January 17th, 2008
 By now, you either love or hate the film versions of Capcom's widely successful zombie video game series, Resident Evil.
Me? Well, I'm pretty much indifferent to the movie treatments as I could care less if the franchise continued or not, but for some unknown reason, I still find myself watching them on DVD or in the theater whenever they're released. I didn't really hate the first one in 2002 or Apocalypse in 2004, but I wasn't head over heels and doing Diddy Kong cartwheels for them either.
My main gripe has always been the fact that Paul W.S. Anderson, a director/writer who has more misses (The first Alien vs. Predator and Dead or Alive spring to mind) than hits, has written a movie series that pays more of a tribute to the source material rather than directly following it. Even as a light Resident Evil player (I have only played through Resident Evil 4 on my Gamecube due to my personal dislike of the control scheme of the past games), I'm cognizant of the detour it's taken as far as the story arc goes. It's not even acknowledged as part of the canon for Pete's sake!
Instead of taking one road or the other for the main narrative, these bastards have thrown their hands in the air and figuratively said "fuck it" before deciding to take the dirt road in the middle and getting completely lost. The only thing that's here to remind you it's probably a Resident Evil film and not some low rent sci-fi/action flick like Aeon Flux or Ultraviolet are the zombies.
If you've seen the first two, you're well aware of the main character and former Umbrella employee of the month, Alice (Milla Jovovich). She's basically developed into this extraordinary super-human badass that defies all logic. Some of the things she does are quite absurd and over the top, but I'll cover that later in the review.
First, I have to explain a few things..
Color me stupid, but I thought those Umbrella ass clowns nuked Raccoon City at the end of the last movie? Hmm, apparently I was wrong because it's quickly explained that the T-Virus was unable to be contained and, as a result, has spread worldwide and there are very few survivors. Well, isn't that dandy; I'm dead. Hopefully I got eaten alive by a hot female zombie while blogging about the amount of fuckery that was going on outside my house.
It's also said that the oceans, rivers, and lakes have dried up and basically every animal has become infected. Okay, the infection thing I understand, but what the lime flavored fuck does the T-Virus have to do with the frickin' water supply? They just wanted an excuse to have this crap in the desert to rip off Mad Max. Anyways...
One of Umbrella's top scientists, Dr. Sam Isaacs, has been making clones of Alice (thanks to a blood sample) in hopes of developing a "cure" for the already infected to save what remains of the human race -- oh sure, they'll still be zombies and have bad breath and horrible skin, but they'll have some of their reasoning skills and humanity restored (smart undead = TEH WIN!!!111!!1 although this happened naturally in fellow zombie flick, Land of the Dead). Unfortunately, all of the cloned subjects end up dying in field tests and it becomes Isaac's main objective to recapture the original Alice due to her blood's ability to bond with the T-Virus.
That poses a problem as she has turned into quite the nomad over the last few years and is constantly on the move because a) staying in one place for an extended period of time makes you zombie food and b) Umbrella can track her via Satellite whenever she uses her funky monkey powers (again, more on that later).
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