Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy, Martin Crewes, Colin Salmon
Runtime: 100 mins.
2002
In the 21st century, large metallic objects make crashing noises just by being looked at.
-Roger Ebert, Resident Evil review
Fifteen years and millions of dollars later, the Resident Evil franchise is still pumping out installments. That makes it all the more difficult to imagine what a George A. Romero-directed Resident Evil would have looked like. He was the first choice, and he even wrote his own treatment for the film that Sony and Capcom passed on because, as far as I've read, it kept so close to the story of the games that fans would pass judgment on its accuracy. More likely the script was bad. Though that sure didn't stop Sony from slamming Anderson's script into production.
Although I don't have illusions that Romero would have made a good film, I'm sure it would have been far more interesting than the Resident Evil that we ended up with. Not being a gamer himself, he apparently had an assistant play through the game and record the footage so that he knew enough to write the adaptation. His approach was, according to him, a more cinematic departure from the source material--exactly the thing video game adaptations need to do if we ever want one that is serviceable.
No surprise that Anderson's adaptation is the gamiest of game movies. Among other traits it shares with 2000-era video games are its amnesia-ridden protagonist, endless identical nondescript hallways, mindless shoot-em-up style combat, frequent plot stoppage for the sake of exposition dumps, adherence to Boss Fight structure, complete lack of characterization across the board, and a nonsense story meant to pad out the runtime.
In video games the "protagonist with amnesia" business is still a cliche, but it actually has a purpose. Amnesia creates a blank slate character that gamers can more easily pour their own psychology into. That way, as you are choosing which actions to perform, you also get to feel like the story is unfolding around you specifically. Oftentimes genre film directors will try to manufacture blank slate protagonists so that the audience may identify with them, but it doesn't work in film. Since we are not ourselves driving the actions of the protagonist, we need them to be a clear character so that we may empathize with them and understand why they do what they do. Unless one is making a film structured around memory loss, like The Bourne Identity or Memento, it tends to be a lazy way to withhold information from an audience, probably because the writers have barely thought that information through themselves.
Despite routinely stopping the movie cold for someone to monologize about what's going on, Resident Evil still manages to be stingy with its story elements. Let me try to reconstruct a synopsis. Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up in a mansion alone, naked, and without memory. She wanders around aimlessly. Then a SWAT team busts through the windows and takes her and a policeman named Matt (Eric Malbius), who also showed up, deep underground into a secret Umbrella Corporation base called The Hive. You see, the SWAT team works for the Umbrella Corporation, although just like the now dead Umbrella Corp. workers in The Hive, they don't know about the genetic experiments that have been happening down there. But Alice, who also also works for the Umbrella Corporation, did know about the experiments, although not anymore because she has amnesia. Anyway, the SWAT team is supposed to see what happened in The Hive, but they have to be out before Umbrella seals it off, although Umbrella is just going to open it back up again. Also Alice has a husband who also works for Umbrella but isn't actually her husband, but is on her side because he stole the T-virus for her, but isn't on her side because he did it for the wrong reasons.
It's a mess. Resident Evil withholds necessary information in order to create an air of mystery, but it doesn't work because we have no reason to be invested in the story. The stakes are unclear. The character motivations are unclear. The plot mechanisms are unclear. It feels like dispassionately watching a bunch of video game characters march to their inevitable deaths. How much better could this movie have been if they had established clear characters with clear conflicts of interest and clear goals that propel them deeper into The Hive? From there, each new external threat could challenge and transform those relationships. That's basic narrative storytelling, which this film lacks.
The pacing is all wrong too. Putting aside the cheesy opening voiceover, we don't get any information until the first exposition dump 21 minutes in. We don't get to see our first zombie until the 39 minute mark. Our hero, Alice, doesn't even take a single action until 49 minutes into the film, and even then it is totally reactionary. How are we supposed to care about any of this?
The answer is that we are supposed to care because Milla Jovovich looks badass in her smokin' hot red dress and leather jacket combo. Resident Evil made a good chunk of change for an R-rated horror movie, and I can only assume it's because the surface elements are so appealing. Jovovich is fun to watch, despite seeming heavily sedated for most of the runtime. Michelle Rodriguez is hamming it up, with such classic Michelle Rodriguez lines as "Blow me," and "When I get outta here, I think I'm gonna get laid." There's zombies and goony CGI monsters and an evil AI. The dystopian corporate elements are extremely on the nose, but effective enough. And the claustrophobia of being trapped in an underground bunker adds some nice flavor. If only every filmmaking decision didn't occlude the fun of these elements.
There's no flow to the editing, the cinematography ranges from drab to obstructive, and the action is incoherent. If it could be said that Anderson has one talent as a filmmaker it would have to be his bonkers ideas, because his execution is excremental. There are a handful of iconic action moments that probably save the film in people's collective memory, but they are surrounded by ineffective lighting, slapdash cutting, and terrible geographical awareness. It's hard to follow what's going on. To make it all worse, the poorly-aging X-TREME score is terribly mixed, and blasts over action scenes with little regard to rhythm or framing. As to who is responsible for the earsore, IMDB credits Marco Beltrami and Marilyn Manson. The Wikipedia article also lists Clint Mansell among the composers, but I can find no corroboration for this, and I choose not to believe it as Mansell is a favorite of mine.
I could go on listing the bizarre elements: an edit that seems to imply a chase scene that we get to see none of, an insulting 59-minute-mark infodump about what zombies are and how to kill them, the endless litany of fake-out jump scares, the apparently omnipotent but petty enemy AI, the various ways that Michelle Rodriguez can hold a flashlight in her mouth. There are certainly highlights to be dredged up as well: I enjoyed the opening shot after the dumb voiceover, and the laser defense scene is admittedly entertaining.
It's just... Resident Evil is terrible at being a zombie movie. If the nuts and bolts were tighter, a solid movie could be hewn from the raw materials here. Anderson does not hew it.
0.5 / 5 BLOBS
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