A Slurry of Film Reviews: Resident Evil, Ghostbusters Afterlife, and Eternals

 After watching these three movies over the course of the holiday week, I feel burnt out and disillusioned - a bit - with the film industry. It's not that it hasn't had its problems, but watching these three movies in sequence really hammers home how corporate and calculating a big chunk of the film industry is these days. Call it the Disneyfication of films in general, or maybe its just the result of a craft which can't afford to misstep in today's post-pandemic box office, but none of these films were especially visionary (well, Eternals had its moments), and all three were very, very carefully calculated to pander to a certain kind of audience.

Rather than review each individually and at length, I thought I'd try to encapsulate my take on each in as succinct a manner as possible. I wish to note that of the three, only Eternals really stands out, chiefly because while it is a Marvel movie, it barely feels like one (until some line or reference is thrown in every few minutes to remind you that yes, this is taking place in the MCU). That alone makes it a better general fare than the other two films, neither of which are anything more than a desperate attempt to produce something which generate the most likes from over-dedicated fans in Reddit and Youtube (and all the rest of the social media ilk).

So...here goes...Note: Some Spoilers Ahead! 

Ghostbusters: Afterlife 

A film which reminds us that Ghostbusters 2016 was at least a movie that understood it was part of a comedy franchise, this new installment leans heavily into a Spielbergesque (or, I am told, Stranger Things-esque) revisionist take on the Ghostbusters as something to be deeply nostalgic and sentimental about. It populates the movie world with a persistent series of direct throwbacks to the original movie in the most pandering, fetishistic nostalgia-fueled manner possible, and gets people like Kevin Smith to have deeply emotional reactions to what is fundamentally a movie that feels like 1/2 "young adult novel" reinvention of the Ghostbusters concept mixed with quasi-religious reverence for all things of the original movie, aimed presumably at adults who were kids when they saw the first one and didn't get all the SNL-style humor. We probably all have movies a bit like that; for me it's Alien and The Empire Strikes Back, but it's definitely not this movie. I mildly enjoyed the artless ways in which the film reverentially, almost fetishistically, took no chances and filled its run time with artifacts, spooks and concepts all directly from the original movie, while providing a mostly neutral to unlikable cast of kids who, in the end, are entirely overshadowed by a brief series of unsurprising original cast cameos. Also, a CGI Egon, for whom I hope his family estates are properly compensated. 

Overall rating: C- but I did enjoy seeing Gozer with modern special effects. This movie is technically watchable, but clearly I am not and have never been the target audience for a "serious take" on the Ghostbusters franchise. My son loved it though, and this movie was definitely for him. But make no mistake....this film offers no vision and ends with an after-credits that threatens more of the same. Ghostbusters is no longer a comedy, apparently. That was their take-away from the failed 2016 reboot (which I think could have been notably better if it had simply not tried to be a reboot). I suggest avoid, unless you have someone who is 10 who loves Ghostbusters in your life, or someone who is spiritually 10 when it comes to this franchise (or even yourself, if you are deeply committed to the series!).

If you've never seen or cared much about Ghostbusters before, while this film is technically competent, I am not at all sure the storyline will make a lot of sense to you, or the constant, never-ending callbacks to the original movie will make much sense, but hidden within this movie is the core nugget of something that could be much better if it weren't hampered by its IP.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

The first 25 or so minutes of this movie felt promising, as it took some core conceits of the original games and then took its precious time to build up a bit of dread and atmosphere. Not strictly following the game plots, it still took the core conceit of the series (such as Leon being a rookie on his first day, and Claire returning home to find her brother Chris) and proceeded to make Raccoon City spooky and interesting in a promising way. Then, someone reminded the movie makers that they were supposed to make a Resident Evil movie that covers the first three games' worth of content with an hour and a half left to do it and the entire film suddenly spins into a weirdly paced yet atmospheric overdrive as it tries to jam into its remaining run time what took 30-40 hours of game play to experience. The result was....watchable, but I have to be honest, Sunday I was trying to even remember what movie we'd seen on my son's birthday a few days' prior! 

The good news is: whoever was in charge of the cinematography, the look and feel, got it down quite well. There's some stuff here which just drips with atmosphere, and there are lots of faithful replications of locations directly from the game. What was missing was any sense of pacing as related to the original games; the movie, rather than take the original Resident Evil and expand on the idea of a haunted mansion tied to a secret lab where a virus that makes zombies gets loose, instead conflates that event with the entirety of the second and third games' plotlines, almost as if the screenwriter was told to "make this movie follow the games, but do it in a short run time." The result is a mess of beats that come from certain highlighted moments in the games, but jumbled about as if someone had a puzzle but were missing most of the pieces. Or maybe they were handed a list of things that someone thought needed to be in the movie for it to be considered "authentic," possibly from a Reddit focus group.

Also, worth noting is that some of the actors really don't feel "right" here. Jill is not Jill. She doesn't even get her signature hokey lockpick line (which is on that aforementioned list), it is instead given to Claire. Leon's actor has the right face, but he is turned into an incompetent klutz and had a brief character arc which boils down to "I shot one zombie, and then I found a rocket launcher and lived" by the end. On the plus side, the actors for Chris, Claire and Wesker work fairly well. 

Overall Rating: C- but tempted to give it a C+ for at least getting the look and feel of creeping around the Spencer Mansion right (when they aren't exploding zombies). The first 20 minutes was a solid A-, however, and I wish they had run with their early instincts and made a movie that worked for its medium rather than another "by the numbers" attempt to appease Resident Evil fans with the basest clinical attempt at pandering, or even better, just made a different movie. "Look! We have that zombie who looks over his shoulder! Here's that zombie dog! Here's Wesker, being Wesker!" And the one thing that was new to the franchise (a creepy survivor of a Birkin experiment) felt out of place and utterly unaddressed in the film, only there because it felt like they needed one original idea in the film even if it was given no purpose than to hand off a bundle of keys which, of course, have unique markers that were themselves a call-back to the game even if they were not at all used for such a purpose in the movie. Yeesh.*

Side note! If you know nothing of Resident Evil and just want to see a good horror movie with zombies then I think you may enjoy this one. As a pure horror zombie film without worrying about RE lore stuff it's probably a C+ and worth a watch if you can see it on the cheap.

Eternals

What happens when you get an amazing director with a vision, an obscure comic property from a guy who always thought big in his story ideas, and then let that film maker create a story that they want with the only restriction being that it must fit within your existing Cinematic Universe? The Eternals is what happens. This movie should not have been part of the MCU, but if it wasn't part of the MCU no one would likely have gone to see it, so its kind of a catch-22. The movie has some noteworthy elements, key among them being that it largely breaks tradition and is the first Marvel movie in quite a while to not follow the by now very standard formula/script of the typical Marvel film. Among other things this movie had some sense of gravity, a weight to what was going on which would have been stronger had the film not been in the MCU. If the film were its own universe then the ending would have been utterly captivating, as we the audience would wonder "how will this end?" with utter uncertainty. But because it is an MCU film we know how it will end....as we know there will be more Marvel films after it, so the only question becomes "How does this lead in to future movies?" instead.

Despite the fact that the film reminds us every ten or fifteen minutes that its in the MCU, it resonates well as its own deal, and in so doing changes much of the landscape of the Marvel universe (sort of). It feels to me like its indirectly setting up for a future Fantastic Four film (for reasons that are not obvious unless you are familiar with the big world-ending beats that the FF regularly deal with), and its post credits appear to threaten us with a more conventional "Guardians of the Galaxy" styled sequel in the future, but all about Eternals, followed by a post-after-credits event that is so obscure your conventional Marvel fans will have to ask the real hardcore fringe fans what it is alluding to. Hint: another Disney+ TV series down the road about a character I vaguely recall being an Avenger from the 80's, and I have no idea if he's had any story development since then.

Overall Rating: B+ and this would have been a great movie to stand on its own, apart from the MCU it is locked in to, but I also suppose it would not have succeeded without that attachment. I can't decide if I am really looking forward to future Marvel movies about obscure comic characters who's books I would not have bought on the shelves, either now or back in the day, when they were actually being created and written about, but as Marvel movies go this one is surprisingly bold in its derring-do. I mean....it actually had multiple romantic interests, an actual scene suggesting some of these characters have sex at one point, and a mild gay romance which felt artfully part of the story and not a deliberate effort to pander. Most Marvel movies seem to stay far away from this, implying no one in the Marvel universe is ever allowed to have a meaningful relationship for various reasons (having to do with trying hard not to offend too many focus groups at once, I think). This one just....let the characters be human, which is ironic in a movie about Eternals. 

