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Movie Review: Resident Evil

Resident Evil was one of the few videogames I was actually able to play all the way through, and I enjoyed it enough to also get my way through a couple of the sequels. So when friends were going to see the movie, I thought it would be worth a student ticket to try it out. Having Milla Jovovich in it didn't hurt, either. I didn't really expect much out of it, but it was decent enough, having some fun action scenes, some good tense build-up, and zombies. Who doesn't love zombies? They used some of the game aspects in nice ways - computer read-outs, fixed-position cameras, and the sounds of approaching monsters. The scene on the train recalls one of the games (the third one?) although the monster FX are pretty terrible there. The movie could have been a lot better, though - the build-up was a little slow, the memory loss was used as an excuse to have a character narrate what was going on, and after the initial zombie scenes things started to move a little too slowly. A few action scenes were poorly directed, where it was hard to follow what exactly went on while they were running from zombies in some tunnels. And the climax was followed by a few too many scenes building up to the ending that seemed to disappoint the audience I was with. I kind of liked it - a definite nod to the video game, but also a cheesy set-up of a sequel. I also would have liked a little more problem solving to get out of some of the scenes they were in, and I would have loved to see more zombie fighting, especially if they had gone and gotten more weapons. Maybe that would have been too video-game-y! Milla did a reasonable job, although there wasn't a whole lot of dialog in this, but she was lucky that many of the cheesy lines went to other people.

Overall, if you want a good zombie shoot-em-up, you could do worse than this. If you liked the videogames, you'll probably get a kick out of it. If you want to see anything you haven't seen before, you should probably skip it.