World Famous Comics: Resident Evil (Deluxe Edition)
Resident Evil (Deluxe Edition)
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy, Martin Crewes Directed By: Paul W.S. Anderson Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: DVD Format: AC-3, Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC Number of Discs: 1 Region Code: 99 Release Date: September 07, 2004 Running Time: 100 minutes Studio: Sony Pictures Theatrical Release Date: March 15, 2002
Product Description: FLESH-EATING UNDEAD, KILLER MUTANT DOGS AND A DEADLY COMPUTER'S SUPER DEFENSE STAND IN ALICE'S WAY AS SHE RACES TO PENETRATETHE HIVE BEFORE A LETHAL VIRUS OVERRUNS THE EARTH IN THIS ADAPTATION OF THE VIDEO GAME HIT.
Amazon.com: Marilyn Manson worked on the soundtrack, so it's no surprise that Resident Evil is best enjoyed by headbangers, goth guys, and PlayStation junkies. Like the interactive game it's based on, this horror hybrid pits a small band of SWAT-like commandos (including Milla Jovovich and Girlfight's Michelle Rodriguez) against a ravenous hoard of zombies, resulting in a gorefest that only sociopaths could love. The tenacious heroes are trapped inside the Hive--an underground complex where an evil corporation conducts illegal research with a deadly virus--and the zombies (reanimated corpses of sacrificed employees) are fodder for endless rounds of gunfire. It's utter nonsense (not unlike director Paul W.S. Anderson's previous Event Horizon), so your best defense is to wallow in it or avoid this trash altogether. A few cool sequences are borrowed from better films (that slice-and-dice laser is cribbed from the 1998 Canadian shocker Cube), but if you're in the mood for heavy-metal carnage, this movie's for you. --Jeff Shannon
One big, giant "Meh" of a movie ^ I hate all the reviewers and critics who say that "fans of the video game are going to love this movie." These critics normally aren't gamers or fans of the source material, so how can they be an adequate judge of the tastes of gamers? I'm a huge fan of the Resident Evil game franchise, the very person these critics believe that will enjoy the Resident Evil films. But I DESPISE these movies. And why, do you ask? Because they really aren't much like the games at all. Oh sure, there's a mansion, zombies, zombie dogs, a "Licker" creature, and the malignant Umbrella corporation. But aside from those aesthetical similarities, the film bears little resemblance to the games.
When preproduction of the first Resident Evil film began, the legendary George Romero, whose Dead franchise was a major inspiration for the Resident Evil games, was commissioned to write a script. His script shared many similarities to the game, such as the inclusion of characters like Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Albert Wesker. However, it also made changes to the story that game developers Capcom didn't like, and Romero was ultimately turned down. Instead, they hired Paul WS Anderson, director of Event Horizon and another video game movie, Mortal Kombat. His treatment was more like a prequel to the games, and this approach was more acceptable to Capcom's head honchos. Anderson's treatment was greenlit, and "Resident Evil: Ground Zero" went into production (the "Ground Zero" subtitle was abandoned after the events of September 11th).
The film begins in The Hive, a massive laboratory facility beneath Raccoon City. The mutagenic T-Virus is being tested in the labs, but someone releases the virus, infecting the hundreds of scientists within the facility. Sensing the outbreak, The Hive's security system, the artifically-intelligent Red Queen, locks down the facility and douses everyone in halon to further prevent their escape.
We switch to Alice (Milla Jovovich), who awakens in an empty mansion after passing out in the shower. Her collapse has has given her amnesia, a condition that becomes ever more frightening when a team of nameless Special Ops soldiers (see: fodder) employed by Umbrella storms the mansion. Turns out that the mansion serves as a secret entrance to The Hive, and the team has been sent to infiltrate The Hive and investigate its lockdown. The team directs Alice down into the bowels of the facility to assist with the task. Why they can't determine the nature of the lockdown from the outside is beyond me, since that would be a much more logical thing to do. And why can't they just trust the security system they created and leave The Hive locked down, rather than endangering the lives of an entire Special Ops team and potentially the lives of everyone on the outside by reopening the Hive? But as you're going to find out while watching the Resident Evil films, logic does not exist in this dojo.
