Trailer for the film.
So as I've been saying, I went and saw Resident Evil Extinction tonight. I do have to admit that I thought the first was alright, and I liked the second one a little better. It helps that RE3 is in my mind the most fun Resident Evil to play, and that I recognized most of Toronto sitting in for Raccoon City. Plus they're certainly not the worst video game movies out there, they're not Doom or Bloodrayne II (Which I may also purchase and review).
My thoughts? I think I liked this movie.
BEFORE I BEGIN THOUGH: It pisses me off that the concession stand now takes debit. My movie starts in 10 minutes, they only just let me in now, I have a voucher for a #1 (Drink, popcorn, candy bar), and I'm standing in a line full of kids who are ALL paying with debit. THERE'S A GODDAMN MACHINE OVER IN THE FRONT WHERE YOU CAN BUY VOUCHERS FOR YOUR FOOD. BUY YOUR SHIT AHEAD OF TIME SO I DON'T HAVE TO PLAY "WHICH LINE IS MOVING THE FASTEST!". I need to start wearing my duster again so I can just smuggle food in.
Let's begin a rundown of the film in chronological order.
GIGANTIC SPOILERS! BUT I'M ASSUMING NONE OF YOU ARE GOING TO GO SEE IT ANYWAY, SO WHO GIVES A SHIT?
PROLOGUE: Movie starts. We're shown a few clips from the first film where Alice wakes up, gets her dress, etc. No narration. She opens a door and the laser corridor is right there. Odd. The laser goes off once. She has to hop up to avoid it. Then the laser grid comes at her. She escapes it by hopping up into a vent (Yeah...). She crawls through, hops out, and is now in the hospital from the end of the film. Huh? She walks through, then is shot in a trap that triggers, and dies. Guys in white suits take her body. We see a shot of Dr. Issacs (Scientist from the end of the second film), looking a little disappointed
Scene shifts to a desert setting. They throw the body into a giant pile of Alice corpses. Camera pans out. It's a fenced off area in a desert with plenty of zombies banging on the fences.
RESIDENT EVIL EXTINCTION
ACT ONE:Time for backstory! Turns out Umbrella didn't quite contain the infection as they had hoped. It spread throughout the US, and then the world. The T-Virus infected lots of other stuff, too. Lakes have dried up and forests have become deserts. The human race is on the brink of extinction. Their only choice is to band together and keep moving. Footage of a convoy full of people is shown. We can recognize Carlos Olivera and LJ from Resident Evil Apocalypse. What, no Jill? I'm heartbroken. She must have died.
We're treated to a bunch of scenes that remind us who the protagonist is. Alice is riding on a motorbike and picks up a distress call from a local radio station. She responds to it and is ambushed by a bunch of bandits who strip her of her weapons. One attempts to rape her and instead gets a swift kick in the face, killing him instantly.
The bandits knock her out and drop her into a pit. She's handcuffed and they throw her down a key. SHOCK SCARE! There's multiple cerberus (Zombie dogs) in cages surrounding her. They let them out. She dispatches them easily and frees herself, and causes part of the pit to cave, allowing her to escape. The dogs kill the bandits, she takes her gear and leaves.
The convoy's been broadcasting a signal looking for survivors. Alice hears it but shuts her radio off.
The convoy arrives at an abandoned motel. Their broadcast goes without response, so Carlos and LJ go in to investigate. LJ is ambushed by zombies and takes a bite in the chest. Carlos saves him, and they leave. LJ neglects to tell anybody about his bite, apparently just hoping it'll go away. The convoy moves on.
Alice stops by a gas station. She kills the zombified attendant and looks around the place. She doesn't find any supplies, but she finds a diary someone was keeping. The person keeping the diary was writing down transmissions received from Alaska, where apparently the infection has not reached, and people live happily there.
Back to the Umbrella facilility underground. It's a meeting among top level Umbrella officials. We're introduced to Albert Wesker, Chairman of Umbrella. Liek no wai. Well, they got the blonde hair and the sunglasses right. The voice is alright. The status of Umbrella facilities globally is discussed (The Paris facility is down to 50% food supply, whatever that means).
The whole "He needs the original Alice for his shit to work" thing might be brought up here, or further in the movie. I forget.
Dr. Issacs discusses his new approach for the zombies: He wants to domesticate them. He plans to come up with a vaccine that can restore some of the zombie's intelligence, enough to trigger memories and stabilize them. Wesker gives him the go-ahead. The meeting is adjourned. All the officials fade away like holograms. Neat. It sure beats the hell out of using Microsoft NetMeeting.
The convoy sets up shop for the night at a gas station. They hand out canned food to their survivors. "Nurse Betty" (Ashanti) treats a superficial head wound on LJ's forehead (Apparently missing the big bite mark on his chest). They flirt, etc. She leaves and LJ takes another good look at his wound. OH SHIT, IT'S STILL THERE!
Carlos is riding around on an ATV. He's setting up motion detectors and surveillance cameras so they can monitor their surroundings and be warned if they have incoming. Some light conversations, beddytime.
