Talking about the movies here. No interest in the games.

So Resident Evil 5 is coming out. Or it's already out. Whatever. I saw a trailer for it on TV, and the bad guy from Resident Evil 4 is still around or something.

Whaaaaat?

He got blown up at the end of the last movie. Did he clone himself or something?

But beyond that bit of lunacy... Resident Evil 5? Really? When's this thing gonna end? Seriously, it's getting kinda stupid. Sort of like the Saw franchise. And much like Saw, the fourth installment was where it started to get really broken. ("Who's that guy who got up from the supposedly electrified chair at the end? What the ****'s happening? Oh, we had to wait a whole year for Saw 5 to explain who he is?")

Now the first Resident Evil was pretty good, and it has some really nice atmospheric effects that you probably didn't notice if you didn't watch it with the headphones on like I did. It's full of appropriately creepy soundtrack stuff and sound effects. Really nice stuff.

So the security team or whatever they are, they enter the facility to find out what's going on with the Red Queen, and they bring the amnesia victims and some other guy along. Then, after some nicely done exploration of the creepy abandoned facility, half the team gets wiped out by the Red Queen's lasers in a convenient corridor that's the only entrance to her mainframe.

Umm... The Red Queen can talk, you know. And she can project a creepy hologram of a little girl while talking. Why not take a moment and just ask what's going on. Here's how it should have gone down.

Security Team: Hey, what's going on here?

Red Queen: Someone released a T Virus in the facility. It turns people into flesh-eating zombies. I killed everyone in the facility with neuro-toxin and sealed all the zombies behind steel doors. As long as I'm able to maintain control of the facility, they won't be able to escape.

Security Team: Oh. It sounds like you have the situation under control. Umm... How are your power generators doing? Do you need any backups?

Red Queen: Let's exchange phone numbers. If I need any help containing the virus I'll let you know.

Security Team: Sounds good. Okay, we're gonna go back out through the way we came in. Text us if you need anything. Really, nothing's too small.

Instead, we get the whole "escape from the zombies" thing because they let 'em out. And then at the end the Umbrella guys open up the place and let the virus out, which brings us to the sequel: Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

Really? It's the second movie, and you're already calling it "Apocalypse"? It should have been over there. That installment was mostly forgettable.

Then we move on to "Extinction". That sounds rather final. What could possibly follow that, right? That was a pretty good post-apoc film with a nice "Road Warrior" post-apoc atmosphere. At the end I thought it was over. The vision I had of fifty Alice clones all storming the Umbrella stronghold and killing everything was infinitely better than anything we saw in "Afterlife".

Oh, that's right. "Afterlife" follows "Extinction".

Sometimes it's better not to know. My imagination can fill in what happens next. But no, we got "Resident Evil: We Want More Money" where she squanders fifty clones during the first twenty minutes.

If you ignore the last few minutes of "Afterlife" like I did, it's possible to envision the whole thing ending there. Bad guy got blown up. Survivors are rescued. There's finally some hope on the horizon...

And then fifty helicopters full of troops fly toward the boat.

Ditch this schlock.

I didnt even need to read that to know that this movie was garbage.

I hear ya, Xix. I hear ya.


Obviously, much like Uwe Boll, Mr. Paul Anderson doesn't know when to quit, either. ... I imagine by the beginning of the third movie's production, Paul became accustomed to shaking an eight ball before every writing session. It would explain Apocalypse and Alien vs. Predator, anyway.

Oh, he also did "Alien Vs Predator"? Hmm, I smell a hack.

Now don't get me wrong. I still like the first "Resident Evil". It's a good survival horror movie, and as noted I love the claustrophobic atmosphere and all the little details in the sound department that make it creepy. The Red Queen is very well played. Hologram and voice of a homicidal little girl, very disturbing. I also liked the third one, "Extinction". Post-apoc setting, and every character who gets killed or zombified is a huge loss for the convoy making its way through the desert. I really felt the sense of loss every time a member of their rag-tag band got killed. And the introduction of a new secret underground facility was welcome. The super powers that Alice has there are kind of over the top (she fries a bunch of undead birds with mind-powered fire or something). But... okay, I'll go with that. The fourth one ("Afterlife") really rubbed me the wrong way, especially that whole deal with the wasting of fifty super-powered clones.

At this point I have no interest in the new one, which is called "Retribution" or something. With a title like that, they've completely skirted around the whole "Apocalypse", "Extinction", "Afterlife" sequence. The next movie could be entitled anything. How about "Resident Evil: Umbrella Strikes Back" followed by "Resident Evil: Return Of The Red Eye".

