Batwoman S01E02 Review: Sister Act

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 2: The Rabbit Hole

As we continue with the second episode of Batwoman, we jump head-long into the Kate/Beth sisterly storyline, and it's... it's interesting? It's not the first time that a superhero show has had the hero's missing, long-thought-dead relative end up being a villain (see also: Emiko Adachi, Astra, half the cast of Gotham), but I do think that the way that these first two episodes of Batwoman did go through the expected beats pretty well. The surprise revelation at the end of the pilot is a huge cliffhanger, and a good chunk of this episode has Kate -- and because she couldn't keep her mouth shut, the rest of the cast -- trying to figure out if Alice really is Beth. And as the audience, we know she 100% is, because to pussyfoot out of that revelation would be anticlimactic as hell, but Kate doesn't know that. And there's just that delicious bit of ambiguity when Alice whispers to Kate about how she might be Beth, or she might just model herself after what she read online. That's actually pretty well-scripted.

A lot of "The Rabbit Hole" makes use of this connection with Kate's past not to just establish the connection between Kate and Beth, but also how Kate connects with her father Jacob, her step-sister Mary, even with Luke and Sophia, and it's... it's pretty interesting. There's still a huge chunk of uncertainty to what Kate is doing as the (still-unnamed-in-the-show) Batwoman, and unlike CW's five other superhero shows, Kate doesn't see being Batwoman as her true calling or The Mission for the rest of her life. Sure, she's very focused in solving the Alice problem, and she's not taking the cowl off any time soon, but I do like how she acts pretty dismissive about claiming the title of Gotham's protector or what Batman's presence meant to the city. The episode doesn't shove it down our throats, but we do get enough scenes and background noise (quite literally, with Vesper's radio show) showing that Gotham City is hungry for a new Batman-like figure, while all Kate cares for at the moment is just Alice.

Of course, when Jacob reveals that they have shoot-to-kill orders for Alice, Kate quickly blurts out over breakfast about how "Alice is Beth", and Jacob sort of dismisses it as a particularly crazy fantasy by his daughter, who refused to move on... although looking at the scenes of the flashback to how the two of them coped after Beth's accident, it's not hard to see why Jacob is so unwilling to believe the fact that Beth might have survived -- particularly due to how unrelenting little Kate is in trying to find her sister, and the very tear-jerking scene when little Kate is just crying about why she didn't try harder to save her sister. Survivor's guilt at its finest.

Alice, meanwhile, continues to be in tiptop comic book villain form, quoting her Alice in Wonderland lines a lot more in this episode, set to the backdrop of murdering a bound old couple who now lived in the old Kane house, or to the dramatic confrontation that happens around halfway through the episode near the waffle stop. Alice/Beth is clearly insane, and she's all too happy to throw in doubt and fuck with Kate's mind... while also sending her minino Dodgson to murder the 'spare' sister. What a crazy, possessive lady!

Mary's storyline was seeded throughout the episode as something that was neat world-building but ultimately felt like it was just there to sort of set up the character for later. Oh, she's got an illegal clinic, clearly an interesting locale for a vigilante show. She ends up getting attacked and eventually rescued by Batwoman, which is pretty awesome... but then at the end of the episode, when Mary finally meets Kate again, we learn that Mary's been really trying to get close to her cold, aloof older step-sister but all Kate is concerned about is chasing the ghost of Beth. That's some pretty neat acting.

There's also the climax of Batwoman driving off to save Alice from drowning when her prison convoy got attacked with a bomb, with a neat showcase of Chekov's Bat-Rebreather, but ultimately it's a scene that raises more questions than answers. Is it part of Alice's huge gamble to escape? Is it a third party in play, and Alice just happens to get caught in the crossfire? Something else? Complicating matters is the fact that the final scene of the episode reveals that Kate's step-mom Catherine Hamilton (who's conspicuously absent after the little family breakfast scene) is apparently the one who hired the hitmen to attack Kate and steal the incriminating knife. Pretty interesting twist!

