I really wanted to do something special for my 300th post. Why? I don't know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Boy was I wrong.I decided I wanted to see a brand new movie. Something at the old cinema. Something I could overpay for and watch among strangers. And, since I was in Atlanta, and away from my dvd player at home, it seemed like a reasonable plan to go up to Atlantic Station to see Resident Evil: Extinction.
What a piece of shit.*
No, I'm serious. Total garbage.
Look, I really liked the first movie. I thought that it had some really good moments and worked well as a zombie movie. And then came the sequel. Which, I enjoyed. It was a good action movie, I wished they'd done more with the zombies, but Nemesis was cool. The third one though, I just can't explain.
It's at this point that I would normally give a rundown of what happened. The problem here is that...well, NOTHING happened. For 95 minutes, no one did anything, and nothing was accomplished. This was supposed to be Milla's last turn as Alice, the genetically mutated zombie killer, and they left the whoel thing wide open for a fourth movie starring Milla.
"What's going on here? I have no idea..."I'm going to give you a bit of a spoiler here. Alice's blood is the key to curing the T virus outbreak, and at one point she is in a facility with everything she needs to make the cure, so what does she do? Does she make a cure? Who the fuck knows! They never tell us. She raises an army of Alice clones to go after the CEO of Umbrella. End of movie. That's it.
The movie exists almost entirely to kill everyone off. Carlos and LJ return and are a part of Claire's convoy, cruising around the desert aimlessly. They're looking for supplies, but have no base, and no destination. Until Alice comes along with a journal from a dead guy who claims that their might be safety in Alaska. They go to Vegas looking for gas, at which point everyone dies. Well, most everyone. Well, most everyone except for the people who had just been killed by the zombie crows.
Oh, and Alice has mind powers.
Things just happen for no reason. Nothing is explained. And in what should be the closing act of your saga, nothing is wrapped up. The movie itself is an exercise in futility. There is nothing to become emotionally invested in. It's a group of entirely one dimensional characters. There is no real conflict in the movie. And there is nothing for them to do. I'd say it was the epitome of banality if I knew what banal** meant.
Rather than showing any real action, director Russell Mulcahy uses quick edits to give the appearance of action. This is a lazy technique used by incompetent directors everywhere. It's a way for implying action when you are incapable of actually showing anything. It's a cheap trick.
And good old Paul WS Anderson goes on, once again, to show what a fucking hack he is. The only thing he's worse at than writing seems to be directing. So, I guess it could have been worse. Can someone please tell me why Hollywood keeps letting this guy work?
The upside of the entire experience was seeing the trailers for Iron Man and 30 Days of Night. Both of which look pretty fucking sweet.
Resident Evil: Extinction gets 3 zombies swarming around the compound until the fence is blown wide open and the mysteriously decide to stay out of the compound of their own volition out of 10. And, I'd like to add a simple plea...please stop. Let this be the last movie. I don't think I can take much more.
*In all fairness, I reacted the same way after seeing Episode 3 for the first time. I now love it.
**I know what it means.
