Review #130: Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
This review was originally written in October 2021.
October 2021 Horror Movie Review #16- Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
Filmmakers everywhere, I want you to repeat after me:
After the first film dealt with the inciting incident of the zombie apocalypse, and then the second dealt with the immediate aftermath and development of that apocalypse, this one decided to just go ahead and skip... well, literally everything interesting about dealing with a zombie apocalypse, as well as skipping forward several years to the point where everyone is out in the desert and everyone is dirty (except for the bad guys, who are inexplicably still wearing suits and ties despite the breakdown of society). I honestly don't know if that alone is a problem, or if several movies I've watched this month just do it really poorly?
This one also has the ever-growing problem of characters. That. I. Just. Do. Not. Care. About. At. All. Once again it's Alice the superhero who superheroes all over the place, and then the group of nobodies that seem to be based on characters from the video game but have absolutely no effort taken to make the audience care about them. Hey, Paul W.S. Anderson, why is Claire Redfield in this movie? I know that the answer is "because she was in one or more of the games", but like, the woman in this movie named Claire has nothing in common with the Claire from the games, except that she's a female human in a work of fiction with the words "Resident" and "Evil" in the title. Did it occur to you that maybe you should explain who she is and why she's here? If viewers haven't played the games they'll just see her as one of the many blank slates in this film, and if they have played the games they'll still see her as one of the many blank slates in the film except this blank slate is named after a beloved character, and that beloved character had (in the game at least) personality traits and a backstory. I hate to keep comparing this movie series to the games (seriously, that wasn't my intention), it's just, what else is there to do? The story is a big pile of nothing, the characters are big piles of nothing, so what am I supposed to talk about except how this one was clearly banking on the cultural cache of the Resident Evil series without doing anything, anything at all, to live up to it?
Honestly, I was relieved when Carlos and Mr. Pimpmobile died because maybe that means they'll be replaced with new characters who actually were written, and not just drawn into the script with a stick figure holding their place and a note that said "people like the games" next to it. And the sad thing is, this movie actually had some brief concepts that were really cool! The fact that the movie began with a clone of Alice sort of going through the motions of the first film set up in a testing facility, makes me wonder: what if the first film was, itself, actually a simulated test, and we just didn't realize it because we were seeing things through her eyes? But I'm roughly 100% sure that no, similar to the writers of this movie, the scientists were just shallowly immitating something they didn't understand and going through the motions they thought would make them successful. And the fact that the movie ends with a tease of an army of Alices could mean something cool in the next film, but I'd bet five bucks it'll end up being something really stupid instead (if it gets brought up at all).
Three more movies in this series, and I'm not looking forward to any of them. Apparently this one wasn't screened for critics, after (according to IMDB) "overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics for the first two films". Qu'elle suprise!
Overall Rating: 2/10 Ditches Filled with Clones
Other Movie Recommendations Featuring Ali Larter: If you want more Ali Larter, go watch House on Haunted Hill! It also has bad CGI but at least it's a fun movie.
Comments
Post a Comment