Alice has set up camp somewhere, and is trying to sleep. She's having flashbacks about the first two movies (Mostly the first one) and all the while her ESPN shit is going off and rocks are levitating. Her dream reaches it's climax and she awakens, causing rocks and shit to drop all around. Her bike also drops and falls apart. Shit.
ACT TWO: Someone switched the reel and put Analyze That on instead. Just kidding. A zombie in a jumpsuit is secured to a chair in a small room with Dr. Issacs and two researchers. It's very violent until Dr. Issacs injects him with something. The zombie calms.
They begin handing it objects to see if it recognizes them. They hand it a cell phone. The zombie flips it up and tries to use it. They then hand it a digital camera. He flips up the zoom and takes a picture of them. The researchers conclude that Dr. Issacs has succeeded. The zombie begins playing with a larger toy with the shapes and different holes. He gets three of them in, then fails on the fourth. It gets pissed, breaks free and kills two of the researchers. Back to the ole' drawing board.
Alice is on foot walking through the desert.
It's morning at their campsite. All is calm until one of the kids gets a shock scare from a very irate crow. A murder of crows swarm the area and perch on rooftops and power lines. ROLL UP YOUR WINDOWS, KIDS! Everybody puts up their windows and remains quiet...until a kid knocks over an empty Pepsi can. A crow goes apeshit and the murder swings into action. We have two problems. #1: The convoy's ambulance (/w Nurse Betty and LJ) is stuck in the sand and can't go anywhere, and #2: The bus has crashed into a pole and isn't going anywhere. The crows are trying to break into the bus.
Action sequence ensues. They try to transfer the passengers of the bus into an army truck. Not surprisingly, more than a few are pecked off and killed in the process.
Alice notices all the crows and heads for the source of the commotion.
Someone mounts a flamethrower on top of a truck and makes use of it for a while until the crows peck him off. People die. LJ and Betty hold the windshield in place while people escape the bus.
Alice finally shows up. The flamethrower has gone haywire and is about to barbecue Carlos and a survivor. She uses her ESPN shit to prevent the flames from hitting them, then directs the flames upward and fries all the crows (The scene from the ads where there's inferno towering over Alice). She passes out and Carlos retrieves her.
Everyone's off the bus. Betty's been pecked a few times, so she remains behind as LJ screams for her. She shoots a few crows, then gets pecked to death.
Cue back to Umbrella facility. One of the officials is pissed because Dr. Issacs keeps commissioning missions for test subjects. This is the other part where he might have mentioned the "He needs the original Alice" thing. Another Alice fails the training course.
The convoy set up a memorial for their dead. LJ still hasn't told anybody about his bite. We're finally introduced to the leader of the convoy: Claire Redfield (in name only). Alice and Carlos discuss events after the second film. Carlos wonders why she left them. Alice says Umbrella was tracking her. She broke into a facility, took note of their satellite's movements, and stays off-grid to avoid detection. Unbeknownst to her, a retasked satellite has picked her up. Dr. Issacs runs the shot through a computer, where it estimates with a 62% probability that it's Alice. A hologram little girl is with Issacs, it's the same voice as the Red Queen from the first film.
Nighttime at the convoy's new nighttime post. Discussion breaks out. Carlos notes that morale is down and their numbers have dwindled. Alice busts out the diary and talks about Alaska. Claire insists that they don't need a pipe dream, but Carlos thinks they do. Claire puts it to a vote and the convoy decides it's Alaska or bust.
Issacs meets with Chairman Wesker. He brings up how there's a 62% chance he's found Alice, and asks for the resources necessary to capture her. Wesker denies his request, telling him to come back when he's got 100% certainty it's her. Pissed, Issacs shoops Wesker's voice into a command approving the resources he needs.
They need supplies, so they bust out a map and decide where to go. They suggest one spot, but Alice says the place is empty (Perhaps the gas station she was at before?). Claire suggests Vegas. They're reluctant to visit a city, but odds are there's gear there since nobody else would want to touch a city, so the convoy goes over there.
Two helicopters leave the desert outpost, one with a crate in tow.
The convoy arrives in Vegas. It's a bit sandy there. LJ, who's not feeling so good anymore, points out that one of the casinos has gas pumps for their valets (He dropped 2Gs there once), but there's a giant crate blocking their way. They get out to winch it and pull it out of the way, but Alice tells them to wait. She puts her ear to the crate and figures something's wrong. Steps back, GIANT ARMY OF JUMPSUIT ZOMBIES.
Loud gunshots. Lots of blood. Lots of Alice slicing zombies heads off. An entertaining action scene worthy of Resident Evil 4. LJ hides in one of the trucks with "K-Mart" (They found her there, Alice yacked with her in some previous scene).
Issacs is monitoring Alice onsite. The idea is for her to be killed, then retrieve her body so they can get her blood. But she's putting up a fight. Oh yeah, lots of people die. Like almost every adult other than anybody I've mentioned, and some of the kids.
