Movie Review: Resident Evil Apocalypse
This article was last updated on 2004-10-11
The other night, I went to partake of the new Resident Evil movie, and
it turned out to be highly awesome, and a big improvement on the first
one. Not that that would be hard. As an interesting side fact, this was
originally going to be called 'Resident Evil: Nemesis', but they changed
it after the release of the Star Trek film with the same suffix.
Sucks.
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Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Two down, one to
go.The film this time is actually set in Raccoon
City, which is the first plus. Its actually a proper backdrop for a
survival horror movie, like Resident Evil used to be before it became an
action series (not that I've any problem with that). You get a brief
synopsis of the first movie from Alice to start with, then it dives right
in to Raccoon falling to shit. Enter Jill Valentine, the loveable
suspended STARS member who comes into the RPD and starts capping zombies.
Soon the uninfected find themselves trapped in the city, Jill meets up
with Alice and they make their way to the school to rescue Charles
Ashfords daughter who will guarantee their safe passage out of the city.
While there they meet up with Carlos and Nicolai, and also during this
time Project Nemesis has been activated - anyone whos played RE3 knows who
_he_ is, and if you've not, trust me, he's not nice. Ends up Alice
fighting the Nemesis, they escape, Raccoon gets nuked, and Alice finds
herself captured by Umbrella again, but escapes with the others who sneak
in dressed as Umbrella suits and smuggle her out.
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Jill goes postal on the captured
infected.First off, the general atmosphere of the
movie is a lot better in this one than in the prequel. It feels like a
good survival horror movie rather than all that technology shite that was
in the first one, which to me just seems wrong when it comes to RE. The
tension as theyre running about the city and the abandoned buildings is
fantastic, and theres alot of 'ohholyshitwheredidthatcomefrom?!!?'
moments. Action scenes are excellent, plenty of violence, guns and
blood.
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The UBCS make the drop.What I thought
was one of the best parts of the movie was that they seem to have actually
looked at the games and the novels and took some ideas from it, rather
than just making it all up themselves as seemed to be done in the first
movie. Theres a couple of scenes lifted right from the games (like the
scene where Alice does the drop-and-fire move with the handgun Claire
pulls off in CV), Alice at the end seems an almost direct copy of Alexia
from the end of the Code Veronica novel, the stand-off of the UBCS and the
remains of the RPD with the oncoming horde of zombies. and even though
they're given different names, a lot of the characters form a direct link
with ones from the games. For instance, Carlos is more like Chris, Nicolai
is a hell of a lot more like Michail (rather than a bottom-feeding
scumbag) and the Umbrella suit in charge of the operation (whose name is
Cain, I beleive) seems like a cross between Birkin and Wesker. The
familiarity adds to ones enjoyment of the movie, if youre a fan of the
games.
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'All the foxy ladies dig my
accent!'Theres the usual cliched bits you could
see coming a mile off in this. Theres a scene in the church where a priest
is keeping his zombified sister fed, which is the obligatory scene in any
zombie movie where someone just cant accept what is happening (and then
said person is wasted not long after). Also, at the end when Alice fights
the Nemesis, he does the whole 'Frankenstiens monster' bit with the
flashbacks and turning on his 'masters' (which is nonetheless very damn
cool) in a blood-rage frenzy of destruction. And it really is proper
destruction, because they gave the Nemesis a chaingun. And let him keep
the RPG. Nice.
All said and done, an excellent movie and a vast
improvement on the last one. Fans shouldn't be able to pick as many holes
in this because it's been shown conclucivley its got no links with the
game (look for how the virus was created), and it's an all-round good
action/horror movie. Highly
reccomended.