Family's clearly the huge theme of this episode, whether it's the interactions between Kate and Beth, Kate and Mary, Kate and Jacob (both past and present)... but the other parts of the show also work pretty well. Luke Fox is trying his best to live up to both his father and Batman's legacy, pointing out just how gung-ho Kate has been about everything, and he's an interesting 'guy in the chair' supporting character. In contrast, though, I felt like Sophia's storyline was a bit underwhelming. Nothing really wrong with that, of course, and I do like just how hard of a decision it must be for Sophia to move from her loyalty to Kate as an ex-girlfriend or to inform Jacob that Kate might be doing something stupid, but ultimately I find her character a bit too flat for my liking. Ultimately, though, it's still pretty fantastic superhero fare. I wouldn't go as far as to say that Batwoman so far has been like, revolutionary or anything, but it's definitely a very solid storyline and acting so far.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Kate casually name-drops Wonder Woman, which I'm 99% sure is the first time we've ever had any mention of the charactr in an Arrowverse show, other than Themyscira showing up as a cameo in Legends of Tomorrow. 
• Vesper Fairchild name-drops Robin while sarcastically noting that Batman might be at Robin's high-school graduation, confirming that at least a Robin exists in the Arrowverse. 
• Loeb Bridge, is either named after DC comics writer Jeph Loeb, or after the in-universe corrupt police officer Gillian B. Loeb, the commissioner of Gotham City before Gordon. 
• "You have our father's eyes" is taken straight from a conversation between Beth and Kate in the comics during one of their first arcs. The waffles thing is also from the comics, where going for waffles was a significant part of the comic-book Beth and Kate -- the incident that separated the sisters was being kidnapped during a trip to get waffles. 

Kamen Rider Zero One E08 Review: Horobi's Katana

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 8: The Beginning of Destruction Starts Here

So this episode is our very first two-parter, after a series of stand-alone episodes. It's actually pretty surprising, considering a lot of the Heisei-era shows tended to either be almost-exclusively comprised of two-parter story arcs or being completely episodic, and I'm definitely up for it if Kamen Rider Zero-One and the rest of the Reiwa era is a lot more flexible with swapping back and forth depending on the needs of the story. 

That said, though, the setup of this episode really does end up feeling like yet another Humagear-of-the-week, with the guest star this time around being the White-coat Angel Mashirochan, an absolutely lovely Humagear doctor, and in the midst of Aruto's antics, we get to see just how much more effective robot doctors and nurses are -- even if I'm not sure measuring a patient's weight by lifting them up with super-strength is kosher. And honestly, in a job where efficiency is key and where real-life medical staff tend to be overworked all to hell, it's actually a pretty neat bit of world-building for sure.

We get a bit more of comedy as Aruto goes through his failed-comedian routine in the hospital, before Fuwa goes through his routine, talking about how shit robot doctors are and how it makes him feel not quite right inside. He's a racist man, isn't he? Of course, Mashirochan immediately saves a random pregnant woman from falling, just to disprove Fuwa's point. 

While this is going on, we get the return of good ol' Dodo (Antatsu-chan, Assassin-chan, whatever you want to call him -- I prefer 'Dodo'). Horobi apparently recreated Dodo from a 'saved' previous iteration, but Dodo's attempts to hack a Humagear nurse in the hospital ends up being absolutely foiled because of the good security system or something, while Dodo continues to make funny faces. We get to see a whole lot of extinction-themed speeches from Horobi and Jin, talking about the large amount of humans they have to extinct-ize. So they decide to target Yua!

We also basically have the confirmation that Yua's mysterious Man In A Shadowed Room (tm) boss is a member of Zaia Industries, and it is Zaia that has been producing the other Progrise Keys that AIMS has been using. And their latest project is the Giga, a bunch of giant robots that could, theoretically, show up and reverse-hack rogue Magia. They look like a cross-breed between a Gundam and the giant Time Mazine from Zi-O.



The Metsubojinrai.net boys attack the AIMS facility, fighting against Yua, and we get a pretty cool sequence of an upgraded Dodo Magia (he's got swords!) and Kamen Rider Jin (who did get to dash into the Giga hangar and apparently attach a Zetsu-driver to one) fighting against Valkyrie's hornet form. It's kind of poor showing for poor Valkyrie and she does get tossed around a lot in this episode. Normally I would say that it's another showcase of the showmakers of a tokusatsu show using the lady as the sub-par fighter, but I'm not going to make that comparison now -- Valkyrie is outnumbered in all her fights in this episode, and it's not like we get a 'Vulcan/Zero-One is absolutely better'. While Valkyrie is busy fighting Dodo, Horobi steals a bunch of briefcase weapons, including a new toy, the Attache Arrow, which Jin shows off by using to knock out Valkyrie.

And... yeah, as Aruto, Izu and Fuwa show up, and they check up on the Giga, they... didn't think to look a bit further? I guess they sort of make a point of showing that our main characters considered the hack, but it still felt kind of an idiot ball on AIMS' part.

Yua ends up getting a check-up and an arm sling from Mashirochan, and, of course, Fuwa takes this time to go on a rant on those filthy robot doctors is 'bad for your health', causing Yua to snap at Fuwa and tell him to shut up and 'keep [his] biases out of this'. So far, Yua does fall pretty neatly in the pragmatic middle ground between Aruto's robot-love and Fuwa's robot-racism. Of course, it's at this point that Mashirochan randomly suggests that maybe Fuwa could get a brain scan if he's not feeling well -- something she's not about to say. The cast of the show attributes that to Mashirochan's care for her patients and humanity causing her to transcend her programming and her potentially gaining sentience, but it's my personal opinion that Mashirochan just none-too-subtly made a snarky insult at Fuwa's assholishness.

