I've got another level that I want to clear

Each Day, A Film
January 28th 2012 (Retrospective)

You know what? Let's stick with Resident Evil. Onwards and upwards, then, to Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which comes from the Ronseal school of filmmaking because it's based on Resident Evil, and takes place during an... Apocalypse.



There's a basic theme that runs through the Resident Evil film series; humans that aren't Milla Jovovich, Plucky Survivors, or Dead, are arseholes, largely masterminded by the the King of the Arseholes, the Umbrella Corporation.

Or, they're Jared Harris Moriarty, master hacker.

There's a certain logic to zombie films once you escape the facility, but let's just freeze on that momentarily, because it's an opportunity to discuss the whole King of the Arseholes problem; Umbrella know what they were making in The Hive, they know what happened when it got loose, they know what the T-Virus does when it does get loose, and yet the Best! Idea! Ever! is to unseal The Hive and, well, y'know, just run with it, frankly.

Just run with it, Frankly could, in theory, be the mantra from now on.

You're a suspended police officer on the edge. You know how to deal with zombies, so when the first signs of an outbreak occur, do you:

(A) Dress sensibly, on the assumption that bites or scratches will kill you slowly, but surely?
(B) Break out that little blue dress that leaves your arms, neck and legs totally exposed to any wandering undead?

If you answered (B), you're both Stylish and Jill Valentine. You also have a higher life expectancy than your boss, who's wearing body armour, the sassy journalist following you around, and most of the trained, fully armed and armoured Umbrella soldiers tooling around the city trying to - contrary to Umbrella's mission statement - help.

In fact, Umbrella's idea of helping is to seal off all the exits and then release a mutated environmentalist hunt down the police forces and generally shoot things with BIG GUNS!

Now, here's a slight plot failure for me - although I realise that in this case complaining about a plot failure in films like this is akin to complaining about spaghetti being too bendy - Nemesis is what happened to Matt Addison after Umbrella decided anti-virus was too good for him. At the end of the film, Nemesis has a change of heart, remembering his quasi-feelings for Alice, and temporarily wanders over to the side of the good guys.

The problem is that it's taken him this long - and being impaled through the chest - to break his programmers hold on him, as opposed to, say, slowly but implacably fighting the programmers since he last had a chance to shoot shit up vaguely in the direction of Milla Jovovich around halfway through the film.

This is where we come up against film logic over video game logic; the bad guy's Heel Face Turn can only, obviously, take place after involuntary cardiac surgery.

This is not to say the film doesn't have clever moments - the shift from stupidly experimental to calculatingly scientific within the Umbrella Ranks towards the end is a nice touch, moving from "lock everyone in the city, see what happens" to "wait, Milla's suddenly more interesting than the rest of the world", especially when That fellow from Downton Abbey .

What's slightly worrying, too, is the repetition of finding ways to make Milla Jovovich look like she's being exploited; towards the end of the first film, there was the Revealing Hospital Gown, and at the end of Apocalypse, she becomes the Naked Girl In The Fishtank.

Again, there's some weirdness with the plot; if you stripped it down to simply a bunch of survivors trying to escape a zombified city while saving a little girl but pursued by an unstoppable menace, it would be an effective film, but all the ornamentation - largely courtesy, of course, of how stupid Umbrella are - kind of gloms on to the narrative and drags it down.

Still, it's not that bad a film. Let's move on.