So I need to see some better movies to scrub my brain. Spider-Man's next movie, filled with three film franchise reboots' worth of call-backs, is coming soon, and I don't think I can take another round of this!

*Important to note that my problem here is, why make the keys look like actual keys from the game? Why do this at all? They could just have been a normal key for purposes of what the story needed. It's a needless detail that will go over the heads of people who don't know about RE lore, and an annoying detail for fans who will feel like these keys are there for recognition purposes at the expense of coherence. It's like in the earlier Ghostbusters: Afterlife film: why is the stack of books there? Why is the crunch bar there? So you can go "Hey, I remember that!" and the studio hopes that is enough to trigger your nostalgia love for the film. Please, Hollywood, stop.

Gaming on the Nintendo Switch - Skyrim, Zelda, Gear:Club and More

A few months ago I decided to take the dive and purchase the only console I didn't own, the Nintendo Switch. This was based on at least four factors:

1. The Switch had gotten consistently good reviews from most interested parties, and Tobold on his excellent blog talked enough about it (and Legend of Zelda) to convince me that this wasn't a game to miss, and also that maybe the Switch wasn't another Nintendo dud.

2. The concept of a portable Skyrim was overhwhelming my common sense.

3. I had come to the conclusion that the reason I rarely engaged with my old PS Vita was that the screen was too small, and that it had no easy way for me to hook it up to a TV (and that the one option that existed was difficult and limited in functionality).

4. Finally, it was the only gadget console I didn't own and that just wasn't gonna fly in my house!

Anyway, the Switch has proved to be a really fun device, and possibly even more fun, overall (even if in smaller bursts) than the Big Two that tend to dominate my house thanks to their specific offerings (Destiny 1 and 2 for the family, The Divsion for dad, Monster Hunter: World for mom and pretty much Everything Else but especially Lego games and Minecraft for Marcus). The Switch has instead held sway as a portable that works really, really well and doesn't induce eye strain like the PS Vita, as well as being sufficiently portable that we could pack the whole thing up, docking station included, and take it on trips where we hook it up to the hotel TV. It's battery life as a handheld has also been much better than I expected, and one evening my son managed to run it down after about five hours of play.

For my own purposes I played many games on it (and a lot of Skyrim and Xenoblade Chronicles 2) well before I dabbled into the deep waters that is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is a contentious game since everone else in the house also wants to play it, but do not want me playing it where I can accidentally spoil it for them. Luckily my wife's been playing a lot of GTAV on a special roleplay server (yeah, that's a real thing that exists) which keeps her distracted, and I caved in and got Minecraft for my son on the PC so he could play AlienvsPredator mods in the game which has left me safely ignored, and enjoying what I would describe as a more colorful, vibrant open world exploration experience that is like a mellowed out version of Skyrim....or maybe to use a further analogy, Zelda is to Skyrim like The Hobbit (the book) is to its successor The Lord of the Rings (also talking about the book here).

Picking it up and playing on the go is a lot of fun, but docking it and playing on the available TV is even better. Being able to pull the whole system and move it to a different TV is actually quite handy in my household, which is dominated by 2 UHD TVs and an HD TV (and two of these TVs are also serving as monitors). If my son wants to play on the PC, and I allow it, then I can move to the living room TV and plug in the Switch, no issues at all. If I want to lounge in the safety of the bedroom where there are no televisions and play anyway, the Switch makes this possible.

So far the only negatives I've encountered with the Switch are as follows:

720p Resolution is more normal with the Switch, and wouldn't be much of an issue if I didn't also have an Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. Playing a game like Doom or Skyrim on it for the portability is awesome, but if you happen to have Skyrim Remastered on PC or Xbox One X then it's hard to want to invest big screen time in the Switch version of either game. However, being able to play either game on the go is priceless.

The Switch also doesn't currently appear to have any "family sharing" feature similar to the Xbox, which means I am not sure if I get my son or wife a Switch of their own that they could play my games on their account. Currently I can log in to my son's Xbox One S and he can play my games, even if its on his account, so long as I'm logged in (with a few notable exceptions). Even the PS4 allows this, although it has fewer family-friendly features than the Xbox environment does, but the Switch seems to lock these to your account. However, there's an upcoming online service that Nintendo intends to implement which may well provide for a family account sharing option, so fingers crossed.

Finally, the Switch has limited memory options. I have a 128GB mini SD card loaded up, and I think I can get a 256 GB card down the road, but while many of the games are small loads of less than 1 GB in size, all the really good games tend to lean toward 10-25 GB in size, and that means having just a few from the digital store can eat up your space. This is a very personal issue, though, and if you're like me and tend to buy many more games than you can find time to play, then you may notice it....but if you're a more focused and non-obsessive collector type of gamer who likes to finish one game at a time, then you may never notice the issue at all.

So what games have I been enjoying the most on the Switch? Well, the one's I've found the most overall fun and time consuming so far, in no particular order, include:

Gear:Club Unlimited

This racing game is no Forza Horizon 3 but in terms of general racing games its a lot of fun with just the right sort of depth for a game that plays well in both big screen and handheld mode. In fact, if you play it in both modes it feels (to me) like the handling of your vehicle adjusts in response to the way you are playing, making handheld and pro controller play equally smooth and comfortable. The game is designed around buying and upgrading cars and your workshop and racing various circuits of different types; it's a "lite" version of Forza, but the result is a great experience, and playing this while on my recent airplane trip was quite satisfying (pro tip: playing a car racing game while the plane is ascending or descending is not a good feeling, though!)

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Yes, everyone has raved about this game already, but I will add my two cents and suggest that it's a game with the compelling style of play from Skyrim, but with a more faerie-tale driven element to it, and a escalating series of mechanical elements in the gameplay that one can easily obsess over. Nothing about this design fails to tick the checklist of "things I love in a game" and it's mythology makes for a healthy introduction to the Zelda universe for people who may not know much about it (and considering the last time I delved into a Zelda game it was the Ocarina of Time on the N64, I think I count). If you like Skyrim, and don't mind if most of the violence is exclusively aimed at various goblinoids and monsters, then you will love Breath of the Wild.

Skyrim

Duh, but also, yeah, Duh! The existence of this game on Switch was for me the main selling point on a Switch, if only just to see it work on a portable, and boy, does it work. The graphics are low on a full screen version, and you can tell it's at the low end of the scale compared to Skyrim Remastered on the other consoles, but on a small screen it's hard not to argue that it looks great. Even on a big screen the game is a lot of fun, although it lacks the workshop and ability to load mods, unfortunately.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Ordinarily this is a genre of Japanese RPG I might at best dive into for an hour and then get really annoyed with and move on from. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a different breed of game, however, in that it has meticulously careful voice acting with great voice actors who really improve the game over others of its type in dramatic ways, and the game is structured around expansive open world exploration mixed with focused quests in a way that I feel better reflects the genre and play people like than, say, Final Fantasy XV (which I feel tries to hard to be something it is not). I'm still plowing through this game (and likely will be for months to come) but it is definitely recommended.

Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion

This is not a game I thought I'd be playing, and I bought it because I thought my son would get in to it (he's been obsessively playing the Switch version of Lego City Undercover). Instead, he got a little frustrated with this one after a while and dad tried it on a lark. Well, I can see why he got frustrated....the game has a really interesting mastery curve, and even lets you skip hard levels in the single player "Octo Expansion" campaign, although I have not bothered to do so. The design and feel of this game is what I'd call a version of Saints Row (stylistically) if it had been done by Nickelodeon with Cartoon Network and a dollop of Adult Swim mixed in for good measure; the storyline about humanoid inklings, half human/polymorphic squid things which generate copious quantities of ink that they use as both weapons and transportation is hard to fully digest as a concept, but if you just go with it and accept the game for what it is, there's a compelling hybrid shooter/platformer experience to be had that is a ton of fun.