Anyway, after a bit of a check-up in Hiden and a brief exposition dump about how AI might achieve 'singularity' and Fuwa being absolutely ready to shoot poor Mashirochan in the head (even Yua stands in his way), the discussion about Fuwa's aggressive shoot-first-ask-questions-never behaviour gets tabled because the hacked Giga giant robot has escaped and is smashing up the hospital. We get a cool scene of Izu joining the other Humagear staff in saving the patients, which I liked.

The Mestu-boys show up, and we finally get the revelation that everyone was sort of suspecting (Jin was essentially confirmed, but Horobi's a bit more questionable), but not quite sure -- they are both Humagears, and they're hiding their weird ear-mechanical-piece thing under their bandana and hoodie respectively. Horobi does a bit of a katana-swirling thing as he gives a big bad guy speech about how the humagear will inherit the earth after humanity's extinction, before ordering the Giga to mass-hack all of the hospital staff. Some great acting from the very hopeful (and subsequently hope-crushed) Aruto as he tries to plead with Mashirochan, only to have her deliver an absolutely unsettling laugh and transform into a Trilobite Magia.

And then we have an absolutely awesome four-way transformation scene, including a sequence where Aruto's hopper buddy slams in from outer space and stomps Jin's falcon buddy straight into the ground, and the two of them clash around a bit before the henshin sequence is completed. Absolutely love this sequence. The action scene that happens next is also pretty cool, and I love the casual ease of Vulcan's Punching Kong form just charging forwards and knocking two Trilobites to the ground. Eventually we get a 1-v-1 between Zero-One and the Dodo Magia, and we get Izu just tossing Progrise Key after Progrise Key to Zero-One as he goes through the shark, bear and tiger forms before blowing up the Dodo Magia -- pretty cool sequence.

While all of this going on, Vulcan and Valkyrie fight against Jin and the trilobite mooks and they enter The Warehouse (tm). Valkyrie and Vulcan eventually team up against Jin and knock him down... only for Horobi to do a badass walk in and show off his katana again (I can't decide if it's cool or ridiculous, to be honest), talking about the 'day of revolution' and whatnot, before slapping his own Force Riser and transforming into Kamen Rider Horobi. Fuwa immediately recognizes Horobi as the mysterious figure from the tour guide episode, realizing that Horobi is the person responsible for Daybreak, and he goes absolutely ballistic.

While Jin fights Valkyrie and holds her back (we've been having a lot of Jin/Valkyrie fights in these past two episodes, huh?), Fuwa goes all crazy as he gets to see the person who's essentially responsible for all the grief in his life, and he unleashes everything he has, and we get some amazing screaming as he machineguns Horobi down with his toy gun-belt, before unleashing a rocket-fist finisher thing... but Horobi's both the new toy being promoted and also the main villain, and he is, of course, completely unscathed. After a brief usage of the Hercules Beetle key to unleash an attack with his bow, we get a cool sequence of Horobi kicking Vulcan in the neck and then walking away as a ridiculously large explosion eats up the warehouse. We even have some kanji for "Sting Dystopia" show up on screen, which I thought was pretty damn cool.

And the episode ends with the cliffhanger of Fuwa being completely and utterly destroyed (and also ineffective) against Horobi, and the Metsu-boys having both a small army of magia minions and a hacked Giga. Overall, it's going through what's essentially 'oh shit, time to get serious' part of the show as we properly introduce a main villain, and I'm curious to see how things will go for sure. A pretty top-notch episode, for sure. 

Random Notes:

