Review of Resident Evil (2002) by Alec D — 23 Sep 2012

Well with Resident Evil: Afterlife coming out I decided to take a look at a few of the past entries in the movie series. Obviously starting with Resident Evil. There will be spoilers in this review so beware.

First is the plot which is a failed conspiracy plot, kind of. Umbrella a pharmaceutical company makes a t-virus in a facility called The Hive which is hidden under a mansion that two Umbrella agents live in. The Hive is locked down, without Umbrella knowing and the T-virus is released in the ventilation system making the staff into zombies. The two agents forget everything because of some knock out gas, so umbrella sends a special team to break into the Hive and find out what happened. It's a pretty good plot and it plays out on screen decently.

Next up is the action which is the best part about this movie. Not much happens for like the first 30 minutes, but after that there is a ton of cool action scenes where Alice, the main character, kicks the shit outta zombies and zombie dogs. The agents sent in to find out what's going on get schooled by this hella boss laser grid defense system, which is the coolest scene in the movie.

Time for characters and acting. This is by far the worst part of the movie. The characters are really stupid none of them are interesting and you find yourself wanting them to be killed by the zombies. This is probably why the scene where most of them get killed by lasers is so cool. The acting is terrible, other then Milla Jovovich, who plays Alice. Milla is always good, but everyone else is just so bad. They just seem like they are reading lines from their script there is a general lack of emotion from the agents and from the two other guys they just act stupidly. The characters aren't explained very well either there is a guy who goes with them because he is trying to infiltrate Umbrella, but he never really says why. I think he explains that he is a government agent of some sort, but he doesn't seem like someone who has been trained or anything he just seems like a regular guy.

Lastly I want to talk about the correlation between the movie and the first Resident Evil. I'll try not to spoil the games too much, because they are much better and more important than this movie. There is very few similarities, the largest being the fact that there are zombies and there is a T-virus. The plot in the first video game is completely different from the movie. In the game it's a squad investigating murders outside of a small town in the mountains, and they happen to stumble onto the whole Umbrella scandal. The characters are different too. In Resident Evil the main character was either Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, not Alice and the other characters were Barry Burton and Albert Wesker. I don't think there is a single character in the movie that's in the game. The first game took place in a mansion, and there were labs in this mansion, but there was never a large underground facility, like The Hive in the movie. Virtually the movie is completely different from the game and this shows how much they cared about the video game they adapted. That's actually probably the reason people make really shitty video game movies, they generally don't care about the games therefore don't focus on the good things about the game.

To conclude the plot is pretty cool, the action is awesome, but the characters and acting suck. on top of that the movie doesn't stay true to the game, in fact it makes small homages to the game. This is really dumb, they should be making the game into a movie not making a movie with the same title as the game that makes small homages to the game, but isn't anything like it. Anyway it's borderline okay, I enjoy watching it, kind of, but it's still pretty bad and angers me at various times. One last good thing to note is the ending is very well done and is a good lead into the second movie. It's probably worth renting.