Honorable Mentions

Honorable mentions go to some remastered classics that are on the Switch, such as Bayonetta 1 and 2 (and you can only find Bayonetta 2 on Nintendo!), Resident Evil Revelations 1 and 2, Payday 2, and of course Doom. Doom is a game I have had my ups and downs with, but I have really had fun with it on the portable end....I don't bother to load it up for a big screen event (I have it on PC, after all) ordinarily, but as a fun thing to play in portable mode it's hard to beat.

Review: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

This is a good week to be a Resident Evil fan. We have a new entry into the game series (RE7) that is genuinely amazing....more on that one later....and also the final movie in the "Alice's adventures in Umbrellaland" series of Resident Evil films starring Milla Jovovich.

I've had a great deal of fun with both the films and games of Resident Evil over the years, and always appreciate that the first RE game marked my foray into "modern" gaming on the Playstation 1. Prior to that, it was a wasteland of suboptimal, graphically terrifying PC games for me, and in fact the PS1 was my first machine that could run anything interesting at all, as well as my first console since my childhood Atari 2600 days. This year in 2017 marks an interesting transition for the franchise, which, like the monsters it portrays, has grown in strange and weird ways. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is no different, offering up a movie that closes out this chapter of the franchise while RE7 opens up an entirely strange and new direction for the games.

Unlike the last several Resident Evil movies, the latest film isn't nearly as campy and stupid, making it hard to poke fun at the film. In fact, if you hadn't seen any of the RE movies since maybe #1, this film could arguably stand on its own....so long as your entire focus is on enjoying a zombie apocalypse film that keeps making allusions to prior events. They give you a decent enough recap at the start, and even fill in some odd holes from the dawn of the series (the kinds of holes this series takes for granted, normally), and then dives in to the current plot. In fact it even eschews the traditional "wrap up the ending of the last film" format by cutting to the chase....we know there was a crazy battle in the ruins of Washington DC but the film starts more or less "the day after" that fight, and moves in to Alice's last trip down the rabbit hole.

I'll get this out of the way real quickly: much like with xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is actually a lot of fun and quite enjoyable, so long as your in to that sort of thing. Which thankfully I happen to be, because otherwise I'd be having a real crisis of confidence in the state of films right now if I didn't. They are both action films predicated on the glory of on-screen excess and madness that is particular to their action-film visions of the universe. They both rely on spectacle over plot, action over story, and the "doing of stuff" over character.

Alice is promised an end in this tale, a conclusion to her story, and we do get that. I am kind of hopeful that this means we might eventually see a series reboot which tries to tell a RE tale closer to the games....but then we get into that tricky gray area where we have to admit that the games have their own special world logic, pacing issues, character development failings and weird plot holes (though none quite so spectacular as the films in aggregate).

The storyline of The Final Chapter wraps up Alice's tale (more or less), brings back Claire, brings back (no surprise) Wesker (and also wraps his tale up), along with gratuitious appearances by all of the Umbrella evil gang....especially the Red Queen and Dr. Isaacs, who's been "dead" for a few movies, actually. It does not clarify what happened to Leon Kennedy or Ada Wong....but I'm not fretting, their arbitrary appearance in this franchise remains one of those "visual nods" to the games without much effort to explain their existence in the weird mirror universe of Alice.

Here are a handful of my spoilerific observations on this movie (yes, SPOILERS AHEAD):

1. For much of the initial scenery this movie looks like they took a tab from Fallout 3's style.

2. As the plot progresses and it is revealed that the entire cabal of Umbrella is cryogenically locked away for awakening after the apocalypse ends, many "motivational" plotholes get nominally filled. This is good! Also, judicious use of clones to explain motivations, appearances, and reappearances was sufficient to help clear up some old (and new) plot detritus. But some of the motivations of prior villains in other films are suddenly cast in to doubt. Why, for example, did Wesker do pretty much any of the stuff he did in prior films? Why was it necessary to wait ten years to release the anti-virus? Why--if near as I can tell that was the goal all along--did anyone left at Umbrella oppose Alice's desire to do so, if it insured they would awaken to their brave new world?

3. Who set the bombs to blow up the cryotubes? I might have not followed this properly, but I was under the impression that no one had a good opportunity to do so.

4. Wesker died like a dog in a trap. Seemed like an oddly fitting end for Movie Wesker, but entirely out of sorts with the vicious mutating Wesker that haunted the video games.

5. I thought the Isaacs clone was motivated to cast down the Umbrella elite, knowing he was a clone. But in the end he seemed genuinely surprised to meet the Real Isaacs. So what, then, was his actual motive for baiting an army of the dead right to the entrance of the installation?

6. They try to clarify that the infection of the world actually started deliberately....but it doesn't quite jive with the first couple movies. I guess it explains how a post-nuked Raccoon City wasn't the source of the infection evident by the time of "Resident Evil: Extinction" but in fact it was Umbrella Corp deliberately infecting the population.....but at the same time, the prior movies held up on their assumptions just fine without this extra layer of Machiavellian scheming.

7. Do you remember the names of anyone else in this movie other than Alice, Claire, Isaacs and Wesker? Me neither. The entire population of survivors were pretty much just there to have a "visual recognition" and then their moment of doom.

8. Wesker still died like a dog. Hah!

9. That anti-virus sure did disperse quickly. Like....insanely quick. But this is RE science so yeah. They kinda clarify it will travel on the winds in the end, but that only lampshades the whole "army of zombies fall over" scene just prior. I guess the army was downwind?

10. I am officially impressed at how many frickin' times that laser trap corridor has made an appearance in the movie now. Officially it is like a character unto itself. The laser corridor is to RE films what the Necronomicon is to Evil Dead movies.

11. Fridge Moment: even if they were evil, I bet a fair number of the Umbrella elite would have been very useful alive to help rebuild society. Then again.....I guess they did cause the apocalypse....

Okay....so this was a fun movie, slightly less stupid than the last three, and slightly more energetic than many zombie survival horror films out there. It was all about the action, the LOUD NOISES as zombies pop out and the monsters. Also, a promise I think from W.S. Anderson to his wife Milla to get her off the film sequel treadmill she's been trapped on. To that end, a solid B+, for a solid B Movie!

B+

After Action Report - Resident Evil: Revelations

I completed Resident Evil: Revelations unexpectedly last week. I don't know quite how that happened, I'm usually much better about pacing myself and dragging out games I enjoy for months, sometimes even years! Suddenly I'm done with RE:R, I'm almost done with the Ada campaign in RE6, and I'm slowly completing the DLC content in RE: Operation Raccoon City, at least when I can stomach the insane default difficulty level of the DLC. Yikes....I wonder when the next installment of the franchise will show up...probably around 2015-2016 on the next generation of consoles. Sigh.

Resident Evil: Revelations was unarguably closer in design, feel and intent to the classic RE titles (1 through 3 plus Code Veronica), although it's engine is clearly a build from RE 4 and 5. The PC version added in high res graphics and decent model designs, but the mere fact that this started as a 3DS title impresses me. This alone says volumes about what the 3DS can handle, and I'd pick one up, except no one seems to make mature games for the handheld. Likewise, the fact that RE:R was designed for a handheld means that it had a smaller design budget and specific considerations about how it would play, and as a consequence of this it's PC port is actually really damn good.

Seriously...because the game had to consider players holding a handheld title for short play sessions, it made the game's structure built around a digestible series of episodes, each of which doesn't take too long to complete, has (mostly) decent auto save points, and starts off each episode and session with a fun recap on the plot up to that point. This structure of convenience aimed at the handheld market actually makes the game equally accessible and friendly to the desktop PC (and console) gamer who maybe just wants to play a game for thirty minutes and feel like he accomplished something.

There are some games (especially some MMOs) where I don't even bother to log in because I only have 30 minutes and don't want to spend it traveling, on inventory management, or just trying to remember where I left off and why. RE:R has none of those issues, and is incredibly friendly to short-burst gaming.

RE:R is also built around a more traditional design and structure, one familiar to fans of the original games. There's a lot of locations and art assets that get re-used, although what's really going on is you're having most of your adventures on a spooky cruise liner, a remote mountain installation, and occasionally in flashbacks to a man-made floating wonder city called Terragrigia shortly before its about to be destroyed. You'll grow quite familiar with the weaving maze of corridors in the haunted ghost ship which Jill and her BSAA partner Parker must explore, even as Chris and his femme fatale buddy Jessica crawl around in the snowy mountains looking for other clues.