Anyway, Alice and the team discover that the T-Virus has turned everyone in The Hive into flesh-eating zombies, and they must get out of the facility before it is sealed up permanently. But seeing the risk of letting them leave, the Red Queen isn't going to make it easy for them.
The Resident Evil games excel at creating a dark, suspenseful atmosphere, where you don't know what horrors are literally waiting around the corner. The main characters are given little ammunition to fend off the hordes of zombies and creatures salivating for their flesh, perpetuating a sense of doom and dread since the player must be methodical and conservative with their weapons. Writer/director Anderson attempts to establish a suspenseful mood by not even introducing the zombies until about halfway through the film. But sadly, all attepted suspense is lost once the flesheaters appear and the Covert Ops team whip out their big machine guns and blast away at them. The film becomes less about mood and scares and more about action and gunfire.
The emphasis on action increases once Alice begins regaining her memory, suddenly remembering that she is a martial arts expert who can run along walls, do flying kicks, and break necks with her thighs. It feels like her sparring partner was Trinity in The Matrix.
In fact, the film cribs a lot of elements from The Matrix Bargain Bin, such as references to Alice in Wonderland (Alice, the Red Queen, the entrance to The Hive is a mirror), wire-fu, slow-motion bullets, and a lead character who suddenly discovers that they have incredible abilities. The film also seems to "borrow" elements from other genre films like Cube and Day of the Dead, though it's hard to criticize the game for using elements of Romero's zombie films since the games themselves are inspired by them.
The film also possess a chugging, screeching metal/electronica score composed by Marco Beltrami and Marilyn Manson. No, I'm not kidding. Shock rocker Marilyn Manson assisted in the creation of the film's score. It's actually quite good, even if the combination of the crunching electronic guitars, pounding drum machines, and heavy gunfire could give you a headache by the end of the film.
This film is "meh". It isn't great, it isn't good, it isn't god-awful. It's quite derivative of other films it shouldn't be, and it lacks the elements that make the game so great. The acting is...well...there. It's also hard to care about characters who don't even have names. The only reason we know that Milla Jovovich's character is named Alice is because it's in the end credits. Characters are almost never addressed by their names during the film. So you feel almost completely indifferent when half the cast is killed off fairly early in the film. They all feel like nameless, faceless fodder, as bad as any cast of horny teens in any random 80's slasher film.
The highlights? The score and the rather humorous audio commentary of Anderson, Jovovich, producer Jeremy Bolt, and castmate Michelle Rodriguez. Jovovich sounds like she's in full "valley girl" mode here, and they joke about everything from Milla's gas (a little T.M.I. if you ask me), their time spent in a German nightclub (the film was shot mostly in Berlin), and cast member Eric Mabius' affinity for yogurt. But it says a lot about a film when one of the major highlights of the film is its audio commentary. After all, you don't watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 because the movies they're riffing on are great.
Not what it could (should) have been... ^ As far as action flicks go, this one is decent. It isn't anything spectacular, but it has ample amounts of blood and guts (the cube scene alone is a highlight) and some adrenaline pumping music to make the `zombie killing' entertaining. In the end the film comes off feeling rather cheap, but it isn't a complete disaster.
Still, having been a fan of the videogames, I must say that this film went a direction I was not expecting and thus proved itself far less than I could have hoped for.
If you are a fan of the videogames, or have at least played them once or twice, you'd know that the whole idea behind this game (and the endless copycats) is to scare you. You play it locked up in your room in the dead of night and find yourself transported to a place that shocks you. Every noise makes your heart jump. That is the exact feeling I wanted from this movie. `Resident Evil' is not an action/adventure type game. It is a dark and slowly paced horror game. That is what this movie needed to be. It needed to layer on the fear and tension, not the action. Sure, it's cool to see Milla Jovovich kick some serious zombie butt, but I'd rather have seen her hyperventilate in a dark room while she listened to the corpses dragging their broken limbs across the hall on the other side of the door.
It's my opinion, but I think it is what the videogame warranted.
