Resident Evil: Extinction Movie Review

In 2002 something unusual happened.  A “B-movie” video game inspired film jumped off the screen with an interesting plot, dynamic characters, and wild story twists.  The first Resident Evil film was a true surprise.  It was a gem of a sci-fi monster movie among duds.  This was primarily because the film’s director, Paul Anderson found some magic in the story.  As a screenwriter and a producer of the proceeding “Resident” films, he has never again been able to reignite that initial spell which created one of the better films of his career.

In Resident Evil: Extinction, Alice (Milla Jovovich) is back hiding out deep in the Nevada desert.  As she struggles for justice outside of a ruined Las Vegas, the woman continues her quest to kill zombies and track the evil corporation responsible for the Earth’s demise.

Gone in this sequel are the plot twists.  Gone are the mysteries.  And gone is the quality of the first film.  All this disappeared with the second film, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the third film of the series has many of the same problems.

If filmography has taught us one thing, it’s that following the apocalypse the only people to survive will be young and sexy.  Overweight people, old people, the disabled and most minorities don’t seem to make it through any of the cinematic apocalypses that have been devised over the last century of filmmaking.  From The Terminator to The Matrix, from The Day After Tomorrow to Independence Day, post apocalyptic drama is chocked full of sexy people surviving an event that might be considered the end of the world.

Resident Evil: Extinction is perhaps the most blatant example of this type of thinking.  The cast is dominated by hot women who have perfect make-up, perfect bodies, and perfect “adventure” clothing which reveals all of their perfect assets.

What shouldn’t be overlooked in this seriously flawed film is the fact that the female roles are scripted as strong and independent women.  Regardless of wardrobe, this movie is about women sacrificing and ultimately saving the world. 

Jovovich’s Alice in particular is an archetypal “Moses” character.  She is a sin eater, a remnant of the old world, she must lead the innocent to the Promise Land; but because she is part of the problem, she herself cannot enter the sanctuary of the Promise Land.  We’ve seen this all before.  Remember Mad Max?  Remember The Postman?  Remember Waterworld?  How about the Old Testament?

The difference here is that this character is a woman.  And this is a very interesting development.  It says a lot about action movies, it says a lot about film audiences, but it might even say more about a society that has a history of marginalizing women.  This archetypal character is not traditionally female…so there has been some feminist progress in a testosterone driven genre, the sci-fi zombie action flick.  It’s too bad that it had to come under the guise of a poorly written, poorly directed and ultimately just plain bad video game adaptation.