Resident Evil: Extinction is the best of the trilogy
Written: Sep 23 '07
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Lots of action, some big story twists
Cons: Not too much dialogue
The Bottom Line: It's the best Resident Evil movie so far, and I hope the series continues.
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| phungus's Full Review: Resident Evil: Extinction |
When it comes to movie trilogies, they tend to get progressively worse. With the Resident Evil series, the first movie was kind of good, but the second movie was just plain bad. However, this third one called Extinction is actually the best one so far. I’m now hoping for a forth one.
The original Resident Evil movie was decent, but it relied too much on special effects and CGI monsters for what should have been the coolest parts. It did at least establish the storyline that would prevail throughout the series – A corporation with underground headquarters creates a virus that turns the infected into zombies. The heroine of this trilogy, Alice (Milla Jovovich), is a product of this corporation, and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding her character. This comes into play a lot in this newest movie. The second movie was about how the virus got out on the surface and essentially began to take over the planet. That movie was appropriately titled Apocalypse.
Extinction is set some time after the events in the last movie, and the Earth has now turned into a desolate planet nearly devoid of all life. After almost all the living population was turned into undead, the entire planet went to ruin with lakes drying up and cities abandoned. It’s definitely a post-Apocalyptic nightmare, and the only ones that seem to be still around are the researchers of the same corporation that unleashed the virus to begin with. At the heart of this underground laboratory is an evil scientist who tells his superiors that he’s working on a serum that will curb the undead’s flesh-devouring tendencies, but he’s got some motives of his own.
It takes some suspension of belief to think that a zombie apocalypse would turn the world into a big sandpit, especially in what amounts to just a couple of years. I know this movie was shot in the desert and a lot of the locations look like something out of the Fallout series of video games, but I thought the whole desert thing was a bit much. The justification behind it all is that with nearly every living creature no longer performing its intended function on the planet, the entire ecosystem collapsed.
Milla Jovovich starts out running solo through the desert on her BMW motorcycle, and in an early scene she responds to a distress call at a hotel, only to find that it is inhabited by a bunch of rednecks who’ve lost their minds, but not yet their lives. Later on, she teams up with a fairly well-equipped group of survivors who travel through the country looking for other survivors and basically just trying to stay alive. Among them are some characters who appeared in the last film, played by Oded Fehr (The Mummy) and Mike Epps (Next Friday). The leader of this group is played by Ali Larter (Heroes), who looks a lot like Milla in close-up.
Speaking of close-ups, I noticed a rather obvious inconsistency in this movie. During a lot of the close-up shots of Milla Jovovich’s face, her skins appears very silky and smooth like it had been digitally airbrushed. In other shots, you can see her natural skin with a few blemishes and the like. She’s still very pretty, but I thought the airbrushed parts were not really necessary because they were too distracting. She’s a natural beauty, and they should have just gone with that.
The action sequences are brutal and plentiful, especially toward the end. There’s one really violent part that sort of pays tribute to Hitchcock’s The Birds, and another huge fight sequence set in a sand-covered Las Vegas. Since zombies need to lose their brains to die, you might guess that lots of skulls get crushed, shot, and more. If there’s one thing about being a hero in a zombie apocalypse, it’s that you’ll never run out of zombies to kill.
One of the main reasons I liked this movie so much is that it didn’t rely too much on CGI. The main bad guy, or the boss if this was a video game, is actually a guy in a suit, rather than a big cartoon. What ruined the first movie for me was that after fighting all the cool zombies, Alice ends up squaring off with this cartoon dog thing, and it just wasn’t as effective. I hate it when movies use CGI when they could go with something more natural. Imagine if Chewbacca had been a cartoon instead of a tall guy in a fury suit – it would have sucked.
I was surprised to see that Russell Mulcahy directed this movie. He was pretty big back in the 80’s and early 90’s, but has mostly been doing TV movies for the last decade. Mulcahy directed the original Highlander, as well as the sequel that most people ignore. He also did the Alec Baldwin movie The Shadow. I’ve always thought Mulcahy was a great visual director, and he’s no stranger to sci-fi or horror movie action. Since he’s done a lot of B-grade work in the past, I was a little concerned over how this movie would turn out, but I ended up being pretty impressed.
Writing credits were given solely to Paul W.S. Anderson, who also wrote the first two Resident Evil movies as well as Alien vs. Predator. I have a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t the only writer on this movie, which is usually the case with most movies. I say that because the second movie was so bad, I find it hard to believe that the same guy wrote this one. I did notice about halfway through the movie that Milla Jovovich barely has any dialogue, but her character was never the talky type.
In the end, I really enjoyed seeing Resident Evil: Extinction. It is a great addition to the trilogy and I hope any further sequels continue in the same direction as this one. Since it was number one at the box office on its opening weekend, I’m pretty sure a sequel can be expected.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Action Movie
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