Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

 

100 Best Science Fiction Movies from Slant Magazine

 

#87. Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

 

Umm … why is this on a “Best of …” list?

 

OK, a little back ground. With the film “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) Director and co-Writer George Romero created a whole new Monster, Zombies as we know them now, as opposed to Zombies as they used to be. Romero was endlessly imitated, but also deftly expanded upon, and now his Zombies have even more relevance in our Culture than “Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus” (novel by Mary Shelly 1818).

 

Jump forward more-than 50-years, and this film is the fifth of a six movie same franchise all Written and Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (there was also a TV series and a reboot film I’m desperately trying to ignore). They were powerhouses, at the time the single most financially profitable Zombie franchise, Horror franchise, and Movie-Based-on-a-Video-Game franchise, in history.

 

The game, “Resident Evil” goes back to 1996, the first film was 2002. I’ve never played the game and hate every single one of films.

 

The first film paled before the same year’s suspenseful, emotionally-wrenching, more truly epic, “Twenty-Eight Days Later.” The first film enjoyed the biggest-budget of any Zombie movie to-date, had lavish Production Values and the latest FX, and made a hell of a lot more money than anything else even remotely-related -- but it was all soul-less spectacle. No heart, no suspense, and no statement.

 

The first was at least simple-and-straight-forward, but as the series progressed it made less-and-less sense because the increasing complexities weren’t as much to add to the mythology as to invent new excuses for Set-Pieces. If I can summarize Anderson’s work into three words, they would be NOISE! SPEED! SET-PIECES! And I’ll grant he’s excellent at all, but really dudes, man cannot live on these three breads alone.

 

In the first one Alice (Milla Jovovich, whom Anderson would soon marry in the Real-World) awakes with amnesia (GOD! I hate that Trope!) and is surrounded by Special Forces Operatives with impressive guns. She’s then dragged down to Hell, a Secret Underground Facility owned by Evil Umbrella Corp. Umbrella’s been doing Bio-Weapons Research and things have gotten out-of-control, an apparent accident (turns out to be Industrial Espionage combined with Terrorism) has unleashed the Zombie virus. When the boys and girls from Special Forces realize this, they and Alice have to fight their way back up to the surface and Freedom, fighting Zombies and a Homicidal AI every step of the way. Their quest mimics the levels of video game play. When Alice escapes, it’s obvious that the Zombie virus is loose in the World.

 

As the series moves forward, we learn that Alice was a Test Subject and, because the virus works differently on her than most others, so she’s also a Super Soldier not a Zombie. Also, the Zombies keep Mutating into bigger and badder Monsters. In the third film we learn Umbrella Cloned Alice into an Army, but the Clones are still her, so, they side with her against Umbrella. The clones are (apparently) all killed. During Alice’s battles across a Ruined Earth, she makes allies, but almost all die. One of them, Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) is kidnapped by Umbrella and turned into a Flesh Robot in the fourth film. As most of the World is a Post-Apocalyptic landscape there some reason to ask “How is Umbrella Corp remaining so impossibly well-resourced after the end of the World?”

 

The first film concerns Umbrella’s Main Facility, but wait, it wasn’t. There’s another Main Facility. Then another. Then another. So, the story-telling remains trapped in the repetitiveness of simulating video-game play-levels.

 

Which brings us to the first scene of this installment, which is the best scene in the movie. It’s a continuation of the final scene of the previous installment but filmed in reverse. Alice is drowning, her body rises, bubbles swirl around her, she explodes from to ocean, flying back towards her ship and the explosion that blew her off of it, her guns jump back into her hands, the bullets go back into the barrels, etc.

 

OK, I admit it, that one scene was cool.

 

Then the next scene is her having a Nightmare about the first day of the Zombie Apocalypse, except it isn’t (and it’s stolen whole cloth from the far-superior “Dawn of the Dead” (2004)). You’ll have to sit though half the film to understand what’s really going on in this scene, and once you do, you realize there was no logical cause-and-effect at play. The next scene is Alice being interrogated by Robot Jill. Then someone mysteriously facilitates Alice’s escape from her cell, but she’s still trapped in the Facility and the following action is more illogically video-game-like than anything previous in the series.

 

She encounters Cloned versions of characters who died in previous films and the Zombies are pretty unimportant in this installment. Finally, she escapes the Facility with both old and new Allies and is told to prepare for the next film and the end of the series.

 

Let me present the entire plot differently, she’s captured, escapes, and the plot doesn’t move forward one iota. During this very violent, well-staged, complete waste-of-time, the alleged script seems to take a Demonic glee in creating more-and-more holes in the plot that isn’t even really there in the first place.

 

None of the relationships are developed or explored, merely assumed because Anderson insists on them. Alice has her maternal instincts triggered by one of the Clones, Becky (Aryana Engineer), in an absurdly clumsy borrowing from the relationship between Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn) from “Aliens” (1986). Becky not only looks like Newt; Anderson even throws in that Becky is deaf for extra-pandering.

 

Some of the Acting is flat-out-terrible, but then the Actors are given basically nothing to work with. Jovovich is not without talent but all this film asks is that she looks good, keep up with the complicated Fight Chorography (by Nick Powell) and glare with intensity at her Adversaries. Michelle Rodriguez, playing two very different Clones, is a bright spot.

 

OK … Why is Alice still being chased and captured? If the Flesh Robots are so good, Alice is devalued. Also, since the Clones are obviously easily programable, so why do they need Flesh Robots? Why aren’t Alice’s Clones as easily Programable as everyone else’s? Why do people keep paying good money to see this?

 

Critic Clark Collis added, “It’s tempting to say that Anderson is not really in the ‘Why?’-answering business.”

 

Critic Jaime N. Christley, responsible for putting this film on this list, praised the movie with bizarre compliments like “exudes a kind of anti-story hostility … Anderson was content to alight the saga on a perpetual rewind loop, ever-ending, ever-rebooting,” which don’t sound all-too complimentary to me. In fairness, she follows up with, “all subsidized by his nonpareil compositional sense … with nonstop movement and fury.”

 

Collis added, “Lunatically haphazard and dementedly enthusiastic.”

 

Trailer:

RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION (3D) - Official Trailer - In Theaters 9/14 - YouTube