February 25, 2004

Is it possible to give a movie an NSF notice for being creatively bankrupt?

I guess its more or less fitting that Resident Evil is a movie about The Dead. Why not? The script is dead, the acting is dead, the plotting is dead and so are the 97 minutes sucked out of the viewer's life. You don’t have to be half-dead to figure out that this is actually the umpteenth retread of Night of the Living Dead or that it hides this information under the blanket of being based on a best selling video game. I guess somewhere, in some kind of weird thinking, that makes it okay. I guess.

The movie is a shinier, trumped up version of every zombie movie ever made and it’s just about as entertaining. The story was established in the video game and revolves around one of those steel-door, card-swipe companies that buries it's secret experiments in underground labs behind ominous yellow stickers and armed military men who never seem to blink.

Its also one of those Evil Movie Corporations that knows its experiments can bring about the apocalypse and has a plan to drown and gas it's employees should one of it's experiments go goofy. Who do they pay to install poison gas pellets? Do they have to gas the guys who install the pellets to keep them from talking? What kind of comittee meetings are held to discuss such a plan? What kind of waver do you have to sign just in case you're the one employee that doesn't get killed by the gas?

The company is called The Umbrella Corporation and it hides it's experiments under the guise of being the world's foremost supplier of health and medical supplies. I'd like to see someone explain how that title justifies keeping a lizard-alien with a nine-foot tongue in the basement. I'd like to see the press conference with the adminitrator if the thing escaped.

The movie begins with the information that one vial managed to get broken and those gas pellets went into effect. The problem: It didn't kill everyone, it turned them into flesh-eating zombies. The other problem: the lizard-alien thing with the nine-foot tongue is now loose for no other reason then the movie's financial backers demanded a money-shot.

The movie takes place in Racoon City, one of those cities that you only find in video games. The characters all have those odd video game names like Rain Ocampo, Jill Valentine, Janus Prospero and of course Undead Kid #8. All are basically interchangable, all have their various functions but it doesn't matter anyway because we already know that they're all fishfood. The lead role is given to Milla Jovovich who known better as LeeLoo from The Fifth Element than as Joan of Arc in the godawful Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc which is probably a good thing. She has the role of Alice who slowly walks around the film having frequent flashes of an erased memory. It takes us five seconds to figure out that she worked for The Umbrella Corporation and had a memory wipe, it takes her the rest of the movie.

The zombies are actually the most entertaining characters in the movie. I learned from this movie that if you are reanimated, not only do you develope a hunger for human flesh but you get superhuman strength as well. So there are perks to being the undead. Unfortunately they don't have the good sense to split up, for the whole movie none are ever seen alone, always in a group of about twenty making them look like a giant gooey zombie mosh pit.

Logic need not apply here. I love the scene in which the characters are trapped in a hallway with moving lasers that will cut them in half. The first moves high, the second moves low, the third moves high then switches to low. The fourth becomes a giant grid that turns it's victims into beef tips. Why didn't they just start with the grid? Did the same subcommittee that decided on the gas pellets also develope the idea for the lasers?

Another plot gimmick that I love is that The Umbrella Corporation has a fail safe plan in which, after the gassing everybody a red digital clock counts down 60 minutes until the doors seal themselves shut forever. In other words, after the gassing and the drowning, the characters have 60 minutes to get out before the place seals itself - for real this time. So . . . what? They're just kidding the first time they closed? I didn't know doors had a sense of humor.