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Resident Evil: Extinction
Romero made simple
2005
Review: October 5, 2007
Director: Russell Mulcahy
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Ali Larter, Iain Glen, Ashanti
Sure!
THE SETUP:
Group of survivors battle zombies who have taken over the world.
DISCUSSION:
I don’t know why I love this series so much. The first one was unexpectedly fun, the second dumber, but still fun, and this one had me smiling in stupid glee from the first frame. Even the cliché slow-motion shots of Milla Janovich’s boots striding through the desert sand had me delighted.
Milla wakes up nude in the shower. She finds a red dress on her bed, then comes out in the dress and her combat boots. She makes it through the laser-hallway from the first film and almost outside, when she finally buys it. Then they throw her in a pit and we see a whole dump full of dead Millas. Then it’s exposition time: the whatever virus has spread all across the world, killing almost everyone, and now there’s just a few bands of survivors left. The real Milla, motorcycling through the desert, is one of them.
So is Ali Larter as Claire Redfield. She leads a convoy of trucks with survivors as they try to stay alive. Also with them is Oded Fehr as Carlos, looking a bit less pumped-up than last time, but still nummy. Also alive is Iain Glen as the evil Dr. Isaacs, employee of the Umbrella Corporation, the ones who unleashed the virus on the world. He’s been making clones of Milla [hence the dump] and testing their survival skills, and also developing a serum to domesticate the zombies. The shots of the zombies surrounding a fence in the desert and the whole project of domestication are lifted wholesale from Day of the Dead. I think it’s funny that in order to see if the zombie remembers anything of his previous life, they hand him a cellphone and digital camera. Why not just take him to Best Buy and see what he picks out?
Anyway, it seems that among the women of the post-apocalypse, only the supermodels have survived. Claire is joined by Ashanti and a few other babes, while the guys, aside from Carlos, are the random assortment of motley schlubs. We also discover that Milla now has psychic powers, which she uses to lift rocks while sleeping. Now, between this and X-Men 3, you have to wonder why all these women with psychic powers expend all their energy on uselessly lifting rocks. Couldn’t they put their powers toward something more productive, like needlework? Bread baking? Cleaning my apartment?
SPOILERS > > >
So after the zombie crow attack [with explicit call-outs to The Birds], Milla and Claire’s crew hook up. Milla has heard that there are survivors and no virus in Alaska, so they decide to go there, stopping off in Vegas for fuel. Apparently one doesn’t want to go into big cities, because there are more zombies there. They go, and we see a lot of the desert-Vegas footage from the trailer.
But the nefarious umbrella corp is going to trap Milla there and use her blood for their super-serum or whatnot. They bring a carton-o-zombies there—and they sure can fit a whole bunch into that tiny container—and we have this massive zombie-off in Vegas. Isaacs gets bit, and they try to control Milla via satellite [they implanted mind-control doodads at the end of the last movie], but Milla resists. Isaacs gets bitten, goes back to the lab and starts shooting up with massive doses of the experimental antivirus he has. Soon he’s totally mutated and can extend his long fingers to poke out people’s eyes from across the room.
Now, a surprising number of the team got wasted in the Vegas battle, and even more buy it at the end—it’s a big, knock-down fight. Milla sends Claire and friends off to Alaska [neatly creating a future heroine should Milla opt out of the next installment], and goes in to battle the Isaacs-beast in the final showdown.
< < < SPOILERS END
I loved it. Maybe it’s just because I’m now 100% on board with the entire series, but this one seemed the best and most fun of the bunch. This series is to the Romero zombie films as The Fly II is to Cronenberg’s The Fly: It takes the ideas you love, but crafts them into a fun thrill ride instead of the thoughtful dissection of society’s ills we’ve come to know from the Romero films. And I am totally fine with that!
Milla continues her indomitable awesomeness. I’d love to see her and Jamie Lee Curtis team up to kick ass. She really throws herself whole-heartedly into these roles—even the disastrous Ultraviolet—and her conviction really draws one in. It’s enough to make me consider watching her Joan of Arc movie again. Ali Larter, a favorite since her delightfully snotty turn in Final Destination 2, is good enough, but not quite as fun. We need to get some Eliza Dushku in here. Everyone else is fine.
Now I know that this is considered crappy horror, like not even semi-serious [which is fine by me], but you do have to acknowledge that this series constantly ups the ante and continues the storyline’s logical progression, moving forward while cutting off ways to go back. If they were completely lazy they could have made three movies with Milla fighting ever-growing waves of zombies and new species of zombie animals. Here they’ve killed off almost all of humanity, and that leaves them with few options on what to do next. Although this movie states clearly what we’re to expect in the next installment—and I’m already checking to see if tickets are available.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you like the series or like zombie movies and aren’t too serious.
