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Resident Evil Movies
My normal policy is to offer a disclaimer: if you haven’t seen the movie I’m going to talk about, I recommend you click the back button and come back after you’ve seen it. I won’t offer this advice now, because the movies I am going to talk about (more like a rant, really) are Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Rather than watch these movies, I recommend you spend a few minutes to read what I have to say. I ask that you take my experience to heart, save your money, and leave these movies alone. For that matter, leave all Paul Anderson movies alone. Don’t touch them. If you’ve never seen a Mortal Kombat movie, don’t make the mistake now. Please, do not spend your money on the Resident Evil special edition dvd. If you have even the slightest feeling of self-preservation, make this review your first, last, and only stop regarding the Resident Evil movies. Stay away from them! By committing my experiences into this text, I am trying to save you not only your money, but your time and even your emotional well-being. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll avoid Resident Evil like the Plague!
I can’t stop by simply reviewing Resident Evil. Such an essay, no matter how negative, may only encourage you to see these movies for yourselves. It’s human nature: you will feel the need to see whether film critics were right or wrong. This was my mistake. I didn’t have an essay like this, pleading me to use a little common sense. I only had reviews telling me the movie was bad or really bad. So, I’m taking everything a few steps further. I’ll give you a critique of both movies peppered within a larger narrative, one that shows how I came to know about these movies and how I failed to learn the lesson I beg you to take to heart. It’s hard for me to organize myself into a well-written and cohesive essay. The following pages are somewhat unfocused, occasionally diving deep into “psychotic rant” territory. I’m afraid it’s unavoidable. Here are two movies so bad that a person like me is unable to separate the scarring experience of them from a relatively objective criticism. They don’t exist for a teen audience. They don’t exist for lovers of zombie movies. They’re so bad, so mean-spirited, so juvenile in thought and execution that they are suitable for no one. I’m asking you to avoid these movies, and to avoid all Paul Anderson movies because they are the epitome of what a Paul Anderson movie is.
The first movie came out in my early college years, at a time when I was more concerned with drugs and women than I was with seeing new movies. I missed everything, both good and bad. So I never actually knew that a movie had been made from the Resident Evil video game series until my brother came back from Thailand with a one dollar bootleg dvd.
The entire movie exists as an implausibility. Story-wise, it serves as a prequel to the games – how, I don’t know. And if the story of the sequel is any indication, neither does writer/director Paul Anderson. I’m not normally one to nitpick against adaptations, be they of books, comics, or even videogames…even though I’m opposed to any and all adaptations of video games. But Resident Evil accepts the story of its video game progenitor as official canon, even a sort of gospel, not to mention the fact that Paul Anderson seems to consider these video games to be grand works of genius. The Resident Evil commentary track breaks away from inane drivel only long enough for Anderson to comment on how he made all his sets resemble the video games, and how he trained the actors to mimic the movements of the video game characters. Trust me, folks. I’ve played these games. They’re fun, bloody, and stupid. Genius, they ain’t. Anyway, the entire story hangs on a theft: The “T-virus” has been stolen from Umbrella Corporation’s secret installation, which is called “The Hive”. Apparently, Umbrella has been so successful that it can afford an underground installation with a back door underneath a mansion…no, I don’t know where the front door is. I don’t know where those hundreds of scientists working in the Hive entered, nor do I know what purpose a backdoor hidden in a mansion could possibly serve. It seems to be important, though, since the corporation feels the need to guard said mansion with two highly trained undercover operatives (inexplicably posing as husband and wife, to boot).
The computer running the Hive decides to kill everyone in order to contain an outbreak of the virus, and a military team drops in to figure out why it killed everyone and unleashed some sort of gas which gave our heroine (given about four names in the credits, including “Alice”, but called none of those names in the movie – I just called her Milla Jovovich).
Blah, blah, blah. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Most of the movie makes no sense. The dialogue is rudimentary, without a brain in its ugly little head. What little does make sense is just plain stupid. Take the 3-d computer simulation of The Hive, which the unnamed military leader shows Milla when she inevitably asks where they are (fuckn’ convenient, isn’t it, that she’s completely amnesiac and has to ask these questions – it’s almost as convenient as the military leader suddenly being able to stop in the midst of a sensitive operation to give us all five minutes of exposition). The simulation is meant to show us exactly what the Hive is: it’s deep underground, essentially a subterranean skyscraper. And gee, here’s a couple of heat signatures showing us exactly where the characters are. Sure, it sorta makes sense, if you get past the question of where the hell those pictures are coming from. But damn, just stupid. This goofball computer representation is repeated in Apocalypse when the Hive is re-opened by Umbrella. The handy-dandy simulation shows a small group of red dots going inside, and then a larger group of yellow dots overwhelming them. Where does Anderson get this shit?
