Resident Evil is a wildly popular, story-driven shooter. Because the producers loved the game and its fans so much, they decided to make a movie vaguely-sorta-kinda based on the first game in the series, BUT… with an entirely new protagonist. Not exactly inspiring sounding, eh?
An outbreak of a deadly virus at the Umbrella Corporation’s top secret research facility under Raccoon City turns everyone there into a Zombie (I’m not making the names up, honest). One bite and you are zombified. Our heroine, Alice (Milla Jovovich), is also genetically altered in some way by the evil Umbrella Corp and is found in an amnesic state by the obligatory investigating soldiers. Zombies are discovered and much wackiness ensues, forcing our heroes to fight their way to the surface, discovering Alice’s nasty secrets along the way.
Zombies are a big hit with the makers of video games because they are slow and plentiful, providing players with superior Kills Per Minute (KPM), thereby increasing the fun of the game. Unfortunately, zombies have been done to death on the big screen, with nothing really living up to Romero’s stuff except for Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later.
Jovovich spends much of the movie in a party dress, which I guess is to compensate for her character not being very memorable otherwise. There is another strong female lead named Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) and a couple of weak male parts. While the idea of dual female leads is puzzling enough, it is the character of Alice which baffles the most. In the first installment of the video game series, the ass-kicking female heroine is Jill Valentine. Why they didn’t just fashion Jovovich’s character after Jill Valentine is a real head-scratcher.
A variety of red shirts are thrown in and are julienned, zombified, eaten… whatever. A love interest of sorts is included, little is made of it. Even a homicidal computer is encountered. Naturally, it presents itself as a little holographic English girl because little holographic English girls are sooo scary! My guess is they knocked off the screenplay for this sucker in a weekend over a case of beer. They started with the script for Aliens, added a dash of Dawn of the Dead and said, “Hey, let’s call this Resident Evil ’cause it has Zombies!”
So now we get to heart of matter. Trying to keep up to Aliens is hard enough, but trying to outdo Romero at the same time? It’s a hell of a thing to ask of contrived material such as this, but if you absolutely must start with a story which has been done a bunch of times before, you really need more than a skimpy dress and a bunch of doomed GIs. You need to come up with characters which resonate with the audience, a new way of telling the story and an interesting outcome. Resident Evil doesn’t do this. In fact, there is very little in it to distinguish it from any other action movie. The special effects aren’t particularly memorable, the dialog isn’t particularly witty and the story is fairly predictable. Even the monsters aren’t especially original. But the worst of all is the underdeveloped, unmemorable characters. The Resident Evil games are all about the characters. This failing of the movie is particularly inexcusable.
Allow me to sum up the movie in one sentence: Our heroes must escape from an underground laboratory filled with zombies and they die one by one until a few get out. Is the main route blocked? Yep. Are we running out of ammo because there are so many bad guys? Yep. Do we have to crawl through the vents? You better believe it! You’ve seen it all before folks, and it was done better in Aliens. In fact, go to the classics section and rent Aliens. It may be be twenty years old, but it’s still a better film.
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