Resident Evil: Extinction

R
** out of ****
2007


Check it out, it's the return of the movie review! ^_^


I wish I was happier to be reviewing this film, but as far as disappointments go, this one was pretty high up on the scale. High being bad. I was so excited to see the new Resident Evil movie. Even though Resident Evil: Apocalypse was nowhere near as good as the first one, it was still more than entertaining with great action sequences (despite my issues with Milla Jovovich as an action hero) and Nemesis! I mean, the first Resident Evil movie is the movie I put in when I want to watch a movie but don't know what I want to watch. I've seen them both thousands of times. Of course I was excited about seeing Extinction!


Premise: Zombies. Lots and lots and lots of zombies. The infection spread through Raccoon City, through North America, through the whole world. Imagine that; what a surprise. Anyway, a small band of survivors led by Ali Larter as Claire Redfield carefully caravan their way through the Nevada desert, dodging some pretty sickly looking zombies. Milla Jovovich as the infamous Alice, enhanced soldier newly endowed with psionic abilities, meets up with them. Suddenly not only are they dodging zombies, they're dodging the Umbrella Corporation who is looking reclaim Project Alice, and don't care who they kill along the way.



Fairly decent premise. Looked like it could potentially be a good movie. And now here is my list of complaints. Be forwarned, there are a few spoilers in here.


1. TERRIBLE writing. The dialog, especially for Claire Redfield and Alice was just awful. This is unusual for the Resident Evil movies. Neither of the other two suffered from bad writing.

2. Ali Larter made a god-awful Claire Redfield. To be fair, Larter is not my favorite actress anyway. I didn't like her at all in Heroes. And the writing was poor, making her character completely one dimensional and uninteresting. But Larter still sucked.




3. Ermm... how about the glamor shots all the way through the movie? The women traveling caravan style without showers look way dirty from a distance, but zoom in close and you'll see that their makeup is 100% perfect, and their faces 100% clean!


4. This is a big one right here: All the people traveling in the caravan have lived through basically the end of the world. Presumably they've all seen hundreds of people bitten get sick and turn into the ravening undead. So WHY THE HELL don't ANY of them seem to notice when one idiot gets bitten and tries to hide it? "Gee, L.J. is looking pretty sick. Doesn't that seem kind of familiar?" ....... "Nah, don't be silly. He just has a cold or something."


......



NO.



5. Claire Redfield: Badass, hardened caravan leader one minute. The next; "I just don't know if we should go to Alaska, let's have everyone vote cause I just couldn't possibly make that decision, even though up until now I've been the hardass commander and everyone does what I say without question!"


6. Bitten soldier Carlos decides to sacrifice himself to help the others before he turns into a zombie. Walks down the line of three tearful women bidding farewell. Two of those tearful women being hard soldier types. GAG ME.


7. Bitten soldier Carlos decides to sacrifice himself to help the others before he turns into a zombie. Alice, apparently struck by the thought that she'll never see him again, gives him a huge kiss. Gee, that was nice, Alice. I bet Carlos would have liked to get some BEFORE he was dying. I mean, come on! You've been through two movies together!


8. Every single time we see a scene in one of the Umbrella Corporation underground bases, it has to do the special computer map thing from the first one and play the exact same music. The first time, it was clever. The 3,000th time, it was boring and annoying. Believe it or not, we no longer care how deep they are underground!


9. The head chairman of the Umbrella Corp wears sunglasses. Underground. Inside. All the time. Is he blind? I seriously doubt it. Just incredibly lame.



10. It has been years since the second film. Alice has been dealing with manifestations of her telekinetic powers for that whole time. She pulls a really cool stunt in the middle of the movie - like awesome cool stunt. But suddenly when she's in the middle of the battle with the end boss, all she can do is throw him across a room and suddenly she has a migraine? PFFFFT!


11. End of the movie, Umbrella Corp is having a board meeting. Board members use projections of themselves to attend. Alice projects herself into the meeting, all threatening, and tells them she's coming. "And I'm bringing some friends." It'll be, like, so awesome! We can, like, party, and, like, invite boys over....


12. AND THE THING THAT PISSED ME OFF THE MOST: Alice has been portrayed in both movies as a hardened soldier. Even in the first one, before she had regained her memories, she handled dead people and zombies like a pro, and didn't let anyone mess with her. Second movie she's even more of a hardened soldier. She's been through a ton, and now she's an enhanced super-soldier. Wow. Yep, badass. SUDDENLY in the third movie, she's super nice to everyone. Except for two scenes her fighting prowess seems to have deserted her. AND she takes shit from Claire Redfield. WHAT?!?! Alice would be like the crazy awesome bitch from hell at this point. After being on her own for the few year gap between the second and third movies you would think she would have gotten even more bad ass, not more LAME. Come ON!




And that concludes my rant.

On the other side of things, there were some awesome fight scenes. There were some very cool special effects. And hell, it's a zombie movie, so it's worth watching. And Milla Jovovich does have some moments where she's ridiculously cool. Just be prepared.