Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 15, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Looking at the trailer and TV spots for Resident Evil, you’d never know there are zombies in it—an odd tack for Screen Gems to take when promoting a movie based on a video game in which the undead are a major part of the appeal. The studio instead is selling a tough-chick/video game veneer similar to Tomb Raider (gee, there’s a movie everyone should emulate), centering on the gutsy heroine portrayed by Milla Jovovich. As it happens, both components receive equal time in Resident Evil, and the results in each case are a mixed bag.
Some of writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson’s creepiest FX appear in the opening scenes, as an experimental virus gets loose in the offices of the Umbrella Corporation, and the automated building takes the extreme measure of killing all the workers via flooded rooms and plunging elevators. Fans of the game will know that these deceased folks are destined to return as the walking dead, but they don’t show up until about the 40-minute mark. Instead, the film follows Jovovich’s character Alice, who wakes up in a mansion’s shower (demurely draped with the curtain—but don’t worry, guys, there are flashes of nudity later) not knowing where she is. No sooner has she gotten her bearings than a team of heavily armed commandos bursts in; the soldiers drag her along on a mission to find out what caused the tragedy down in the Hive, Umbrella Corp.’s underground base. (Anderson throws in a nice visual joke about the view out of the Hive’s “windows.”)
There’s the requisite exposition about the computer that controls the Hive and the sinister experiments being performed there, but it’s all just pretext to the Good Stuff: the battles between humans and the hordes of bloodthirsty ghouls that want to make them their next meal. Other game favorites like zombie dogs and the monstrous Licker turn up too, and Anderson’s goal of giving the game’s fans what they want comes through loud (sometimes ear-splittingly so, as in all of the director’s movies) and clear. No pasty faces here; the zombies are an effectively gory and nasty-looking bunch, courtesy of makeup FX by Shadow of the Vampire’s Animated Extras and Pauline Fowler. The director stages the action confidently, keeping the pace swift and the visuals flashy. It’s not entirely backhanded praise to call this the best movie yet to be based on a video game.
Yet in the greater scheme of the horror/science fiction genre, the movie lacks distinction. The overriding problem is that Anderson’s scenario is so similar to Aliens and Dawn of the Dead, one can’t help being reminded of how much better those movies were. What’s lacking is characterization of the humans facing down the horrors, which would give the thrills dimension beyond the surface. Jovovich ably carries her share and Colin Salmon is charismatic as the soldiers’ leader, but the rest of the men are undistinguished cardboard cutouts. Michelle Rodriguez fills the ethnic tough-girl role, but to be brutally honest, her character is no Vazquez (Jenette Goldstein’s memorable Aliens warrior) either as written or played.
Anderson does provide some late-arriving revelations about the relationships between some of the people, and while it gives the final reels some extra juice, this material would have been even more dramatic if revealed earlier and developed over the course of the story. There’s also the distracting sense that the director is pulling his punches in a few key action sequences. Not that the film is sanitized—it earns its R rating—but when, for example, a gun-blasting Alice faces down the zombie dogs, the lack of any but one split-second impact shot robs the scene of its power.
Then there’s the matter of the zombies themselves. Anderson has gone on record repeatedly about how dated he thinks George Romero’s monsters are, but what makes Romero’s movies resonate even today is that his creatures are more than targets in a shooting gallery. They are our deceased relatives come back to haunt us, the ultimate consumerist mass, a plague that neither our science nor our hardware can control. The difference can be summed up easily: In Dawn of the Dead, one character says of the ghouls, “They’re us”; in Resident Evil, they’re just props.