The game introduces a bunch of new characters to the RE storyline, and most of them live to the end. In fact I have to say this game did a great job of adding new and interesting faces to the RE canon; we get more of that in RE6, of course, but for whatever reason the characters introduced here in RE:R get more story time, more attention, more fun and cheesy lines and are just plain old more interesting because of this. If there's a RE7 in the near future, I would really like to see Parker Luciani, Jessica Sherawat and Clive O'Brien show up again (although admittedly, some are more likely to return than others, based on RE:R's ending sequence, which is fairly comprehensive in establishing where everyone ends up).

There's really only one character that I didn't see enough of, and she's mostly there as a unique and very persistent foe: Rachel, or more accurately Rachel Ooze. Rachel is pretty much spoken of only posthumously, and her real legacy lies with the Raid Mode events, but her persistent resurrected form haunts your protagonists throughout the game, and it would have been nice to have learned a bit more about her prior to her death and rebirth.

Rachel before...

...and after. FYI she's available in Raid Mode as a DLC pack,
and is my second favorite Raid Mode character after Jill

Not only does RE:R offer up a twelve chapter tale in the classic RE:R vein, filled to the brim with things you can click on to learn more cool story bits, find keys and otherwise deal with various puzzles and mysteries, but it also provides a robust after-game solo and multiplayer co-op feature called Raid Mode. The Raid Mode lets you revisit the many areas of the game (it's broken up into roughly eighteen maps), bringing in an array of different characters and costume options (many of which require unlocking over time.). You equip them with tricked out weaponry and proceed to tackle each level in Raid Mode like a mini-adventure, complete with an end goal to reach and an array of threats between you and that goal. This mode was originally conceived in brief way back in the bonus hidden level for Resident Evil 2, where you could play the curiously named Umbrella agent Hunk as he blasted his way through Raccoon City, and over the years this got revisited in various forms including Mercenary Mode from RE5 (and other titles). Raid Mode is similar, but with an emphasis on solo and co-op play it allows you to essentially play through the levels and maps of the original game in an endless array of mini missions, which turns out to be strangely compelling, and a lot of fun. With level up mechanics, weapon upgrading and collecting, alternate skins and characters and a large number of escalating maps, it's a really cool way to extend the life of RE:R beyond the single player campaign. I'll be playing Raid Mode for a long time to come; it's actually more fun than the Mercenaries Modes in RE6 (though to be fair I quite enjoy those as well).

So, long story short, here's RE:R in a nutshell:

Single Player Campaign takes about 10-14 hours, is very fun and feels very much like original-style RE

Raid Mode is a fun extra feature that actually plays out like an endless array of cool mini missions, and allows co-op gaming

RE:R's budget design aimed at handhelds translates into a very easy-in and easy-out style of gaming that prompted it to make good use of its resources to tell a fun, sometimes camp, other times tense and exciting survival horror tale that treats the Resident Evil universe right. I want future titles in the franchise that are more like Resident Evil: Revelations.

A+++

Monday Update! Sick Family, More of the Saints, and Lots of Rain

This is another Update blog, which is to say I've missed a couple and have no content lined up as yet. Last week was a hectic work week as co-workers were out on vacation and I was pulling double duty in other departments I don't normally dabble in if I can help it (even if I am the boss; knowing when you don't know something is an important part of the job). Then as work returned to normal I and my entire family came down with some hideous virus simultaneously, with myself, my wife and my son all equally sick. Plus, on top of everything it's been pouring cats and dogs in New Mexico, which is amazing (and needd). What a weekend! Lacking much energy or time I did not get much blogging done.

I did, however, play a lot of Saints Row the Third, and actually finished all the story arcs and primary campaigns. I got to about 78% completion, with only a smattering of the miscellaneous missions and challenges incomplete. All in all I got about 45 hours out of the game, which was not bad. The storyline remained as crazy as one could expect right to the end, albeit with the caveat that SR4 due out next month will top even the craziest storyline in SR3 right from the opening, a tradition now for this franchise, it seems.

After finishing SR3 I started a new campaign on hardcore mode with a male character using the gravelly Statham voice option (as my wife puts it) to see if playing a second gender made a replay worth trying. Aside from the entertainment value of seeing and hearing a dude go through everything it appears to be an identical experience, but the visceral enjoyment of replaying the game is pretty strong, stronger than many other recent titles I completed (i.e. Diablo III, Max Payne 3 and Star Trek, to name the last games I completed). There's also an advantage to replaying SR3 in hardcore mode, too: it's a tougher challenge, but I know that the accrual of reputation (leveling) and accompanying perks will lead to game-changing superiority over time, and this might make for a more challenging experience with a greater sense of reward when those really amazing perks start being acquired.

A week or two ago I pitched an idea about using SR3 as inspiration for a supervillain campaign, maybe powered by Mutants & Masterminds. As it turns out, one of the final missions for SR3 actually ends up giving you a range of superpowers, with which you proceed to trash Steelport. It was a great deal of fun, and a hint of things to come in SR4 if some of the trailers are anything to go by. Apparently Volition toyed with the idea in this once DLC pack (the one with Clone Gat) and realized that there was a great deal of additional potential by elaborating on it. I'll be curious to see if SR4 makes it a more integral portion of the game, or restrains it to a specific set of missions. In SR3 it's a temporary effect that lasts for an hour or less (more use burns it out). They could do something similar in SR4, but make it possible to purchase or find more doses, I imagine. One of the trailers shows Gat running up a building, though...Prototype style....so maybe they'll expand on the power options, too.

Speaking of Prototype, I snagged that plus Prototype 2 on the Steam Sale and got a few hours in. It inspired me to also resume playing more of InFamous, to contrast the two. Both are very decent games, worth playing, and I'll talk more about them in weeks to come, thanks to my newfound fascination for the wacky world of Open-City Sandbox/Theme Park GTA-clone titles. Prototype is especially interesting because it is best summed up as, "You start the game playing as the end boss from a Resident Evil title." InFamous has an interest good/evil moral quandry mechanic, which means you can be a suitably villainous menace or a misunderstood hero, depending on how you play your cards. Many of the quandries are sufficiently nuanced that it is actually easy to see why choosing the villain path might be smarter, if not kinder, which is interesting.

You know what the biggest threat to the next generation of consoles is right now? It's the last generation of consoles.....at least it will be, for the first couple of years. There were so many amazing and well done titles released over the last seven years that it's impossible to to have kept up for most people, and for gamers who aren't obsessed with the new and shiny (and I would postulate that most of the aging gamer base eventually become more concerned with games they can enjoy on a decent time:money ratio, as opposed to whatever is brand new) being able to pick from such an amazing selection of discounted titles is a real boon.

This is why the Xbox One and PS4 aren't offering backwards compatibility....they know their greatest enemy out the gates is everything that has come before.

I'll try to have more content out this week....been blogging about video games a lot lately, but I concede that my focus lately has been on gaming and also catching up on reading (especially some Wade Davis books I have been enjoying). I really should do some more book reviews soon, and maybe put more of an effort into blogging about all the interesting stuff going on in archaeology and anthropology in general. There are some blogs out there which I admire for their quality over quantity approach; maybe I'll try focusing on fewer but more substantive blog entries....we shall see!

Good News Everyone! Resident Evil: Revelations is officially announced

Actually it was announced a few days ago but I just now got around to blogging delightedly about it. This has been a good year or two for the fans (especially versatile, forgiving fans like myself) for all things RE. If your definition of RE ended with the last of the old style of games (circa Code Veronica) then perhaps the current wave of RE titles is not to your liking....but it sounds like Resident Evil: Revelations is worth checking out, as it manages to hold the modern look and feel of the series while getting back to its deeper, more exploratory/investigative and survival horror-filled roots.

The announcement site and trailer is here. Steam has a stretch goal event going on for preorders that includes a copy of Lost Planet Colonies Edition and an end goal of free season pass content. So, probably worth it? They haven't announced what the season pass will include yet, of course. Los Planet Colonies Edition is not on my list of "squee games" but its not horrible, either.

RE: Revelations look like its on schedule for a May 20 release.



