Media Review - Resident Evil: Apocalypse

I have several other planned or partially written posts about other films (Ju-on 1 & 2, the new Manchurian Candidate, Reconstruction) seen earlier than this one, but I feel compelled to dash off something about the new Resident Evil while the movie is still fresh in my head. In part, this is because if I wait too long the experience will disappear entirely (and that tells you something about the movie itself) but also because the film's bizarre, alternatively cliched and provocative virtues are particularly prone to decay from memory. On a similar note, a warning: I spoil.

I was a fan (guardedly) of the first Resident Evil after skipping it in the theaters and catching it on video. I don't play video games, so I have no idea what the "plot" is supposed to be (I assume there must be a reason why the city is named "Raccoon" but don't know what it is.) The first RE benefited, perhaps, from my lack of background as well as the pitiful comparison of the other video game-based zombie flick, House of the Dead, released around the same time. RE begins with Milla Jovovich's character (Alice, the first of several Lewis Carroll references that seemed superfluous at first) introduced as if newly born: naked and innocent, knowing nothing about who she is, her relationship to the other characters, or her role in the precipitating disaster due to drug-induced amnesia. Over the course of the movie we have cause to suspect and fear the military personnel who lead her back down to the underground corporate laboratory (The Hive) that she must subsequently fight her way out of, other survivors of the man-made plague, the Hive's electronic overseer (called the Red Queen, of course) as well as the ominous Umbrella Corporation, the cannibalistic walking dead and the zombie-producing T-virus itself.



Night of the Living Dead (and its sequel) casts a long and deep shadow over almost all the zombie movies made since the late 60s, and this is not an exception. From Romero's models, this movie includes grotesque, slow-moving, flesh-eating corpses in large packs that have to be shot in the head, an uneasy alliance of civilian and military characters, the infection that follows being bitten by one of the zombies, and the "survival politics" that follow from it. Intense mistrust of the military and corporations is not solely a Romero contribution, but he does offer something of a gold standard for it. Unlike House of the Dead, which had almost nothing to demonstrate horror credentials other than gore and violence, Resident Evil has the intelligence to create horror through inference, to remind you of something in life (or in the world at large) that is unnerving. Combined with taut pacing of action and revelation and an effectively claustrophobic setting, it's a well-done piece of paranoid horror/sci-fi/action moviemaking in the tradition of not just Romero, but Cameron, Carpenter and Verhoeven.

Seeing the movie again recently, I was struck by how, like Carroll's Alice, the primary character in RE tries repeatedly to make what she believes are the morally right, socially responsible decisions and finds either that those choices are not available to her or that she does not understand the relationships between her actions and their consequences. Fundamentally, Alice is complicit in this disaster without knowing it and her basic socialization, something the audience undoubtedly shares, is totally inadequate to prepare her to deal with her complicity or the situation. Not a difficult connection to make, but interesting in a way that RE:A is not.

The first movie ends, and the second begins, with Alice reborn and evolved into a superhuman killing machine, all the better to justify endless explosive combat for the next 90 minutes. Raccoon City, dominated by the Umbrella Corporation whose malevolence is no less clear now than the undead, is quarantined due to the escaped virus and being used as an arena for an experimental battle between Alice and another T-virus creation called Nemesis. This is probably the silliest element of a movie teeming with silly elements, but the inevitable showdown competes with so many other conflicts boiling up repeatedly that it doesn't matter that much. You have to hand it to Umbrella: in the middle of a potential public relations disaster of apocalyptic proportions (unintentionally justifying the title) they decide to stage another bio-weapons test. I guess when life gives you lemons...

At times (but not very often,) RE:A recalls The Crazies, Robocop, and even some of the early bio-horror films of Cronenberg, especially Rabid and the underrated Scanners. At the end of RE:A, Alice is reborn once again, cloned this time as in Alien: Resurrection or Species II, and demonstrates even more destructive potential, near omnipotence really, while simultaneously setting up yet another sequel and suggesting that the Umbrella Corporation is still in control. In a chilling gambit last used with effect in the closing moments of John Carpenter's Escape from LA, Alice gazes unmistakably into the camera, at the audience, suddenly aware of our heretofore unperceived observation.

So far, I've discussed very little of what goes on between the opening and the conclusion. This isn't an oversight, as little of this material is worth commenting on. In fact, I was disappointed with the competent, but unremarkable battle and zombie attack setpieces that pad out the underwritten plot. An Umbrella scientist who initially cultivated the T-virus to give health to his young daughter enlists the motley collection of roaming survivors in Raccoon City to find his daughter, hiding in her school from hordes of zombie children while an impending nuclear explosion looms to cover up the mess. These survivors include a couple of abandoned Raccoon City elite cops (one of whom is the always-reliable Oded Fehr,) a comic relief street-hustler (Mike Epps, in one of his first movies that doesn't star a rapper,) and a video game heroine (there's really no better description) who is apparently some kind of rogue cop. None of these "characters" really deserve the title, but Jill Valentine (the video game heroine, played by Sienna Gullory) is a welcome addition for those who, like me, find that Milla Jovovich lacks voom.

So, the middle is a disappointment for anyone who isn't happy with visually satisfactory, but basically unmotivated explosions and zombie chomping. Unlike in the first movie, there's no uncertainty about who can be trusted or who is going to make it (for instance, the reporter who's never fired a gun before will NOT survive) and no point of access to real terrors. The ending goes a long way toward saving the movie by tapping into the vein of dread touched upon by the teaser trailer for the movie, released earlier this year, that was mostly indistinguishable from a moisturizer commercial (with some side effects.) As in Scanners, order appears to be restored, but what kind of order? Who is in charge? Who are these people?

I've likely put more thought into this movie than its makers did, but haven't come away completely empty handed. Without intention, I've delayed writing this long enough to catch Cliff Doerksen's review for the Chicago Reader, which adopts a typical, lazy attitude toward horror, especially zombie horror, found in many of its unfortunate enthusiasts. He opens with the ignorant claim that the zombie genre was "born" with Night of the Living Dead, and two of his three choices for superior imitators (28 Days Later and Cabin Fever, the latter of which has only a tangential relationship to Romero's films) were made in 2002. Although not as flatly stupid as his review of the new Manchurian Candidate, Doerksen's review dismisses Romero's social criticism (which only occasionally dips into satire) and locates the basis of zombie-horror effectiveness in the creation of "you are there" verisimilitude that nobody above the age of 10 really feels. The power of linking horror and social criticism, something that Romero shares with Cronenberg, Tobe Hooper (who sometimes lets his political impulses overwhelm his filmmaking judgment,) Wes Craven (to some extent,) and Bob Clark (see the marvelous Deathdream) is that metaphorical horrors are real, and closer than you imagine. To someone who can't distinguish politics from entertainment (as his Demme review makes clear) this is perhaps too demanding on the overtaxed imagination of a viewer trying to figure out what kind of oatmeal is clinging to the zombies' faces.