MadCap's Reel Thoughts - "Resident Evil (2002)"

Saying that Paul W.S. Anderson ruins video game franchises by this point is a bit like saying that Uwe Boll ruins video game franchises...actually, that’s not entirely fair to the man.  Mortal Kombat was at least decent and DOA:  Dead or Alive is pretty much exactly what one would expect from any adaptation of that franchise.  So, let me start again, in all fairness to Mr. Anderson.

I’m not a fan of Resident Evil.  While I enjoyed the fourth game as being a third-person shooter (and, apparently, so did everyone else), the first three games and I have never really gotten on all that well.  Mostly due to the fact that having a fixed camera angle that constantly changes depending on which part of the same room you happen to be standing in is absolutely stupid in any game that you play, most of all ones where you’re supposed to mostly be avoiding enemies rather than fighting them.  It’s not challenging, it’s wasting my time with nonsense while I’m trying to avoid being zombie chow.

...so should I just play Ave Satani now?

I’m getting off topic, back to my original point that the Resident Evil games have had a profound impact on gaming.  Indeed, many would say that the series has shaped how every survival horror game that has come out since it has been made - for better or for worse - with this rise in popularity, it was inevitable that a movie adaptation would be made.  But who to get for such an endeavor? Enter Paul W.S. Anderson, Director of Mortal Kombat, an actually successful movie adaptation of a video game.  Could he strike beautifully hammy gold once again with Resident Evil?

It seems easy enough, really.  Take the plot of the first game:  a group of Special Tactics and Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.) members get trapped in a mansion and discover that things have gotten a little bit Dr. Frankenstein.  Now just take out the S.T.A.R.S., put in a Ukranian supermodel who cannot act (and isn’t expected to, really) and give us a bunch of characters who may as well be wearing signs reading “I am expendable” for all we care. ...surprisingly, not a terrible movie.

Holy smokes, Ms. Fanservice is packing!

Fans will rag on endlessly about how movie adaptations ruin their favorite franchises (see my book “Dear God, Not Tobey Maguire!” for my Spider-Man related thoughts) in video games, movies, books, and so on.  However, the first Resident Evil doesn’t really do anything to mess with established canon within the games.  Indeed, it’s very possible to see where the non-intrusive story of Alice and the expendable squad could fit in even during the events of the original.  It’s a shame, then that Anderson would go on to do - as of this review - five other films in which he takes characters from the game and underutilizes or completely changes them in order to heft the ego of the Madonna, Alice. In this film, though, we begin with Alice (Milla Jovovich) having no idea who she is or how she’s woken up naked in the shower.  Also, if you ever at any point get tired of seeing Alice naked over the course of these movies, I feel sorry for you.  Anderson just loves to remind us that he’s tapping that, and while I do have to congratulate him on that, there’s only so much self-gratification you can do. Besides her fanservice, we find that Alice has a deadly fear of light breezes before she is shanghai’d not once, but twice by a policeman from Raccoon City and a group of Umbrella soldiers who have come in to learn about the condition of “The Hive”, a facility that Alice was apparently one of two guards of.  “The Hive” being where the T-Virus, the virus that causes said residents of evil, is being mass produced by the Umbrella Corporation.  We do get a scene in the very beginning of some of the people within the Hive complex when the virus gets released, but besides a reveal near the end and a simple blink and you’ll miss it cameo from someone of importance to the endgame plot, there’s really no reason to care. And that’s a major problem with this film.  We have no reason to want to see any of them survive.  People are given piecemeal character development at best, and I can’t even make that many plot derailing Mary Sue jokes about Alice because, really, this is her story.  None of the Resident Evil mainstays are actually in this movie, and so she’s not really taking anyone’s story from them.  But even with her, I found myself caring very little whether or not she lived or died.  The rest of the group are either one note or pretty much completely forgettable. At the beginning of the film and a little bit later in the film, we are exposed to the Red Queen - an artificial intelligence modeled after the daughter of a prominent Umbrella scientist (who, by the way, ends up both looking and sounding completely different in the sequel) - because Anderson wanted to make an Alice in Wonderland parallel without any subtlety whatsoever (I'm also aware of the Red Queen hypothesis, before you comment on that).  That being said, she’s one of the few instances I’ve ever seen in fiction where an A.I. doesn’t go completely guano and kill all organic lifeforms.  Really, she’s just doing her job in protecting the outside world from the spread of the T-Virus.  Not that this - understandably - keeps the hapless humans within the Hive from doing everything they can to ensure their survival, including shutting her off completely and threatening to erase her from the mainframe. She also, ironically, is pretty much the only relatable person in the bunch. As for the plot itself, it’s very much in the vein of every single “handful of survivors trying to survive scientific/arcane/cosmic terror in an enclosed space” film that has ever been made.  Just, again, with no character that we’re actually given to care about.  And considering Alice is pretty much protected by the creator, even situations where we should feel some sort of tension or fear for her well being...we don’t.  And I remind you that this is before she ever becomes a gunslinging, T-Virus enhanced Mary Sue.  In the end, she manages to escape (again, because the focus of The Lord Our God Anderson is upon her, is the main character) only to be captured by Umbrella and tested upon, waking up all fanservice-y and setting up the sequel in the seemingly abandoned and ransacked remains of Raccoon City.

Sad when your special effects look worse than the game, just saying..

As for the visual effects, they’re mostly alright by early 2000s standards.  The final boss...sorry, the “last beast encountered” is the Licker from several of the games and when it first gets released by the Red Queen, the fact that it’s CGI is painfully obvious, but in later scenes it looks decent enough.  It’s very clear that the production team knew right from the jump that they knew who the real stars of the show were, namely the zombies who all look very decent and I really like the visual aesthetics. I do have a beef with the Red Queen's explanation of how the T-Virus works. I don't care how much electricity you run through a dead body, it's not going to do anything more than jerk around like you embedded an ax in its nervous system. While the fact remains that the human body does hold an electrical charge at least for a little while after that, giving the system a "jolt" isn't going to turn them into a flesh-eating zombie. It's just not going to happen. Still, I'm asking for realism in a film where Saint Alice of Anderson is going around killing zombie dogs that have several times her strength in the face with no adverse effects, so maybe I'm asking for too much.

Truth be told, I can’t really rag on this film.  Again, I’m not even a Resident Evil fan, but this film at the very least does not violently violate the canon, treat established and beloved characters of the franchise like side characters.  And, truth be told, Milla Jovovich’s role as fanservice here isn’t so much intentional as it is just because she’s the main character.  No, for that...in fact all of that, Anderson waited until the second movie to start with it.  And no, I’m not going to jump into Apocalypse right away.  Instead, I’m going to leap back in time just a bit to another product of W.S. Anderson.  Next time “Reel Thoughts” returns, it will be time to test your might...

For now, though, final thoughts on the first film - it's dumb, but it's no less dumb than any other film of its type. It's got a single wholly memorable moment (the lasers in the hallway - when you see it, you'll know what I mean). If you've got an hour and forty minutes to kill, it's worth a watch.

Resident Evil is owned by Capcom. The film is owned by Constantin Film and distributed by Screen Gems in the US. It is available wherever movies are sold.

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