“I don’t want to be one those things, walking around without a soul”
I now take you into the third major zombie movie franchise: the Resident Evil Series. I was going to use the quote “You’re all going to die down here” because it is pretty badass, but it is also well known and in the trailer.
To start this series, I will begin with some background information about the Resident Evil video game series. The game first came out in 1996. The series follows the genre of horror survival. Most times the game series has a very claustrophobic and surreal feel to them. Much like the series’ main competitor, Silent Hill that is even more dark and creepy. Resident Evil, the Silent Hill, are movies that can be stand-alone from their video game counterparts, however, without a bit contextual understanding, a few things may not make sense to the person watching the film who has not played the game. One could argue that the movies such as these are made for the fans of the games, however, film is usually in a different universe than the thing they were inspired from and in order to properly appeal to a large audience as well as make money, films should not require knowledge of the games to understand them. That is one of my few critics of Resident Evil as well as Silent Hill.
Resident Evil starts out with someone sabotaging the facility and the automated defense systems taking over. The computer ends up killing everyone in the building to contain the T-Virus. Now, most of you are probably thinking this is stupid and are wondering why the computer would kill everyone knowing the virus reanimates the dead? Here is where information from the games comes into play. Unlike most zombie movies and the causes of the zombies therein, the T-Virus is very special. T-Virus (which stands for Tyrant Virus, Tyrant being the name of one of the boss monsters in the games) can infect anything living from people, to other mammals, to any animals, bugs, and even plants. The T-Virus manipulates genes and DNA and therefore affects each and every organism differently. What does this mean exactly? It means it will not necessarily kill everything it infects. It can, on rare occasions mutate a being into a super soldier/monster that is technically still alive (i.e. breathing, heart beating, thinking, etc). So the computer made the logical conclusion. It killed everyone and have a 1000 relatively weak and stupid zombies easily contained in the facility. It was either than or 90% of the people would die anyway and become zombies from infection or murdered by the other 10% who become aggressive, super strong, mutant monsters that would easily break out and wreck havoc on the land on top of allowing the 900 zombies free to run around infecting people.
The protagonist is Alice, whose name we do not find out until the second movie. If we do find it out in the first, I miss it every time. Alice lives in the mansion that is the setting for the Resident Evil 0 + 1. The movie could theoretically take place before 0 making it Resident Evil -1. The mansion is the secret back entrance cover to the secret lab called the Hive that is located under Raccoon City directly under the Umbrella Corporation’s main office building. Alice is security personnel guarding the mansion who lost her memory as a side effect of the computers defenses.
Umbrella: I already mentioned them in my review of Return of the Living Dead: 4: Necropolis. Umbrella represents the evils of the warped free capitalism the major nations use for an economic model as well as the evils of conglomerate corporations. This is the main underlying message of the Resident films; however, the films hit you over the head with this message.
Umbrella sends a squad of privatized soldiers to investigate what happened. There first part of their mission is to shut down the Red Queen (the computer). This is a zombie movie, but, the first several people to be killed are killed by the computer and we really do not see any zombies for about half the movie. However, this movie probably has actual zombie vs. human action than any of the other films except maybe the second. In the Resident series, the zombies are typically not the real enemies and zombies are never really depicted as the villains of zombie movies, usually it is an asshole or psycho person bringing back the message of George Romero that really, we are the true monsters. In addition, each Resident film has one of the boss monsters from the game series in it as a villain. Back to my point though, the zombies are more of a nuisance and side effect, especially since rather than horror, the series is more action, meaning the stars mostly are well armed and skilled in combat making them badass and anyone who dies usually has no skills and/or is an unlikable asshole of a character anyway. Point being, the Resident movies are zombie movies, but they take the message of the old zombie movies (Romero style) to a higher level that message being zombies = minimal threat, people left over + people responsible for zombies = moderate to major threat. (Zombies < psychos + assholes)
Resident Evil does do a few things right: it references Romero constantly. In truth, the movies obviously would not exist without the games, and the games would not exist without Romero. When the computer explains what zombies are, it basically sums up Romero zombies from the whole Dead trilogy: they are brought back to life but only slightly with seemingly no intelligence, “perhaps a little memory and only the most basic of needs: the need to feed”.
Also this is the first zombie movie that not only has scientifically accurate slow zombies, but coagulated blood. They even take a moment to explain with dialogue about the blood. “Blood doesn’t do that till after you’re dead”. Before this, even in Romero movies up 1990, zombies have bled as if they were alive, gushing liquid blood in excess. Now, finally, it only comes out in bits and clumps of goopy dark red stuff.
The movie ends with a cliffhanger and overall, it is not a bad film. The acting is convincing, the effects expect for the early CGI, are all great, the plot is good, it did do tribute to the game even though no characters from the game are in the first movie, it follows Romero rules and so I have to give it credit for that. My only real critique is that the commuter killed half the people in a movie about zombies. It does have some jump/surprise scares and it has plenty of action. It’s fun, it’s cool and I give it 3 ½ out of 5 stars.
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