Resident Evil
I’ve only been reviewing movies less than a year, and I’m doing another video game movie. It has been almost twenty years since its release five sequels and new one on the way. Let dive back to Resident Evil.
Resident Evil (2001) 100 minutes (Spoilers)
Resident Evil follows Alice after having a recent bout of amnesia, and a bunch of commandos as they attempt to contain the outbreak of the T-virus at a secret umbrella underground facility. When they do get inside the faculty, and find a zombie outbreak, and load of biohazardous creatures.
I’ve previous mentioned how this was a video game movie that took ideas from the video game and turned it into its own thing. At the time I had really played any of the Resident Evil games. Now I have, and I can say they have made a mess of the lore for this film. Of course, I am here to review the movie as it is and not comparing it to the games.
I can remember liking the movie when it came amount, but with a re-watch it isn’t that great. There are a lot of things I found extremely annoying about it. One of the things that stand out to me is the constant unnecessary jump scares. They are just littered everywhere in first part of the movie. It just done to try and scare the viewer, but they aren’t the little bit scary. Once or twice, it is effective, but to keep doing it kills their impact.
Not that the movie doesn’t do horror good, it just like to pick and choose its moments when it does it well. Like the opening screen with the lift, has nice tension. As we don’t know if the lift is going to crash and kill everyone. Then it ramps up with the woman sticking out of the life, then we get a nice payoff. Which is good.
Another thing I found very annoying is the film’s sound design. For a movie that is meant to be horror or suspenseful the sound just never stops. There is always some kind of music going on in the background. You would think certain scenes would benefit from just silence and have something happen and build the music around the building tension. But no, it just constant rock music all the time.
When your young you don’t notice things. Like there are something that just don’t make sense and would be more interesting if they would have shown the action. The characters are stuck in a room filled with zombies, and yet two people manage to get away and go to another room without a problem. Or when they are stuck in tunnel with a bunch of zombies closing in, but the scene just ends and shows us they got above the zombies somehow. Would it have been nice to see it? yes, yes it would.
As much as I have been harping on about this movie, there something that I did enjoy. As everyone I enjoy the laser grid sense, it doesn’t make sense, but its still fun. I like that they mention Biohazard the original Japanese name. While the opening uses a similar door opening animation to original game, which is a nice touch. However, the CGI on the licker looks like shit.
All I can say is that this movie tired to keep it self-separate from the games, and it worked as it go five sequels. It’s just a shame the following movies use characters from the games that are either bad cosplay, or bad characterising.
