all it takes to kill this computer program. They’re nowhere near the CPU! But it must work, because it’s the capper to a scene full of “drama” and “tension.”
Then they go to the train, Alice finds a zombified Spence very much not ripped to shreds, and does him in with a pickaxe (off screen).
The train is speeding along, as everyone shoots up on anti-virus like the heroin addicts Milla Jovovich rather resembles. Everyone is safe now, an idiot thinks, while those familiar with narrative convention and basic logic are counting down the seconds before the Licker’s triumphantly noisy entrance. It kills the useless guy (Kaplan), claws Matt a bit, then gives in to temptation and licks Alice’s thighs. Paul W.S. Anderson reenacting his home life for us, eh?
Then Michelle Rodriguez finally turns into a genuine zombie and – get this – everyone is surprised. It’s Zombie Movie 101, people! But she is shot, and meanwhile the Licker’s great slobbering tongue snags itself on the tracks under the train as it drags away to certain CGI death.
Alice and Matt alone escape, passing into the mansion just as the Hive’s vault doors seal for good (off screen, which is either artful or lazy – take your pick). Thus begins the Return of the King of horror movie endings – another 10 minutes of post-climax climaxes, all in slow motion. So Alice and Matt relax on the mansion’s marbled floor when –
Hey, Anderson’s seen E.T. too! All these hazmat scientists enter to drag the clawed and mutating Matt away, to be a part of the Nemesis Program that means nothing to me now – though I’ll be seeing the sequel soon. Alice, once so formidable barehanded against the legions of the dead (and CGI Lickers), is bested by these scant scientists, who drag her off kicking…
She awakes, again nearly nude, in – you’ll never guess – a blue, antiseptic room. Some would call this “coming full circle,” some would call it a narrative that’s accomplished nothing, I would call it the starting point of 28 Days Later.... For Alice escapes, picking a keycard lock with an IV – You can do that?! – and takes to the streets. Predictably, it’s now post-zombie apocalypse in Raccoon City – basically, it’s downtown Toronto after the Maple Leafs win. Alice preps a shotgun and – INSERT COINS TO CONTINUE…
Oh, it’ll continue alright! An ending like that is designed with sequels in mind, because when you make a “market risk” movie, that’s always a possibility. Resident Evil and its ilk are designed to be franchises. The accountants have it all worked out so that a $33 million dollar movie, making a mere $40 million in the U.S. ($103 million worldwide), can be constituted a “success.” And even while critics and the public as a whole recognized Resident Evil for a poor, poor property, there will always be certain viewers – people with no sense of taste or knowledge of other films – who will watch such tripe. Just release it in a so-called dead season (March in this case, September for the sequels), and you’re set.
Related posts:
• No. 2 Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
• No. 3 Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
• No. 4 Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
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