3 years after Apocalypse, we’re back with the Adventures of Alice in Resident Evil spin-off cinema land… but she wakes up as she did in the first movie, has some flashbacks, faces some traps, then dies and she’s retrieved by scientists?
Yep, considering the finale of Apocalypse and the opening act leading to a reveal of a mass grave of Alices, it’s not that surprising that we would eventually see the series go hard on the clonatron, upping the ante by explaining that Umbrella didn’t contain shit, and the epidemic spred all over the world, eventually turning the globe into a post-apocalyptic barren, withered zombie wasteland.
The Alice clone that survived/was let go now roams on a motorbike, alongside other survivors as they try to escape the zombies by moving to Alaska through the Mojave desert.
And stopping by Las Vegas, nominally for fuel, factually because its Las Vegas, where they don’t actually stay much, despite the marketing for the movie emphasizing the “Vegas trip”.
Despite the brief Vegas cavalcade, this new voyage through lots of zombies and nothing brings us Alice fighting a band of vaguely Hill Have Eyes-ish hillbilly murderers, while meeting new characters, some named after the ones in the videogames, like Claire Redfield, but this time trying even less to even have anything match between the videogame characters and this film rendition of them, plus a gaggle of new characters not named after anything from the games that are random and disposable as they come.
But you don’t wanna know that.
You wanna know if Wesker is finally in these fuckin movies, and he is now, Albert Wester is in, being played by Jason O’ Mara, here in his (theathrical/feature lenght film) debut role.
What does he (and hence Umbrella, as he’s the company president) want?
Initially to end the zombie apocalypse by concocting a super cure through the Alice clones’ blood and experiments, not by curing the zombies, but by placating/tame them and use them as a workforce/resource of some kind, like in the early, very early black n white zombie movies.
The effects are better these time around, the CG is cheapish as before but there’s more usage of practical effects that do look improved over Apocalypse, even if not that much.
This time in the director’s chair we have Russel Mucalhy, which is kinda surprising as he’s well respected name behind movies like 1999’s horror thriller Resurrection, the cult classic killer boar film Razorback, and a little movie called Highlander (and Highlander II: The Quickening, too), and you can tell we have an experienced director at the helm, heck, as there is an effort to move the needle more on the horror side of “action horror”, managing to give some believability to this deserted zombie post-apocalypse, some creeps and scares to be had in this supposedly horror franchise, while also delivering some good action scenes.
though he can do little with a script like this. I mean, why doesn’t Alice uses the esp/telekinesis powers she gained in the previous movie’s ending? Why only 30 minutes in she shows signs of telekinesis powers she can use even in a sleeping state/unconscious state?
Are we following a different clone that the one that escaped from the Umbrella Lab in the last movie? Is that why she doesn’t travel with Carlos Olivera, Claire Redfield, and the pimp?
Where’s the little Angela Ashford? Where’s Jill for that matter?
We get some answers to these questions (mostly why she went solo instead of tagging along with the other Raccoon City survivors) but not all, because this a series now, so maybe we’ll bother in some of the sequels, gotta milk these undead udders.
The plot IS utterly predictable by anyone who has seen even a single zombi movie, the pacing is slow, and it suffers as it feels – and its – like a middle chapter, with way too much build up for another sequel, a shoestring plot to actually offer here, and the videogame references are growing thinner and thinner as this series goes on, with here just the infected zombi crows and a Tyrant-styled mutated scientist in terms of monster fodder featured alongside the basic zombos.
Even with the limp-ass plot, i’d say it’s definitely better than Resident Evil Apocalypse, it’s definitely the better directed one yet all around (enough that Mulahy can get Jovovich to actually emote properly when its called for, and it helps in making the character feel a bit less two-dimensional), the actions scenes are quite satisfying as now Alice is basically Carrie too, and at least there’s some plot points from the first movie returning that were completely absent in Apocalypse.
Plus its always fun to see what absurd cliffhanger situations Anderson can write for the ultimate “director’s waifu insert” that is Alice/Milla Jovovich.
Will Alice and her army of “Misaka Sisters” be able to reach and hunt down Wesker as he moves all operations to the Tokyo branch of Umbrella? And what Touma Kamijou has to say about it?
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