Apparently, with the shit they put in her, they can "shut her down", so they power down Alice. She just stands there while people get the shit kicked out of them.
LJ finally turns into a zombie. He goes after K-Mart, but Carlos saves her. He plugs LJ in the head, but not before LJ can bite his arm. The T-Virus seems a lot slower than it did in Apoc: It took Sgt. Peyton a few hours to zombify, but it took two full days for LJ to succumb to it.
Alice is fighting the shutdown. She manages to fry the satellite with her ESPN shit and comes back. She rushes the tent with Issacs and kills all the guards, but Issacs escapes to the chopper. He's bitten by a zombie in the process and flees. Alice has a chance to board the chopper but she refuses. It's not revealed if they finished off all the zombies, but Alice reveals to the group that she didn't board the chopper because now they can follow it to wherever it goes.
They follow to the source and monitor it with binoculars. Alice needs to get in there. She figures they ought to have the anti-virus for Carlos, but he doesn't seem to want it. They start hatching a plan to get in there.
ACT THREE:Back inside the facility. The same whiny exec from before confronts Issacs, who's under house arrest. He's injected himself with about five different somethings (I forget if they were the vaccine or not). Chairman Wesker has ordered Issacs killed, so the exec plugs Issacs twice. He falls over. Well I guess we're done here and OH SHIT ISSACS GETS BACK UP AND OH SNAP THERE'S TENTACLES ON HIS ARM AND HE PULLS OUT THE EXEC'S EYES AND SHOVES A TENTACLE DOWN HIS THROAT AND FUCKING KILLS EVERYBODY
Issacs has become what I guess I call Stage Two Nemesis. In RE3, once Nemesis loses the top half of his coat, gets tentacle powers and shit, which is basically what Issacs has become: What Nemesis SHOULD have been in the first movie. He's not fully a tyrant since he lacks gigantic claws or an exterior heart, but it's certainly very cool: An actual Resident Evil end boss.
The convoy's plan is as follows: Carlos rushes the crowd in their tanker-plow-thing and crashes. He blows up a bomb he has with him, clearing a path for the rest of them to drive into the fenced area. Claire and Alice get everybody aboard the chopper, and Claire escapes with the survivors, never to be seen for the rest of the film. I'm gonna assume they've survived because there'll probably be a fourth RE film and with Carlos and LJ dead, we've got nobody to carry over to a fourth film.
I would like to point out at this point that there's been pretty much no character development, but Resident Evil has never had any character development in the games. Oh I know some people may try to tell me that Steve Burnside had development in CODE: Veronica, but that's just bullshit. He's a 17 year old pre-emo emo. The only reason he warmed up to Claire was because he wanted to bone her. You put an irate 17 year old in confines with an attractive woman and eventually he's going to start thinking with his
Alice goes inside and is greeted by the White Queen. "I knew your sister. She was a homicidal bitch." WQ reveals to Alice that the cure for the T-Virus is in her blood and she can prepare all of the cures she wants on-site, but there's a problem. Issacs is sealed in the lower chambers and he needs to be dealt with first.
Alice stumbles upon one of her clones still in stasis. Then Issacs comes at her and they duke it out. She slices at him with her machetes but all his wounds heal themselves. She manages to cause him to retreat while her clone awakens and falls to the ground. It seems as though it dies, so she covers it with her jacket.
Alice follows Issacs into the training course that the Alices were going through at the start of the film. A fight breaks out in the mansion hallway and it seems for the most part that Alice has the upper hand, but Issacs fights back and the fight moves into the laser hallway.
The Alice clone isn't dead, and reawakens.
Issacs kicks the shit out of Alice and looks ready to finish her off. He declares him superior over her (Much like Cain thought between Alice and Nemesis in Apoc), and Alice just laughs. She says he's just another asshole, and the Alice clone activates the lasers. Issacs gets grid'd, and Alice uses her ESPN to stop the lasers from hitting her.
CUT TO BLACK.
EPILOGUE: We're shown some footage of zombies lurching around...Tokyo? The camera pans underground to yet another meeting of Chairman Wesker and his cronies. They haven't heard from their North American facility in 17 hours, so they consider it lost.
Apparently they have new plans, but we don't find out what they are because Alice interrupts the meeting with her own hologram. She says she's coming for them, and she's bringing her friends with her.
She fades out. The clone is standing next to her. The camera pans over to the clone storage area, where a shitload of Alices in stasis begin to awaken.
CREDITS.
VERDICT: It's better than the first two films, and the pacing is alright. You don't learn everybody's names, but most of them don't stay alive long enough for it to matter. You can give it a pass unless you had a passing interest in the first two films. I give it two stars out of four.
QUESTIONS LEFT UNANSWERED:
-What happened to Jill Valentine and Angela Ashford from Apoc?
-Where did Claire and co. go?
-Is Alaska really a safe haven?
I'd also like to point out that never once in this film do you see Milla's bare boobs.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pass out now.
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