Whatever. The military team knows this computer is homicidal. They were sent in by a corporation which built the damn thing to shut it down. And this computer is named “The Red Queen”. Ha, ha…get it? Since the main character is supposedly called “ Alice” we’re probably supposed to think of Alice in Wonderland. Downside: any possible allegory to the book is flushed down the toilet when it isn’t pursued beyond the names “Red Queen” and “Alice”. That’s as clever as it gets here.
This same well-armed, well-trained military team doesn’t even know what booby traps the computer has set up, even though they were sent in explicitly to shut it down. They’re supposed to be best of the best, yet they run out of ammunition in about ten minutes and most of them are wiped out by a strange laser-grid, and we’re honestly supposed to believe they didn’t see this coming? I dunno, I had a hard time believing they had such a hard time shutting down the booby trap before it wiped everyone out, not to mention the fact that they were dumb enough to go in there in the first place.
It gets better. The T-virus reanimates tissue. If you’re bitten by a zombie, you turn. The reasoning there is that they carry the virus in their saliva, and it wreaks havoc on your living tissue, eventually killing you and forcing your body into unholy zombie-hood. Great. Yet the big-daddy monsters (called “the licker” in the games) are meant to be early, crude experiments with the T-virus. Apparently, they look like poster-children for bad skin because the virus was injected directly into living tissue…this is somehow supposed to be different than how all the other zombies were created, which would explain why these lickers are so radically different from all the other zombies. I tried, I really tried to puzzle out how regular zombies, created when living creatures are bitten, can be different than lickers. I got a headache. That’s basically the result you get if you try to figure out the logical soundness of this plot.
Everything’s dark, like a haunted Victorian factory. Machines groan and clank. Doors slam and creak even when they’re not moving. And the best part: they shoot a zombie, the zombie runs away. Examining the blood, they notice it’s coagulated. “Blood only does that when you’re dead.” Um…blood is smart enough to know?
Those were my basic impressions after seeing the no-frills bootleg of Resident Evil in the Spring of 2002. I got about what I expected. Paul Anderson (his probable oft-used line: “for the last time, NO! I am not the guy who directed Boogie Nights.”) is the same man who wrote and directed such cinematic crap as Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, and Soldier. The commonality between them all is, of course, no character motivation or development, plot twists so clichéd you’d think they were taken from a mad lib book, and all-around bad writing. I knew all that, but I broke my moratorium against Paul Anderson (it started when I saw Event Horizon, and was pissed off by seeing the main character wearing a 1940’s bomber jacket and smoking a cigar – don’t even get me started with Mortal Kombat) by watching Resident Evil. I did so with two noble purposes in mind: First, I don’t like criticizing a movie until I’ve seen it, no matter how bad it looks. Second, it was free. I saw it, hated it, and forgot about it entirely except for those rare instances when someone would ask if I’d seen it. I’d say yes, it sucked, then complain about how horrible all of Paul Anderson’s movies were, usually ending my rants by screaming for his severed head on a pike and crying at how stupid I was to even bother seeing any of his movies.
In August of 2004, I heard Resident Evil: Apocalypse was coming to theatres. The dim memory of Resident Evil had faded. I remembered my impression of the movie being negative, but went anyway. I just wanted to see if it would be as bad as it looked. For some reason, I hadn’t learned my lesson. So I went.
It was the single worst movie I have ever seen. The script was inept. The acting was even worse. The actress playing Jill Valentine, while dead-sexy, had the personality of a boll weevil. I’m not sure if she’s actually a bad actress or if the dialogue is just so repulsive that no one could make it sound good. Maybe it’s both. I’ve spent three weeks trying to drink away the memory of this movie. It hasn’t worked. The movie is composed of shots so rapid you can’t even see what the characters are supposed to be afraid of. Take the zombie dog sequence, which was done in the first movie and also in every goddamn video game (originality is not something these people can be accused of). I didn’t actually see a dog. I heard barking. I think I saw a muzzle lined with mucous and teeth. But that’s it. And their big-daddy monster, “Nemesis”? You can see him, but you wish you hadn’t. He looks like grey play-doh. There’s a scene which is supposed to illustrate how dangerous he is: he approaches a hideout for human survivors and starts blowing them up. But one guy gets away. The how: he drops his two golden guns (yes, golden guns – and he is the most annoying motherfucker on the planet) and Nemesis walks away. Trust me, guys, I couldn’t make shit this dumb up if I tried.
The worst part is the knowledge that this sequel is the result of two years of strenuous work, multiple re-writes, and an exhaustive search for the “perfect” director. I guess he’s “perfect”, he’s a Paul Anderson clone. Anderson wrote the damn thing, and the director treated the script as Holy Text while mimicking what Anderson would have done if he hadn’t been directing Alien vs. Predator.
You’re probably asking why I would even bother seeing Apocalypse. I saw the first one, I hated it, and saw the second anyway. My error was seeing negative reviews, seeing trailers that looked like crap, and wanting to see just how bad this movie was. In this error, I subjected myself to roughly 90 minutes of hell. Absolute, poorly contrived hell. I can say with all honesty that Resident Evil: Apocalypse not only surpassed the sheer awfulness of its predecessor, but it’s taken its rightful place as the worst movie I have ever seen.
