Now you go to bed, I'm staying here

Each Day, A Film
January 27th 2012 (Retrospective)

... This catchup season is beginning to feel a bit sisyphean, if I'm strictly honest with you. But let's not be honest, today!

Let's talk about Resident Evil, instead.



Now, as previously mentioned, a friend and I have a thing for movies which aren't just bad, but they're bad movies trying to be good. Often, they fail, for a variety of reasons, but sometimes they gently straddle the middle ground.

One of the reasons you can pick for this failure is the video-game-movie model, especially thanks to Uwe Boll. But this is not about Uwe Boll.

As mentioned, it's about Resident Evil.

Now, basing your film on a video-game property is the ultimate double-edged sword - second only to comics-based films pre-1996 - because while you have brand recognition, a pre-sold audience and a host of tropes and plot points to pick and choose from, there's always going to be the logic clash:

(1) Characters in video games do things as the plot and engine demand
(2) Characters in films do things as the plot demands
(3) Characters in real life do neither.

Now, in the wonderful Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks, there's a nice deconstruction of how nobody in zombie movies ever seems to know what a zombie is. This is an interesting parallel world where either zombies have never existed in popular culture, or perhaps George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was never released.

In Resident Evil, there's a sequence where an elite, trained group of special forces soldiers --

--

-- You know what, Cracked can put this much better than I can;

It takes the Umbrella employees an insane twenty minutes to rediscover headshots. They expend most of their ammunition (and half their team) in a single firefight, and they don't hit a head once. Never mind the basic survival, that's statistically impossible. They hit the walls, the roof, the floor, and destroy the basic 'safety controls' on the experimental mega-zombie containment units littered around the room, which releases even more undead; they shoot so badly that they actually increase the number of zombies.

And this is where the three-point scheme comes in above, because this is film logic in action; conforming to point (1), in a video game a headshot would be logical after the first time other damage doesn't work, and in (3), well, let's just hope that never happens.

For all this, Resident Evil is not a bad film. I come not to praise it, but neither to damn it; the video game logic (memory loss, underground trains/loading screens, boss fights) meshes mostly with the horror film logic (supposedly insane but actually just clinical AI, relentless hordes of undead, a crushing sense of despair and occasional nudity) pretty well. The special effects on the Licker are a little ropey - there's that weird feeling that it doesn't actually have any mass, a lá the Eric Bana Hulk, but that doesn't actually detract from proceedings that much.

If there's one issue, it's the reliance on the -flashes-to-memory- that are a decent but fluffed attempt to set up the events of the day, because the timing always seems a little off, somehow; yes, she's married, but no! he's not her husband really, but yes! he's decided to trump her by selling the bioweapon before she can get to it through her contact, but no! she doesn't remember. Until she does.

This is just me talking - and so is just one more opinion in the vast sea of opinions that stretch from shore to internet shore - but the opportunity for a decent, well-timed setup was a little missed there. Alice introduces herself as having been the 'head of security'; if so, why not spend ten minutes at the start of the film with a tense corporate espionage sequence establishing who's thinking about betraying who before genre-shifting into I-will-eat-your-brains-motherfucker? The memory flashbacks are a fine device, but if it'd just been treated as a tension convention rather than a convenient way to explain the plot, might that not have worked a little better, with the audience not knowing who's going to betray who and how?

Also, let's take a moment to mention Colin Salmon, whose career trajectory comes across as more than a little bizarre on the surface but then, when you apply it to his biography, makes more than a little sense; lots of television, lots of roles, then lots of small roles in big-budget American films, then back to television. It's just a shame he gets killed so quick...