Taking my personal preference aside, this movie does deliver to a certain extent. The story it develops is engaging (and the back story does have a certain amount of depth) and they tried hard to layer it with elements from the film, but overall it feels a tad hollow or unimportant. When it's all over you don't feel like you need to watch it again. There are far better zombie films out there (Danny Boyle's masterpiece '28 Days Later' is everything this film SHOULD have been).
Jovovich is a stunning piece of eye candy, and I really enjoy watching her breathe, so I was game for this film and its ridiculous sequels. Still, I wish she were a better actress and I wish she were in better films.
Damn, Milla Jovavich is the hottest chick ever! ^ Resident Evil is arguably the best zombie game series of all time,before Dead Rising and House of the Dead. The story starts off showing how the T virus was started in the hive by someone close to umbrella and why. Will let you find out the rest from there. Claire and Chris unfortunately do not appear in the movie, however Milla Jovavich took my attention away from the missing characters. She is the real deal. Sorry guys she's all mine!
stupid, cheesy, but reasonably fun ^ This is the kind of shlock SF/action thing that, regardless of reviews or how bad the ads look, I nearly always have a gut desire to see - and which all too often disappoints. Having gone into this one 8 years after its release, having studiously avoided it and its sequels and knowing almost nothing about the plot or the game it was based on, I have to say that I was somewhat pleasantly surprised, at least at first. No, it's not a great film or even a particularly good one, but in the hands of a director who is even remotely competent or interesting, this could have been a solid entry into the action/horror/sc-fi arena.
Unfortunately, the director we have here is Paul W.S. Anderson, who has managed not only to have a fairly productive and lucrative career but also to marry the fabulous Milla Jovovich, his leading lady in this film and the sequels. The only other PWSA film I've seen is ALIEN VS PREDATOR, and this is certainly a notch above that film, but it still shows plenty of examples of poor editing and narrative construction, dull and ugly action scenes - excepting a couple where Milla gets to kick butt on her own - and fairly obvious and trite horror movie clichés in abundance.
What's good about the film is mostly Milla, who I wouldn't say gives a terrific performance exactly, but who does exude a presence, show some nice physical grace and power, and communicate reasonably well the character of a woman just starting to come out of memory loss - and to realize just how much the mega-corporation that she and nearly everybody else works for has betrayed them all. She is Alice, apparently a former security professional for the Umbrella Corporation, and she has seemingly lost her memory as a result of some kind of nerve gas. She awakens in a fancy mansion that turns out to be a secret portal to the underground Hive, a supercomputer that runs nearby Raccoon City and is a breeding ground for all kinds of unorthodox experiments. Alice has to accompany - and eventually lead - a team of commandos into the Hive to see what's gone wrong with it, and along the way they encounter those most boring (to me) of currently popular horror icons, zombies. Somehow an anti-aging virus developed in the Hive has this unpleasant zombifying side-effect, and the Hive has killed off all of the scientiests within. Except, of course, that you can't really kill a zombie.
Like I said, there are some good action scenes with Milla, and there's also a nice sense of claustrophobia at times - it seems like the Hive might go on forever - but on the whole this wasn't any better than "OK" for me, and it sure wasn't helped by the dreadful bang-your-head-against-the-wall music by Marco Beltrami and Marilyn Manson. I guess it's what the kids like. But to be fair, this probably does feel a lot like the videogame - lots of action and blood, paper-thin story and virtually zero in the way of characterizations. Well, being a hardcore fantasy and SF viewer, I've certainly seen plenty of worse stuff.
Superbit DVD, not a reference one. ^ My review is for the SUPERBIT release of this movie. SUPERBIT is supposed to represent the top of the line and best image quality a DVD can achieve and many times those DVDs are actually reference DVDs. Well, the quality in this SUPERBIT edition of RESIDENT EVIL is so so, not bad not good, just like any other DVD. It certainly does not do justice to the SUPERBIT term. Other DVDs that honor the SUPERBIT name are the FIFTH ELEMENT and THE BIG HIT version but this version is nothing to talk about. It is not as terrible as the other SUPERBIT DVD or Charlie's Angels but if you are buying this DVD for reference or video quality purposes look elsewhere.
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