Resident Evil
C+
Carrying a big stick.
Movie Credits:
Written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Edited by Alexander Berner
Cinematography by David Johnson
Starring Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez
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USA, 2002
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Screened at Loews Palisades Center, West Nyack, NY
Zombies @Deep Focus:
A sinister conglomerate is secretly conducting experiments in a huge
laboratory called The Hive, located beneath Racoon City. An artificially
intelligent supercomputer may or may not have gone berzerk. An elite
task force investigating the scene is getting sliced and diced by laser
beams in an elaborate booby trap. And zombie dogs are on the loose.
This must be
Resident Evil
.
If you wouldn’t come to that conclusion your own, then you’re
not much of a videogamer. You’re also, therefore, way outside
the target market for
Resident Evil
,
un film de
Paul
W. S. Anderson that tries to build on the dubious success he enjoyed
with his fighting-game-based
Mortal Kombat
.
On the evidence, Anderson seems better at attaching himself to nifty
concepts than he is at actually directing movies.
Mortal Kombat
,
for instance, was an early harbinger of the enduring renaissance in
martial-arts pictures, and his
Event Horizon
came up with the
idea of remaking
Solaris
years before
Steven Soderbergh got around to it. Even the expensive, ill-fated
Soldier
benefited from an interesting screenplay by
Blade Runner
scribe
David Webb Peoples.
This time around, Anderson himself wrote the screenplay, his first
since his 1994 debut,
Shopping
. Somebody should have told him
to pick up a collaborator. Though the bulk of the film consists ideas
stolen from
Alien
used as a framework
for propping up ideas stolen from
Dawn of the Dead
, Anderson
has a strong enough visual style that
Resident Evil
is more
watchable than it should be. (Cinematographer David Johnson gets some
of the same richness of color that he displayed in the exceptionally
good-looking
An Ideal Husband
.)
What it’s missing is character — a sense that any of the
people trapped in The Hive deserve to get out alive.
The storyline, oh yeah, is your typical hoo-hah about a shadowy multinational
corporation’s germ research gone bad, resulting in a deadly-virus-on-the-loose
setting with lots of biohazard signs littering the walls. The implicit
criticism of the military-industrial complex is muted not only by the
fact that
Alien
did it first and did it better but also because
Anderson chooses to make the ultimate villain of the piece not the aptly
named Umbrella Corp., but an overzealous anti-corporate terrorist. The
subtext doesn’t matter so much; longtime readers of this site
probably suspect that I will sit through just about anything involving
zombies and/or Milla Jovovich, but
Resident Evil
proves that
it’s awfully hard to make a decent zombie movie and still score
an R rating. The zombies in
Dawn of the Dead
felt menacing
because when they got close enough to you, boy howdy, they would disembowel
you and feast on your guts. The zombies in
Resident Evil
get
close to you and then just kind of gnaw feebly at you as though they’re
trying to gum you to death. One thing’s for sure: If George Romero
had directed this movie, it wouldn’t have taken the protagonists
a full hour to determine that in order to kill a zombie you must
shoot
it in the head
.
But Anderson is clearly not a moron.
Resident Evil
may be
the first videogame-based film to give much thought to the nature of
videogames themselves. Protagonist Alice (Jovovich) wakes up naked,
collapsed in a bathtub, with no memory of who she is or why she find
herself in a capacious old house. (Given our expectations for this film,
we’re not sure why she’s there, either.) As Alice investigates
her surroundings, she gets hints about the nature of her life —
we see the glint of fear and maybe excitement in her eyes as she discovers
a weapon, for instance, and we’re encouraged to discover her backstory
along with her, as quick flashbacks roar across the screen when she’s
introduced to people that stir memories within her. She is the player
character, and such piecemeal discoveries about an environment are hallmarks
of a videogame narrative.
So your ability to enjoy
Resident Evil
will be determined
to some degree by your satisfaction with Alice herself. Michelle Rodriguez
is a striking presence but a mumbler, and the two men whose loyalties
Alice is trying to sort out are so bland that I had a hard time remembering
which was which. Jovovich is clearly the star attraction. Here, as in
The Fifth Element
, she is a woman
of few words. She barely speaks, instead spending most of the film with
her eyes wide open, trying to figure out what the hell is happening.
She wears a tiny red dress that shows her off to good advantage throughout,
and when she cuts loose, her foot connecting with the chin of a zombie
doberman, for example, the lithe acrobatics are breathtaking. Plus,
I’m a sucker for the whole beautiful-woman-surrounded-by-death
schtick that Anderson indulges in here.
What’s most interesting about Anderson’s movies is that
they are at least partly successful on a level that has nothing to do
with their pedestrian stories. The first couple of reels of
Resident
Evil
, beginning with the sequence in which somebody unleashes a
lethal virus into the circulation system of The Hive and then continuing
through the weird segue to Alice’s insomniac awakening, is dark
and compelling. The movie doesn’t become so effective again until
the very ending, an apocalyptic coda that’s more upsetting than
any of the film’s more conventionally plotted zombie shenanigans.
Resident Evil
is not a very good film, but it shares with other
Anderson pictures a sensibility that can veer sharply in unexpected
directions. When this guy leaves narrative behind and works on instinct,
he can really leave an impression.