Now to finish up the third RE 6 campaign (which is proving do far to be Not As Bad as reviewers implied...at least on the PC version), the Ada Wong campaign and the plethora of additional campaigns on RE: ORC that I still haven't found time to finish because of Rift, Defiance and all that time sink stuff.

Review: Resident Evil - Caliban Cove

Resident Evil: Caliban Cove by S.D. Perry

The second published novel in the Resident Evil series (and third in chronological order) is also the first original tale S.D. Perry got to pen in the weird Biohazard universe, serving as a sort of filler between the events of the original Resident Evil (presented in Umbrella Conspiracy) and Resident Evil 2 (novelised in City of the Dead, which I am presently plowing through). Caliban Cove gets a unique opportunity to break away from the video game restrictions on the story and elaborate on a few bits and pieces that are otherwise missing from the games.

Rebecca Chambers (the perky young genius biologist who was a fresh recruit into the Special Tactics and Recon Squad-STARS-stationed in Raccoon City) gets to be the focus of this tale as she and the other STARS surivors of the Spencer Mansion incident are now being hunted by Umbrella hitmen while the press and local investigators dance to Umbrella's publicity department and place suspicion and blame for whatever the hell went down at the Spencer Mansion squarely on the STARS' shoulders.

Rebecca gets an opportunity to do further investigating when David Trapp and his aspiring team of STARS agents from another district step forth with rumors of an accident at another secret Umbrella facility in the unfortunately named Caliban Cove in Maine. David is a handome British gent which means we get to hear about flashlights being called torches for a while.

I'm glossing over some of the surprises, should you wish to read and enjoy this book spoiler-free, but here's the gist of it (spoilers): Caliban Cove is the reclusive haunt of a gaggle of mad scientists who were working with the deranged evil genius Nicholas Griffith, a man who's vision of what the T Virus can do led to a perfection which both allowed him and his team to organize zombies into armed "tri-squads" and also to create true zombies, with a sort of "muscle memory" of their intellect but totally lacking free will. And Griffith, being quite mad of course, has taken advantage of his co-workers to set about his own special plans of zombie-driven world domination.

Luckily, the STARS, always gifted with an impeccable sense of good timing, arrive on scene to disrupt things, suffer horribly, and triumph in the end.

Because the book is not following any sort of game-directed script it deviates slightly from the pacing and style of the other novels, and we get a lot more setup and exposition than is normal, perhaps even too much of it (we're sixty plus pages in before anything evil-lab and zombie related starts hopping). The disaster at Caliban Cove, while suitably appropriate for the series, is also toned down a bit...we get some good, creepy moments, some action bits, and so forth, but its all more measured, more subdued than the novels ripped directly from the games. S.D. Perry does introduce a measure of puzzlers into the story, however, in keeping with RE tradition.

This book wasn't quite as good as, say, Zero Hour (which was written much later) but it's definitely a fun read and adds some background to the setting, as well as providing a great framework in the first half of the tale to explain just what the heck sort of an organization the STARS are, and how deep their membership is in Umbrella's pockets. It also demonstrates how the core conceit of the Resident Evil universe -that of a world in which evil Pharmaceutical Companies generously sprinkle secret bioweapons test labs in the dark corners of Amercia, to be found by daring law enforcement mercenaries- can sustain itself rather well outside of the video game environment it was birthed in.

Reading Resident Evil: Umbrella Conspiracy and Zero Hour by S.D. Perry

Drinking from the Resident Evil fire hose for the last couple months has been fun. This is a franchise that's a roller-coaster of quality, focus and interest across the board, from movies that appear to be whacked-out psychedelic trips through Alice in Zombie Land on down to the original adventure games full of weird puzzles and the current crop which is high-octane cinematic adventure that, like the films, sometimes requires leaps of logic too vast to span. And then there are the books...

The Resident Evil novel series started many years ago and I recall trying to read them and being unimpressed. I have also learned that almost any opinion of literature (fun or serious) that I had during my nebulous "Seattle years" spanning 1996-2005 is suspect, because during much of that time I was running on empty, literally; I worked a night-shift type job for most of those ten years and rarely got more than 3-4 hours of sleep every night, sometimes for months on end without reprise. I was in a strange relationship with my ex-wife and I often was too fatigued, worried and generally stressed to focus properly on anything. It's a miracle I was able to get anything done during this era.

As a result of this, I've often found that books I tried reading and discarded as too derivative, banal, uninteresting or annoying for whatever reason end up being much better now, in my "nicer years," where I get like...6 whole hours of sleep each night, I have a comfortable 7:30-4:30 PM type job, weekends always free, a wife with whom I have excellent synchronization and a son who is a total joy to raise. So yeah, I sometimes find books that I once dismissed to be actually rather fun.

The Resident Evil novels (not to be confused with the movie novelizations) were written by S.D. Perry and focus on actual adaptations of the original games up through Code: Veronica. There are seven books in the series. S.D. Perry is/was a master at the licensed adaptation, and did a very good job of writing engaging, suspenseful but otherwise lite-reading tales of the Resident Evil universe. I've gotten through two of them so far, will review more as we go along.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy

Umbrella Conspiracy starts with a direct adaptation of the events in the original game. it's a bit rocky, as you might imagine a tale of mercenary cops wandering in a haunted mansion full of zombies solving obscure adventure-style puzzles relying on adventure-game logic might be. We are treated to a bit of "pre-game" lead-in, explaining a bit about who the Special Tactics and Recon Squads (STARS) are, a sort of international mercenary outfit (think Blackwater, I guess) that is employed by Raccoon City to supplement and assist the local police department and is ostensibly also there at the request of Umbrella Corp, the pharmaceutical company that pretty much made Raccoon City what it is. We meet Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Rebecca Chambers and Barry Burton, as well as the ever-evil Albert Wesker in the few moments we get to know him before he flips his evil switch on.

This was S.D. Perry's first attempt at a novel outside of her work on the Alien and Alien vs. Predator franchises. It's a bit rough, and she does an admirable job of trying to recast the events of the game in a way that works for fiction. When I originally tried reading this I remember being annoyed at specific details, or just how the story was framed relative to the game, which was much fresher in my mind at the time. Today it's been so long that I'm just impressed that the tale is detailed enough to invoke memories of specific events, locations and characters or creatures from the original! So in that sense it's quite a success. Indeed, if you ever wanted to know what the original was about, but didn't have the endurance, dexterity or temerity to find and plow through the game, this book is more than suited to the task of getting you up to speed.

The most amusing bits about this novelization are the pieces which don't quite "fit" with later canon. Wesker here does indeed go evil somewhere along the way, although his motives and complicity in the process aren't as exaggerated or obvious as they later become in retrospect. He also doesn't technically live to the end....but that's a suitable reveal for when he comes back in the future. Other moments, such as Rebecca Chambers and her experiences in Resident Evil Zero aren't entirely in sync with this novel. But as always one can imagine that a fiction like this is an amalgamation of bits and pieces inevitably corrupted by the unreliable narrator if you wish to reconcile the book with the setting canon.

Still, I enjoyed it. This is light reading, and you could easily give this to your younger reader to enjoy; there's little or nothing in the way of purely mature content that I noticed, while an adult looking for something fun to read over a series of lunch breaks (as I did) will be entertained, if not provoked.

Resident Evil: Zero Hour

Technically Zero Hour is the seventh book in the series, but chronologically it happens just before Umbrella Conspiracy, being an adaptation of Resident Evil Zero, which tells about the fate of Bravo Team, the STARS unit that went in to investigate the mysterious cannibal attacks around the Spencer Mansion just a few hours before Alpha team followed. This is one of the Resident Evil games I didn't play all the way through, for various reasons having to do with my horrendous work schedule, troubled marriage and lack of general time during my years in Seattle, so reading it was a chance to fill in some of the gaps in my RE lore.

Rebecca Chambers is a child genius, who graduated from college by age 17 and was hired on to the STARS as a chemical specialist due to her incredible credentials. Presumably she had interesting aspirations for a teenage girl, or maybe the STARS just pay really well...either way, she is the focus of the tale, along with the wanted criminal and accused murderer Billy Coen, recently escaped from a military police transfer thanks to the freakish luck of passing through the remote mountains right when some serious zombie smack-down starts off.

