The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [4 out of 10]

Resident Evil: Extinction is a terrible, terrible movie.

For fans of the games or even of the 1st or 2nd movie, just turn and walk the other way. Hidden deep in this script are literally 2 good ideas that get 3 mins of screen time, while the remaining 87 mins is garbage that will have you cringing at least 4, likely 5, times while watching it… and I guarantee you will check your watch at least twice.

Backstory

The lore behind the Resident Evil series of games has always revolved around the evil, multi-national, world-controlling Umbrella Corporation creating a virus (the T-Virus) that reanimates the dead. That was the original story at least. Over the years the story had to mutated to become more complex in order to make way for the 8-10 games, 8-10 books and 3 movies that followed. None of the new tellings really connecting that well with the last… and even having some games in the middle of the series carrying on from previous stories while the one before and after have no connection.

There is usually a hearkening back to “Raccoon City”, the location of the original out break of the T-Virus, but then the rest is all made up on the spot to make way for the story in that particular game or movie.

This isn’t so bad though… usually the creative monsters, great settings (e.g. Resident Evil 4) and memorable battles with bosses sit in your memory as a fun adventure.

As far as I know of the Resident Evil series, the movies never followed the games or books… they sort of decided on what they liked, filled in some blanks, combined some story lines and ran with it. The elements that were huge in the game were never carried over to the movies and the characters were reimagined quite a bit differently. Although Resident Evil 2 gets props for actually attempting to execute the Nemesis character, one of my favorites in the Resident Evil lore.

Story

It’s hard writing this section without simply saying “it was fucking stupid”. The story in 3 is so full of holes both in the grand story arc, but also in each individual scene. You will find yourself saying stuff like “Why the hell did he just do that? Just shut the door!” or “OMG that’s such bullshit, they would just go over here!” constantly… I said it about 10 or 15 times during the movie, it is completely un-enjoyable.

NOTE: I am making an assumption here that you don’t hate yourself when I claim the movie is un-enjoyable. YMMV.

The premise of 3… I think (keep in mind, I took a break because I was so bored/embarrassed for this movie)… was that the world has been decimated by the T-Virus… which also changed the climate of the entire world and dried it out. So I guess the T-Virus made our planet sweat it’s 75% water mass into space or some shit.

Anyway, there is no place safe anymore on the planet, there are small bands of people that are rogues and constantly moving around. The main rogue band consists of Ali Larter (as Claire Redfield, which is nothing like Claire’s character in the games or books) and Oded Fehr, who plays Carlos from Resident Evil 2. Fehr seemed unable to deliver his lines with out smiling in this movie… I got the impression he wanted to laugh at most of his lines due to retardation-overload from the script… I hope he got paid a lot.

Anyway, Alice, is still a bad ass from the T-Virus “binding with her cells” which no longer just makes her strong and fast like in #2, oh no, she now has telekinesis… for the simpletons out there, she’s a freaking Jedi. She has force-push now apparently.

When she first runs back into the band of rogues she puts up a force field around her buddy Fehr and saves him from fire, then redirects the fire into the sky, into a mile-wide cloud cover that burns like 1000 crazy infected crows that were attacking the rogue band.

NOTE: This was visually, the only cool part of the movie. I think they out-sourced this 1, 10 sec scene, because it looked awesome… and the rest of the movie looked the opposite of awesome. You can sort of see it in this shot:

besides the fire being cool in this scene, Alice’s eyes also dilate to cat-sized-pupils when she uses her Jedi Force powers, which is twice in the entire movie.

So Alice saves them and hangs out with them. Then, using the diary she found off of a dead guy at a gas station that has all sorts of pictures and incomplete sentences about Alaska being safe (yes, the main plot line is determined by a conveniently located diary with all the information they need).

The best part about the diary is how it’s written… it’s not written like a normal person would write it, it’s full of phrases and half-sentences that are either written over and over for dramatic effect (for the viewer) or it will be some picture and then something like “Alaska safe. NO ZOMBIES. NO INFECTION”. There are no coherent/complete sentences in this diary and it’s chalk full of information, facts, maps, etc. about Alaska. Which makes sense, since she found it off of a dead guy in the middle of Vegas. So I guess he went there, recorded everything like a rambling idiot, wrote it all down in incoherent blobs, then headed back to Vegas and died. WOOPS.

So they decide to all head there.

At that same time, Umbrella corp has used their “satellite grid” to home in on Alice (cause she is controlled by satellite… which makes sense… since they just made that up and wrote it into the script) and they decide to capture her. So they air-drop a cargo container full of psycho zombies. The key here… is that it was a cargo container, but if you actually count how many zombies come out of the thing, and are killed, it’s more like 112. I have no idea how more than 20 zombies fit in there, but this movie is already so good, I just shrugged.

Anyway, Umbrella tries to turn off Alice, she “fights back” and her brain breaks the CPU on the satellite and then she goes after Umbrella. At this point the cliched evil doctor gets bitten, so now he’s infected. (SPOILER: He’s the main bad guy, he OD’s on anti-T-Virus serum back at base and turns into a Zombie-Squid… which looks ridiculous and the end fight is about 2mins long and I think consists of 3 punches).

Alice takes the entire squad, they go after Umbrella to this base station (exactly like “The Hive” from #1) in the middle of the desert, the rogue group gets on the helicopter and flies to Alaska and Alice goes down the elevator to fight the boss.

NOTE: I am getting tired writing this… it’s so stupid.

They fight, she uses Jedi Powers on him, he uses them back on her, then the laser-grid from #1 is used to kill him finally. Alice finds all the clones they created of her, so they could research her blood, and she decides to activate them all and go after Wesker, who is holed up in Japan in another bunker.

And that’s how the movie ends. Congratulations, you are stupider for knowing that script now.

Visuals & Sound

The sound is decent, nothing outstanding. The visuals are run of the mill, not bad and not great, except for the one fire scene where she throws up her force field to save them… that was awesome looking.

Conclusion [4 out of 10]

If you scrolled down to the conclusion first, this movie is terrible. Besides the entire script and enormous holes in the logic the characters follow and the leaps of faith the script makes, Sony is there the entire movie to remind you that Sony makes stuff.

This seems like an odd point to make, but when every single electronic device in the movie is boldly labeled SONY and shown to you over and over again, to the point where you are noticing the label more than you are the movie… you realize this this movie isn’t a movie, it’s just a giant commercial. Sony knows this movie is garbage, so they stick there name everywhere in it, knowing kids will ask their parents for it, and then let the kids watch it, associating “Sony” with cool things.

Uggggg…

This movie, simply put, is an over-the-top commercial for Sony. The plot is so worthless and characters so shallow and stupid you can’t really call this a movie… it’s more like a… visual diarrhea.

Areas of Improvement

To be fair, I’ll try and critique individual things that should be different to not make this a nightmare-inducing shitfest of a movie:

• Make the characters more believable. Choosing good looking, popular comedy actors and musicians to play the roles of key parts in an “end of the world” movie is ridiculous.
• Create better moments of suspense, if 1 more zombie jumps out from behind a door to grab someone, I’m going to shit out of my eyes.
• Make the dialog better than garbage.
• Milla doesn’t need to cry when she delivers every single one of her lines. It’s like Anderson told her to deliver every line like it was her last… ugggg.
• We don’t need super-zombies that run/attack/climb as fast as trained ninjas just because some scientists in a lab made a break through and got one to use a cell phone (I’m not kidding, this is one of the story elements).

and last but not least, the most important way to make the movie better:

• make it a different movie.