I gotta give George Lucas props for his prequel trilogy. It has a beginning, a middle, and more importantly, an end ("Clone Wars" animated series notwithstanding). At the end of the commentary track for Episode 3, George says he's done with his saga and he's happy with it. You go, George. Show 'em how it's done, dude.

I have to disagree about the original. I thought that if you had nothing invested in the series the original might be OK as an action movie diversion for at the show on a Friday night. But as a fan of either RE or survival horror I thought it was really bad. The two main problems where huge. Namely all the special force type weaponry from the start and worse so that it was a special force party not a lone individual. All the gymnastic matrix type crap was unforgiveable. I saw 2 scenes that made me think RE or survival horror. The first was when Milla found herself alone and at first confronted a zombie and then some dobermans where she used the magnum. Those two minutes were great. Wish the whole movie was like that and then the train at the end had that typical escape from the area survival horror feel. Other than that I felt no connection. And that is why I never even considered ever going to see a sequel to this series.

I believe that the Resident Evil movie series does nothing more than perpetuates/solidifies the stereotype that video games can never be good movies. Hell, even the newer Resident Evil games that aren't horror focused anymore do a better job... both cinematically and environmentally as far as horror go.

Bo and Lantis,

Can't argue with that, especially coming from someone who enjoys survival horror games (Bo). However, I do submit the following. A movie operates on a certain level. It has to tell a story and characters and, most of the time, dialogue and something happening. A video game operates on a different level. You can have one guy in a maze fighting monsters or whatever, and it works on that level because you're controlling the guy and you're emotionally invested in what's happening. A two-hour movie of Milla Jovovich beating up undead dogs would probably be boring. Sort of like watching someone play a video game. That's one reason why I prefer my movies to be movies and my games to be games. They're separate mediums that work in different ways.

I dunno, maybe you can provide an example of a successful movie that's based on a video game. Or vice versa. Personally, I don't believe we need more of this kind of disaster. As a counter point, I think this video game did a good job of conveying the feel of being in an action movie. So maybe it's possible for a game to adequately capture the feel of a movie. But I don't believe it goes the other way. Movies need to engage the watching audience in ways that are different from the ways that video games engage the playing audience. That's a big difference: watching and playing.

Actually, he was portrayed at the beginning of the movie as another cop on the Jigsaw case like everyone else we've already seen, so I can't say he was out of left field there.


.... And it dawns on me that I am sticking up for the Saw series, which is overall a franchise based on torture porn, and yet I refuse to give any credit for ... ANYTHING ... on the Resident Evil movies. What does that even say about RE as a film franchise? I can make more sense out of Saw. (Don't get me wrong; I was clearly thinking way too hard on the topic at hand in that thread I made a few years back on Saw VI.)

At the time it was confusing. It was like "huh?" No explanation about who he is (aside from being a cop) or why he's suddenly picking up where Jigsaw left off. We had to wait for Saw 5 to explain it.

The problems with Saw... are numerous. The first one really grabbed me for some reason. I think it was mostly the clever puzzles that the two guys in the room had to solve in order to figure out what's going on. It was more than just "two guys trapped in a room". There was clever stuff hidden in the room, clues that helped them piece together what's going on. The twist at the end was awesome in that "Usual Suspects" way. The sequel promised more of the same, but with a group of people trapped in a house. Problem was, the characters were so stupid, they didn't solve the puzzles. I had to watch some sort of commentary piece and hear the director explain the puzzles. Why have that stuff in there if no one in the movie is going to solve it? This ain't Zork. It's a movie. And in a movie that poses puzzles for characters to solve, I expect to see characters solving puzzles.

The third Saw movie introduced "death machines", elaborate mechanisms that people are strapped onto or trapped in, that kill them. When did that humble concept that worked so well in the first movie become torture porn? Ugh.

It continued to go south from there. The bad guy had so many accomplices helping him out, that by the seventh movie it seemed the entire city was in on it. Going back to that humble first movie, I found it easier to believe that one guy was capturing and murdering people on his own. I mean, he was just a nutcase who was jealous that other people got to continue living while he had inoperable brain cancer. I'm sure there are other people with inoperable cancer and stuff, and you don't see them kidnapping people and torturing them under the guise of "trying to teach people the value of life". Eh, the guy was just a nutter.

I understand what's going in Saw 4 and 5 and 6 and 7. I got it. Doesn't mean I wanted it.