Zero Hour is focused on explaining a few lingering plot threads from the original tale, namely what happened in the first place to cause the outbreak of the T-Virus. If you thought this was fairly evident (if not exactly spelled out) from the first book/game, then you would be right: until Zero Hour the general assumption was somehow, perhaps due to industrial sabotage or sheer ineptitude the virus was released, causing a lock-down at the Spencer Estate and, as it turns out, a previously unseen Umbrella retreat and research compound.

After Bravo team crashes (no helicopter can survive a Resident Evil tale), they spread out to look for evidence as they wait for a rescue from Alpha team. While Rebecca finds evidence of a private transport train to the compound (coming from Raccoon City, presumably) that's been massacred by something spreading the T-Virus, Billy Coen runs into her and they settle into an uneasy truce to survive against the mysterious horrors that are crawling all over the place. As the two explore the train they find evidence of mutated leeches that seem to cooperate like a hive mind, connected somehow to a mysterious stranger. When the train starts up they find themselves deposited at the Umbrella Retreat and Compound, driven to escape the maddening complex by an unseen foe who is bent on helping and hindering them.

Zero Hour is the seventh book S.D. Perry wrote and it is actually very solid, a better read than Umbrella Conspiracy, despite being subject to the pacing and approach of the game's story line. The net result is a more coherent read, and a chance to see what Rebecca was up to prior to her arriving at the Spencer Mansion and running into Chris Redfield. It also helps to set her up for further adventures in the next novel, Caliban Cove (which I shall review next week). I definitely suggest reading it immediately after Umbrella Conspiracy, and not before, despite it being a prequel; it meshes better this way, as the inconsistencies in the timeline caused by Capcom's monkeying with jamming this story line in to the mix are more tolerable with a retrospective approach than trying to reconcile them after the fact. Put another way; Umbrella Conspiracy makes for better reading if you follow up with Zero Hour rather than the other way around. Zero Hour is definitely an improvement all across the board, and worth checking out.

Next up is Caliban Cove, the second novel in the series, and an original story which takes place between Umbrella Conspiracy and City of the Dead (the adaptation of Resident Evil 2). I'm halfway through it right now, but S.D. Perry's chance to shine with an original story is already my favorite. But I shall save details for another batch of reviews next week!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil: Afterlife

Day Five: Resident Evil: Afterlife

When we left off, Alice (Milla Jovovich) was our resident supernatural horror hero with psychic powers and wire-fu along with the resources of a vast Umbrella research lab filled with a seemingly endless army of Alice clones at her disposal. It was the sort of plot corner you write yourself into for one of four reasons I can think of:

You are trying to kill the series

You are not the writer on the next movie and want to screw over the next guy in charge of the script

You are writing some sort of freaky Resident Evil fanfic that requires dozens of Alices running around

No one else vetted the script for coherence or feasibility

Now it’s possible that Paul W.S. Anderson, being Milla’s husband and all, just can’t imagine having only one of her for his wife (I wouldn’t fault him for such an exotic fantasy). But really….where was he going with this? It’s easily one of the goofiest plot hangers I’ve ever seen.

Topped by one of the goofiest ten minute intros I've ever seen to a movie.

If you thought James Bond films could get weird, Resident Evil: Afterlife takes the cake. In the first ten or so minutes of this film we get to see exactly how the plot is written out of its corner, including the ever-expanding Mary Sueism of Alice, in one fell swoop. Want me to spoil it for you? Read on.

Basically Alice and her army of clones travel somehow to Japan and attack Umbrella HQ in a giant battle worthy of the sort you normally see at the end of a classic Moore-era James Bond film, complete with awkwardly CGI’d multiple Alices running around slashing and shooting everything they see. It concludes with Wesker, now suddenly looking and acting more bad-ass (somebody must have been treated to the cut scenes in Resident Evil 5) escaping and using some sort of singularity-generating explosion/implosion bomb to suck all of the Umbrella HQ in Tokyo down the time-space toilet along with all the Alice clones. I guess somebody in R&D at Umbrella paused long enough to notice they had unlocked the secret of gravity and matter manipulation, good for them.

Then “Real Alice” turns out to be hiding on Wesker’s getaway craft, and he injects her with a magic neutralizing serum that destroys the body-enhancing T-Virus thingies that make her special. Then they crash into a mountain but she walks away okay.

This entire sequence felt like some sort of bizarre dream or vision I might have had as a teenager.

After all that is out of the way, the real movie starts, and it turns out someone wanted to make Alice more normal (i.e. vulnerable) as well as creatively dispense with the plot baggage up to now. Except for one lingering bit: in the last movie, a bunch of survivors go north to Alaska to a promised escape at a place called “Arcadia.” So Alice, having found a small two-seater jumps across the Pacific to Alaska to follow them. What she finds is a mystery that leads her to Hollywood (no irony intended so far as I can tell) and a setup that feels like a classic pull from your typical zombie survival flick, except with more visual moments and creatures pulled randomly from the video games.

If anyone playing Resident Evil 4 or 5 felt a gut-churning moment when you realized that they were going to introduce the Ganados/Majini as just another type of zombie that for no particular reason (not that they need one in the RE universe) likes to sprout four tentacles with teeth from their mouths….raise your hand. If you were equally impressed at their ability to introduce a big due with a huge friggin’ axe into the events without even so much as an explanation (or at least one of the characters present saying something like, “Hey, that’s kinda new, wonder where he came from…”) then raise your other hand.

At least when Wesker returns he is granted all the superhuman traits we see him with in RE 5. However I can safely say his portrayal in RE 5 was more action-packed and cinematically interesting than what we got here.

Despite all this, the core of the movie is pretty decent, if you ignore the parts that jump out and beg to be groaned at. A gang of random misfit survivors in a lockdown prison surviving against the zombies seek a way to a ship that turns out to be the promised Arcadia…and Alice and Claire are here to help. Chris Redfield’s movie clone appears as well, complete with a perfectly senseless sibling relationship with Claire, punctuated by the irony that she suffers from amnesia and doesn’t remember him. Aggghhh rrurughhghdlllll.

Despite the fact that the movie struggles against its own painful plot contrivances and complete lack of direction….despite the fact that I am still trying to figure out how Umbrella still had enough infrastructure left to field dozens of loaded VTOL craft at the end of the movie (guess the new film will reveal all once more), and despite the fact that entire swathes of better and more meaningful lore and characters are lifted in the most haphazard fashion from recent RE games that have long since veered off into more elaborate and interesting territory (leaving zombies entirely behind)….and that the cinematics in the games are of better quality than their “clones” in the movie….it was still an okay film, I guess. Either a B- or C+ depending on whether you pretend the movie starts after the opening act plane crash or not, and whether or not you are still pretending this has anything to do with the Resident Evil franchise outside of the name.

Evil Wesker is Evil

Next Up: review of Resident Evil: Retribution (if I can bring myself to pay money to see it. This may not happen)

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil - Extinction

Day Four: Resident Evil: Extinction

2007 demonstrated that you could take an established franchise and carry it in a direction that the IP holders probably never imagined. The third movie in the Resident Evil franchise starts by dispensing with more or less the entire body of canon which the two previous films had paid some measure of lip service to. It’s four years later and the world is a bloody shambles, as the T-Virus has decimated plant and animal life across the globe, stolen our water and apparently turned everyone except for Umbrella execs, faceless goons and a handful of survivors into endless hordes of zombies. Umbrella has some operation in the undefined Midwest out of which their resident mad scientist is trying to replicate the creation of a new Alice, whom he can use to synthesize some sort of serum from her blood, but for some reason he’s obsessed with running her through a gauntlet of traps inspired by specific memories of her experiences from the first movie. Meanwhile Alice is on the run, and her destiny as usual is about to converge with some hapless survivors, some of whom made it to the end of the second movie.

Here’s the weird thing about RE: Extinction: as a “movie based on the game” goes, it’s terrible, unless you said that game was Fallout 3, in which case I’d say, “yeah, I can see it.” But as apocalyptic zombie horror flicks go, this one’s not half bad. If they could just jettison the Resident Evil universe baggage, this movie could almost stand on its own as a fun post-apocalyptic romp with zombies.