But guess what! I didn’t quite learn my lesson. About a week ago, I was dragged to Wal-Mart. After being very pissed off that they didn’t have Futurama’s fourth season (that fucking wasteland is so filled with unbuyable crap it’s unbelievable) I saw Resident Evil on dvd. $10.
I bought it. Sweet Lords, I am so sorry I did it, but I bought it. The movie is as bad as I remember it, and it’s complete with a commentary track. It’s listening to this commentary track that gives me all the reasons I could ever need to understand as to why Paul Anderson movies so irredeemably suck.
Early on, the movie’s Producer goes on about Paul Anderson’s love for the Resident Evil video games. Apparently, he plays these things religiously and his longterm dream has been to make the Resident Evil movie. Milla Jovovich jabbers on about just how cool it is to kill things in video games, and how it’s so cool someone was making a movie about it. Michelle Rodriguez talks about how cool shooting a gun is, and how cool gun X is that character A is carrying around. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not leaving out any technical lingo or outside reasoning. The words “cool” and “awesome” pop out about every twenty seconds. These people are idiots. It’s obvious they’re very nice people, but they haven’t a clue just how dumb they are.
Paul Anderson himself resorts to the “it’s so cool-looking” mantra too many times to count. I’m not paraphrasing or even describing his mood. That’s what he says. The word “cool” is about every third descriptor for him. I’m no genius, but that just may be the beginning of the problem here. Perhaps the scripts are shit because his first and last motivation is, was, and always will be “this’ll look cool.” His movies are crap for this reason. I had absolutely nothing to do last summer, and ended up spending a lot of time at IGN film force (good website, but I spent too much time there – I even read a weekly article called “comics in context”, written by a man who places WAY too emphasis on the importance of comic books in America; I swear, every fucking thing he talks about he tries, and fails, to equate to greek epics, psychological abstract reasoning. It’s kinda like reading Augusto Boal). While reading IGN, I stumbled on an interview with Lance Henrikson, an actor too good to be appearing in a Paul Anderson movie. During his interview, he commented that Anderson had said if he hadn’t become a director, he would have been an architect. He should have become an architect.
I almost hate to criticize the man, even after listening to a commentary track filled with the most vapid human beings I’ve ever seen. By all accounts, Paul Anderson is a nice guy. It’s reinforced by interviews that he’s just a sweetheart of a man. But when I listen to Milla Jovovich and him talking about watching test patterns on dvd’s, I can’t help but scream, weeping as I implore someone to PLEASE TAKE THE FUCKING CAMERA AWAY FROM HIM! LOCK HIM AWAY! ALLOW NO PENS, NO PAPER, NO CONTACT WITH AN OUTSIDE WORLD SO BASELESS THAT IT WOULD ACTUALLY PAY TO SEE THE BULLSHIT HE PRODUCES!!
My normal response may have been along the lines of “slowly break his fingers while he begs for his life, then take him out into the street and put a bullet in his head.” But I now reserve the use of that kind of punishment only for Joel Schumacher.
It gets worse and worse. I’m sure you all know this, but at about the same time Apocalypse came out, so did Alien vs. Predator. Anderson actually had the balls to direct and write a PG-13 Alien movie. I have not seen this movie. I will not see this movie. I refuse to ever see this movie. This isn’t just because the best criticism I’ve ever seen was along the lines of “at least it wasn’t as bad as Predator 2”. It’s not even because I view the very idea of a PG-13 Alien movie to be a form of blasphemy (even worse than Alien: Resurrection). I refuse to watch this movie because my very faith in humanity has been shattered by the very idea that a movie as bad as Resident Evil: Apocalypse was made with the full knowledge of Paul Anderson’s previous movies. I refuse to watch it because people eat this shit up. There will probably be a third Resident Evil movie.
If the online clips of Alien vs. Predator are any indication, I’m not missing anything. The Predators look like stocky, down-syndrome afflicted WWF rejects. And Jesus, their moves only reinforce this thought. One of the clips is a minute long fight scene between the Alien and the Predator, in which the Predator jumps up from the ground in a single movement. We get a full shot of him. He looks like a 5-foot Italian mobster in a Halloween mask. I ask, beg, once more: Someone, please stop this man! Boycott his movies, have him arrested on trumped-up charges of child molestation! You may feel guilty for doing this, and I feel guilty to suggest doing it, but it’s all for the greater good.
I’ve seen both of these movies. I bought the goddamn dvd. They’re worse, yes even worse, than Dungeons and Dragons, Freddy vs. Jason, American Beauty, or even a Jean-Claude van Damme movie. I ask you all to please think, learn from my horrible mistakes and never watch these movies. Remember, he may be a nice guy, but that is no excuse.