Resident Evil (2002) Review

Resident Evil (2002) Review

 

We have arrived at the final franchise in this year’s Sequel-a-Thon! The Resident Evil movies were a pretty big deal in my teen and young adult years, and I’ve been wanting to review them ever since the last one came out. The film series was based on the video game series of the same name, and somehow found enough box office success again and again for six movies to be made before this particular series was concluded. My reviews will contain my contemporary thoughts on them, but let me be up front about something right away: I still find these movies entertaining, but do not think they are very good. I’ve never played any of the games, so if you’re hoping to see comparisons between the films and the source material, these aren’t the reviews for you. Let’s begin with the first one—a quaint beginning to look back on compared to the later entries, as we will see.

It feels like the movie starts three different times, with voiceover/text about the Umbrella Corporation, and then with scenes of confusion as the virus is unleashed in a facility, and then with main character Alice (Milla Jovovich) coming to consciousness in the shower. We stick with Alice, and a team of commandos infiltrates the mansion she’s living in—or, does she live there? Her memory is a little fuzzy. Luckily the team fills her (and the audience) in on the plot. They have to infiltrate “The Hive” which is an underground facility beneath Raccoon City. A deadly virus was unleashed in The Hive (as seen in the second opening scene) but no one knows who did it. Think it might be someone from this unlikely group, which also includes a cop and Alice’s equally amnesic partner? That would be a good guess. There are three catches to infiltrating The Hive: 1) the virus has turned the scientists and other workers into zombies, 2) The Hive is controlled by a homicidal A.I. called The Red Queen, and 3) the Umbrella Corporation experimented plenty with the “T-virus” which also resulted in some monstrous creatures.

Resident Evil serves as a fairly straight-forward starting point for the series. There’s a deliberate build up as they infiltrate the facility, and I appreciate the effort made to create some suspense instead of just going straight to some big action scenes, but there’s an awful lot of expository dialogue from the team leader. Even when characters start getting killed off and the horror kicks in, some restraint is shown. There’s not a ton of blood and gore in the first half hour—not even when multiple characters are diced up in a hallway full of lasers, which is one of the coolest and most memorable parts of the movie. There’s a countdown element to the plot: The Hive will shut them in automatically in an hour. This does nothing to make things more suspenseful or interesting, but again, an effort was made. Alice slowly has memories come back to her as the movie progresses, and it rapidly cuts to flashback clips multiple times, unravelling more of the mystery each time. It’s more interesting than expository dialogue, so I'll take it.

Visually speaking, it at least looks a little more realistic than a video game. The human zombies are not remarkable at all, but the zombie Dobermans are a highlight. The part when Alice rebounds off a wall and kicks one in the face makes me laugh out loud every time, but I can’t tell if it’s intentionally comedic or not. The set design is kind of cheap, but forgivably so, and there are a couple video game-ish camera angles, but nothing overly distracting. The Red Queen—that evil A.I. which took over the facility and is trying to contain the virus as well as kill everyone—is visually represented by a cgi projection of a British child. It's like one of the ghost girls from The Shining meets Skynet from Terminator. The cgi for her is acceptably low quality, but some of the other computer-generated elements? Well, they vary, but the cgi is mainly dated and quite below standard even for 2002. All I can say about the monster that shows up toward the end is, oh no…

I’m not going to talk about the characters because there’s barely anything to talk about, but I will talk about the actors, because there’s a lot going on there. I was a huge fan of Milla Jovovich after seeing her in Ultraviolet (2006) when it came out, and, naturally, I embarked on the Resident Evil movies afterward to see more of her. Looking at the first Resident Evil now, I can’t help but feel she was still coming into her own as an actress at this point in her career. Her line delivery is so flat, and she’s mostly expressionless for the whole movie (get used to that). Still, she kicks butt. Some of the weird supporting cast standouts include Michelle Rodriguez (Avatar, Fast & Furious franchise), Colin Salmon (Alien vs Predator, which was also made by writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson, more on him soon) and James Purefoy (TV series The Following). I don’t know why, but Michelle Rodriguez has such a mean face in this movie. She looks incredibly pissed in almost every shot.

Paul W.S. Anderson's “bad ass” dialogue is pretty cringe, and the rest of his writing is rather lackluster. Here is a weird conspiracy theory of mine: James Purefoy plays a character who has had a whole lot of hot sex with Milla Jovovich's character in the past, and the actor looks oddly like director Paul W.S. Anderson, who had the hots for Jovovich in real life and asked her out after this first movie came out. Did he cast Purefoy on purpose? Did he rewrite it in such a way as to make his lookalike her lover? It’s kind of creepy, but somehow it actually worked out for Paul and Milla in real life. They have three kids and are still married. A problem with my conspiracy theory is the guy Purefoy plays turns out to be a bad guy (spoiler).

Resident Evil might be the highest point in the series for some viewers, or it might be the lowest. For me, this one feels like a lot of setup, with some cool moments throughout, but looking at it just for what it is, it's a little action/horror video game adaptation than hasn't aged well, and in the context of the movie series, its arguably the one that feels the most like a real movie but is the least entertaining because of that. The stuff that I like about the series overall isn’t as prevalent in this one. It’s one of the entries more focused on the zombie aspect, and in terms of its place in that sub-genre, it doesn’t stand out as being all that scary or innovative.