There are problems, of course. Alice is a super-heroic horror hero with supernatural abilities ranging from amazing wire-fu prowess to randomly functioning psionics that do whatever looks cool on screen or the plot calls for. She’s almost completely gone Mary Sue by now, though the formal transition doesn’t fully happen until the end of the movie.

The movie continues with the pretense of being somehow related to its source IP by naming one character Claire Redfield (played by Jodie Foster kinda-lookalike Ali Larter) even as Umbrella Corp. remains the Big Bad. Wesker appears for the first time in a notable way, as the behind-the-scenes exec who is pulling the strings. The fact that they even bother to puppeteer these characters on stage as if they bear any relationship to their in-game counterparts is amazing. This movie only makes canonical sense if you try to imagine it as a super divergent extreme in GURPS Infinite Worlds, behind multiple other divergent realities from “RE baseline.” If you look at it like that, this reality is Alice 6+n or something.

Okay, so if you take this film for what it is: a post-apocalyptic zombie flick that pretends it has ties to another IP entirely, does it work? Short answer yes, but with caveats. Long answer: yes, and then you get to the end.

The movie holds its own well, and the special effects are really decent this time around (zombies are starting to look good here). The plot is basic survival but done reasonably well. The underlying premise (of a promised land) has been done better in other movies (notably in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) but that aside it holds fairly well here. Someone should explain to Anderson and co. that helicopters aren’t usually known for flying vast distances (i.e. across half the country…or to Alaska), though. Well, it’s the future. Maybe they’re running on unobtanium or something. Umbrella seems to have a lot of it lying around (more in a minute on that).

So the movie holds well until Alice gets to the end of the road and seeks to shut down the Umbrella operation that’s been cloning her for experiments. A few weird things happen that just totally derails this film at the end, although not in a “what the hell I can’t enjoy this” sort of way, but more like a “Gee I guess they didn’t really want to do a sequel, eh?” kind of way. Also, a “what the hell is that and why isn’t it more important than all this T-Virus crap?!?!?” sort of way. Specifically:

Clones Clones Clones: at the end of the movie we know Alice is being cloned so they can develop a serum that makes zombies more obedient, although the mad scientist figures out it makes them more aggressive and cunning instead. Then a new AI pops in and informs Alice that her blood holds the cure, possibly, to the whole mess. Okay….typical Hollywood “blood is a serum” approach to Science. I can deal with it.

Then, toward the end, Alice discovers that they aren’t just cloning her a bit, they’ve got a veritable warehouse full of her clones. We’re at the end of the line, and the entire world is starting to look like its going to be populated by only three types of creature now: Alice clones, black-suited Umbrella goons, and zombies. Ay yi yi brain hurts!!!!!

Then a bit of “fridge logic” hits as well, albeit for me it hit while watching: each Alice clone is nurtured in a circular orb of water held together by some sort of projecting force field. Cool, sure. Typical throw-away special effect, I imagine.

Now just consider for a moment what we’re looking at here: not only have Umbrella perfected human cloning, the T-Virus, holographic technology and artificial intelligence, they have also invented some sort of gravity/force controlling projector. Holy crap. They’re so busy unleashing a zombie apocalypse nobody bothered to notice Dept. 13D down the hall had just discovered how to manipulate time, space and gravity....and Dr. Bozo co-opts it for his little sick clone-torturing experiments.

So Umbrella is basically a giant slush organization for mad scientists, and it just so happens that they got a bit carried away with the ones who made a mutagenic zombie-generating, monster-making virus before the guy with the power to control gravity and matter could show them what he had going along with its many world-destroying applications. Gotcha.

The only thing more bizarre than how this film ends is how the sequel starts…hint: it does not start with an army of force-field wielding Alice clones spreading the blood-cure across America. 

Anyway, I give this movie a A- right up until the end, when it goes so far off the rails I can’t even see what letter it earned. Maybe a “W” for “WTF?!?!?”

Next Up: Resident Evil - Retribution Review

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Day Three: Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Something I forgot to mention about the first Resident Evil film becomes increasingly relevant as the franchise plows along. Specifically: Milla Jovovich.* In many ways these films are like “action porn” for Milla fans. Indeed, by the time you get to the latest the films have to offer, it’s pretty obvious that the Resident Evil trappings are just there to frame the tale around the adventures of Alice, who of course is played by the best female action star to appear this century. The fact that her character takes center stage from the get-go, and all other characters, including the ones named after characters from the games, are there to serve as a frame and foil to her exploits becomes strongly evident with the second film and onward. She’s not quite a Mary Sue…yet….but she’s destined to be, if only for a short time.

Released in 2004, Resident Evil: Apocalypse starts the day after the last film ended, keeping pace (so far) with the chronology of the games (barring the 1998 date of the games vs. the “not too distant future” implied date of the films). A bit of back story reveals that not all is well in Raccoon City, and introduces us to Jill Valentine, or a version of such modeled after the actual Jill from the game universe. This Jill dresses similarly and is quick to shoot zombies as they pop up in the police precinct where she has just been drummed out of service with the STARS (Special tactics and Recon Squad) on trumped up charges. STARS are a sort of SWAT group for the Raccoon City set, and it’s never clear in the movie universe if they are some local independent group or some sort of special deal set up with Umbrella’s approval. In the game universe it’s sort of unclear, too. Almost as if the game were written by Japanese authors with only a loose notion of how US law enforcement worked, or a concern with how to justify why half a dozen heavily armed special ops agents are investigating what seems to be a private mansion conducting modest bioresearch in the middle of nowhere.

The movie then proceeds to break down rapidly in terms of pacing, over-the-top action and an utterly implacable plot with herky-jerky pacing that feels like someone writing the script was trying to squeeze as many elements of the game in as had been explained to them by a third party who had talked to someone who had a son who had played it and explained the plot. Sort of.

All of the story credits on the Resident Evil movies go to Paul W.S. Anderson, who has a list of credits that include a variety of films I’ve never seen, with the noted exception of these movies plus the Death Race film (which was fun but also nonsensical).  He also wrote Pandorum, which means much to me as I plan on watching and reviewing it soon, too. In any case, if I had to guess, I would say that Paul probably didn’t play the RE games before working on his scripts. And if he did, he was probably hampered by two factors: the first being how to translate the game plot to screen, the second by the fact that I’m pretty sure someone behind this movie had the hots for Milla Jovovich. I wonder who. Hmmm. The fact that Paul happens to be her husband makes me a tad suspicious. Also, a tad jealous. (To my lovely wife if you are reading this I mean that in the least offensive way possible!)

Yeah so anyway, keeping in mind that this entire franchise has been co-opted for films to serve as a churning engine of Milla Jovovich action flicks helps to frame what happens from here on out to the series. This is very important, because this is the film that jumps the shark, and it does so by making Milla’s character Alice a super hero. A horror super hero, yeah, but dress it up however you want: she can do super kung-fu, wire-fu, and before the end of the movie she’s even pulling a note from Akira and F.E.A.R. by giving people psionic nose bleeds and “hearing” thoughts occasionally. Oh, and she has this all thanks to being genetically ideal for bonding with the t-virus, making her a compatriot to the Nemesis himself. Yeahhhh…

Still, this movie has moments that work when its characters aren’t being too ridiculously clichéd or one-note for their own good. The best part of the movie was when they were looking for the little girl in the school. The second best part….hmm. Well, okay then. So that was the part that felt most like Resident Evil.

The end sequence was fun, too, if head-scratching. It was also a continuance of the tradition started at the end of the first movie, where the story runs past “stop” and carries on with the frame for the next movie installment.

In the end, this movie is about an event which begins with the tale presented in a game and then rapidly spirals into utter oblivion, ending as a completely new franchise about a psychic super warrior named Alice who just so happens to have some coincidental relations with another universe that it left almost completely behind.

If I had to rank it, I’d give it a D+. The D is for managing to take what could have been a much, much better “zombies invade rural America” film that has been done so much better so many other times, and instead making it kind of a crazy, outlandish wire-fu action hero flick with barely a nod to its source material. That’s okay, though. Later films will make this one look downright canonical and respectful of the IP.

Oh, and the Mary Sue? She's not quite there....yet. But she will be. Oh yes, she will be...

Next up: Resident Evil – Extinction Review

*You can see Milla go from "healthy" to "emaciated" between the first and second movie, too. Kinda scary. Her semi-naked shower scene in the first movie has her looking somewhat healthy and normal, but by the end of Apocalypse she looks like she's on a starvation diet. The ease with which Milla does nude and semi-nude scenes means its possible to notice stuff like this. Purely from a clinical perspective, of course. The clinical perspective being, "you need to eat a bit more before you disappear."

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil - The Movie

Day Two: Resident Evil (the movie)

The first Resident Evil movie arrived in 2002, featuring Milla Jovovich as the lead character. As movies based on game franchises go it was pretty well done, but as anyone who’s sat through more than a few such adaptations can assert, being “better than normal” in this department is sort of like saying, “I’ve eaten plenty of bugs in my time, and as bugs go, this one’s pretty tasty.”

In the film’s defense it actually is pretty good, and unlike later sequels you can easily follow each component back to the source without too much effort. The movie focuses on a squad of Umbrella mercenaries who are sent in to investigate their immense subterranean lab beneath Raccoon City, where they’ve been experimenting with all sorts of unpleasant bio weapon research. Unlike the game, the movie focuses primarily on a cast of characters here to deal with what at first appears to be a rogue AI computer, and set pieces from the game like the mansion and underground subway are given a slight nod but aren’t even remotely as relevant in the movie. Even the zombies from Resident Evil are just one part of the movie’s focus, and not even the main one at that; the numerous high-tech traps of the “Red Queen” AI as well as the licker creature (a late-appearing foe in the first game) are given a great deal of focus.

In many ways this movie complements that game because it could, in theory, be depicting previously unseen elements of the massive and complex mess of plots that comprise the events of the game. Later entries into the game franchise (like RE: Operation Racoon City) even seem to take direct inspiration from the film while trying to meld its many elements together with the game’s. This in some ways makes this first film more significant. It’s possible, after all, that Milla Jovovich’s character Alice is actually a resident of the mansion (or another mansion….Umbrella has a lot of places like this, it seems), and the film follows the games in spirit by demonstrating a large underground Umbrella operation being present, although the demonstrated scope of this facility in the film seems to be far greater than anything the games imply or demonstrate.

If one ignores the fact that Hollywood has never, ever made a video game tie-in that was an accurate depiction of the source game, can it be possible for them to intentionally or accidentally get the thematic elements right? So going by my core criteria for Resident Evil as a game series from last time, how does the film stack up? Let’s See:

(Un)controlled Pacing

You can’t really have a “player” in a movie so this is an unfair comparison. However, you can have plenty of unpredictable or frightening moments in film, and you can punctuate these by building up a slow and methodical pace, then surprising the audience in ways they didn’t expect.

The movie does a fairly good job of attempting this, but fails in the sense that it doesn’t really capture the slow but suspenseful build-up that the original does. The movie tries to frame much of the experience through the eyes of Alice and her erstwhile ally who are both suffering memory loss, allowing them (in theory) to be as surprised as us when they discover things even though they worked for Umbrella. Likewise, the mercenaries seem to understand the sort of employer they work for yet are woefully unprepared for just what it is they might encounter. I give it a C.

Scenery Porn – Horror Style

There are some great moments in this film, with weird sets, moody and disturbing scenes of carnage, industrial equipment and machinery, weird labs and a wide range of such to boot. If you graded the movie a success on this element alone it does a pretty decent job. Unfortunately except for the mansion scenes and the underground railroad very little is directly inspired by the games. B+.

Sense of Isolation

Actually I thought the movie did a pretty decent job here despite its large cast of cannon fodder. You start with a large number of characters, who quickly get whittled away. There are moments where the film engenders a decent sense of claustrophobia (you definitely feel like they’re deep underground) and I never saw anything that felt specifically like a set to me. On the other hand these are a gang of tough mercenaries and special agents; only the poor reporter guy stands out as someone who should be losing their cool in the midst of all this. With so many cast members running around, it’s hard to feel the isolation. I give it a C+.

Resource Management

So how would you go about expressing this theme in a film? Running out of bullets, taking a moment to demonstrate that people are running out of resources, or emphasizing when they do find them. It’s not really a “thing” in the movie, which frames events in a very short time span (I’d have to say that the length of time that passes in the film isn’t much more than a few hours). Hard to grade this, since it’s so specific to the game experience, but the movie could have made it stand out. There is one point where Michelle Rodriguez’s character mentions that they’re running out of bullets, I think. People often seem to run out of ammo in these movies, and usually respond by tossing their guns to the ground. Yeah….give it a C, I guess.

Mystery Unexplained

Well in one sense there’s plenty that remains unexplained in this movie. Enough to do four sequels, it would seem! But not all is obvious…as subsequent reviews shall demonstrate. Needless to say, the movies do attempt to keep plenty open, but mostly for purposes of framing the end of each film to open up for a sequel. In 2002 when this first came out it was a great cliffhanger, which felt like a decent conclusion to the movie and at the same time implying a future sequel.

In the context I intended, which is to say the idea within the games that there remained many unexplained puzzles and implied mysteries or tales yet to be told, the movies do a less than adequate job. The problem here is not even a matter of simply dropping hints or suggestions of things to come or events unseen; it’s a problem with film script writing in general, especially in the genre of action films where plot and exposition will always fall by the wayside. A side effect of this sort of film is the so called “fridge logic” moments, which if the film makers are very lucky transform into “fridge brilliance” moments instead. (I dare you to lose hours of your life looking these terms up on TVtropes).

A fridge logic moment happens when you think about a movie later on and realize some glaring plot holes. Fridge brilliance is when something less obvious suddenly stands out as especially impressive later on. Unfortunately Resident Evil’s first movie has a lot of the former and less of the later. It only gets worse….much, much worse…with later films. The saving grace will boil down to: how much can one overlook the problems inherent in these fridge logic moments, and assume that…at least in the implied universe of the RE movies….such deviations from logic are the norm?

Luckily for the first film there aren’t many…but what it does is set up the stage for the later films to violate logic…and canon…all over the place; but more about those later on. For now, I’ll just ask the following questions and rank this film with a B+ for effort:

That Crazy Laser Trap

How did that laser chamber trap work? Assuming it worked in any way like a conventional laser, what is that material the walls are made of, because if it’s glass then the laser ought to be slicing right through it and the metal framework everything is held up by. The only other explanation is that the laser source is being generated on the surface of the glass and metal frame….but that way lies madness. We’ll ignore the “gridded” trap for the moment, too.

The Licker Crate Conundrum

The lickers were kept in crates in a large containment area. Okay, I can accept this. But if all these creatures are so virulent in their ability to transmit the virus, and there are crates full of them down there, why wouldn’t Umbrella have at least considered the risk, or briefed their team going in? By the second movie the only implication is the entire corporation is managed by psychotics who like to experiment with stuff for fun, but more on that later.

Also, why do we only see one licker escaping? The answer, of course, is “because we could only budget for one and a gaggle of them wouldn’t work in the framework of this movie,” and more do appear in the second film.

Umbrella’s Lack of Faith in the Red Queen

How come no one at Umbrella could speak with the Red Queen to ascertain what had happened? It was never adequately explained, as best I could tell, just why it was assumed that the Red Queen had gone psycho despite the fact that she seemed to be engaging in Umbrella-approved methods of containment (which included gassing the work staff and arming lethal traps). I mean…the Red Queen didn’t build these, right? She’s just in charge of making things happen as it should, a neutral and unbiased personality who’s willing to push the button when the tough decisions need to be made. So why didn’t Umbrella recognize this? My rationalization is that Umbrella is, for such a ridiculously evil, secret corporation with clear government backing, heavily compartmentalized to the point where whomever sent in the initial response team in this movie probably didn’t have a need-to-know, and by the time somebody with familiarity of the situation arrives (at the tail end of the movie) its mostly just to salvage what they can.

Final Verdict

It’s a half-decent attempt at a video game film which manages to tell a story that, while highly deviant from the source, still feels like it “fits,” telling a side-tale that doesn’t entirely contradict the original game story, even if it also doesn’t precisely fit in a round hole/square peg sort of way. Worth seeing though, and taken on its own merits it’s a fun movie to watch even if you know nothing of the games. B+

Next: Resident Evil: Apocalypse in Review