• Different translation teams name the giant robot suits either "Giga" or "Giger". I'll go with the former until we get a more definitive romanization of the Japanese. 
• I kind of feel like the X-Ray segment with Aruto in the very first scene is to quash any theories of Aruto being a Humagear himself. Or at least as a misdirection. 
• The Dodo Magia being reset to its previous, pre-death memory and configuration doesn't just explain how the other guest-star AI managed to survive (in a fashion), but also how Jin lost the character development and doubts he got in the sixth episode, because he was reverted back into the crazy psycho man--child by Horobi when he first transformed!
• I'm not 100% clear if it's the Humagear in the hospital that are just extra hack-proof, or if Hiden Intelligence did a software update for all their Humagear between episode 7 and 8. 
• This episode is a goldmine for Izu doing hilarious things in the background. Basically every time they show up is glorious, but highlights among their antics include:
• Izu's "scanning for laughter: none found" little speedy head-spin.
• Izu pulling Aruto outof sight as he makes faces at Fuwa from a distance, unwittingly smashing Aruto's head into the wall next to him.
• Izu's little jumping away when the Giga's tentacle whips swoop down; and then also moving away before all the chaos of transformation occurs. 
• Izu copying Aruto's thumb-pointing-at-himself in the background when he's all "I'm the only one that can stop you!"
• Izu's over-the-head clapping after Aruto blows up Dodo. 
• Dodo flapping his arms uselessly as he transforms into the Dodo Magia is also absolutely adorable. 
• So, uh... what's up with Horobi posing around with that katana? I mean, sure is cool, but why?
• The 'chan' in Mashirochan's name isn't just a suffix because she's cute -- the Hiden data readout actually parses her name as 'Mashirochan', so it's actually part of her name. The same readout also notes that Mashirochan is "all serene", and has a little paragraph going "She has the name of an angel in white, she is loved by everyone, she is helping everyone, she is". Okay! 
• The Gimmick Watch:
• "Force Riser. Poison! Force rise: Sting Scorpion!" Horobi's transformation summons a scorpion buddy, who stings him in the chest before wrapping its claws and legs all around him. Sting Scorpion's attack is "Sting Dystopia". Unlike the good guys' finishers, Horobi's finishers show up in Kanji. 
• "Strongk! Hercules Beetle's Ability!" Apparently, the ability of a Hercules beetle is to shoot out green energy beams. Absolutely love the actually decent English in this season's toys. 
• We've got a bunch of additional named attacks, including the Flaming Kaban Dynamic (Flaming Tiger + Attache Calibur) and I think we've seen Power Punching Blast before?

Batwoman S01E01 Review: Protector of Gotham

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot

Batwoman is... it's a show that has garnered a lot of press even before it started. And as someone who blissfully ignored and wasn't even aware of the massive flame wars on youtube trailers and comic-book fan sites until five minutes before writing this review, I never really saw Batwoman as an attempt to shoehorn SJW-politics into superheroes, or gender-flipping Batman, or anything of that sort. In fact, watching through the first pilot episode of Batwoman, my reaction was more of "well, this is actually a pretty decent adaptation of the 52-era reboot of Batwoman!" And with Gotham over, it certainly does help to sort of fill in the Batman-TV-shaped hole in my heart.

The pilot episode for Batwoman is, surprisingly enough, an origin story for the character as she returns from her training all over the world back to Gotham City, in a time where Batman has mysteriously vanished for a couple of years. We learn a bunch about Kate Kane throughout the episode, and while her relationship to Bruce Wayne -- he's her cousin -- is brought up a couple of times throughout the episode, unlike Supergirl or Titans, Batwoman is allowed from the get-go to essentially tell her own story instead of being bogged down under the shadow of a bigger hero. There's a neat balance of having Kate Kane become the new defender of Gotham, while also at the same time she also treats the legacy that Bruce has left behind with respect.

The pilot episode essentially isn't super complex. Kate returns from training with strange mentors when her ex-girlfriend Sophie Moore is attacked and abducted during a ceremony in which the Bat-Signal was supposed to be shut down, in a crime perpetrated by a crazy woman calling herself Alice and quoting Lewis Carol's work. While originally training to find a spot in her father's crime-fighting organization the Crows, Kate ends up basically being pushed away by her father from any operation to find Sophie, in a combination of some father-doesn't-really-see-her-daughter-as-competent and Jacob Kane being pretty overprotective.

And the second act of the episode sort of... sets up Kate Kane's little investigation, as she initially goes on her own crusade, breaking into Wayne Industries and meeting nerdy ol' Luke Fox, meeting Alice herself and inexplicably being spared by her, and eventually discovering the Batcave after pressing a button placed underneath a display of Martha Wayne's pearl necklace. We also get to see Kate's backstor, where her mother and sister were presumed killed when Batman was going off to save a school bus, when Batman's bat-line failed to hold the car and caused it to plummet. It's an interesting dynamic of Kate respecting Bruce a lot but hating Batman, but very quickly comes to terms when she realizes the whole story... and ends up deciding to gang-press Luke Fox into helping her root out Alice and save Sophia. Donning a modified version of Batman's suit, Kate finally ends up fighting Alice and her men as Batwoman. Kate herself... has a neat personality? She's pretty low-key and subdued throughout much of the episode, being laser-focused at recovering her friend while also having enough of a sense of humour to do the odd sarcastic jab or two. Her personality is still sort of there, kinda-dour-but-not-gloomy.

A fair amount of the pilot's plot beats feel pretty expected. We get to see Kate Kane being a badass, we get to see the kooky sidekick, we get to see her backstory (including being kicked out of military school for being gay -- the LGBT part of the show is prominent without being too in-your-face about it) and we get to see her fight both outside of the suit and inside of it. As Batwoman, she eventually rescues Sophie and we get a cool sequence of her picking off Alice's men one by one before rescuing Sophie. Alice's plot is pretty standard fare for the psychotic Bat-villains of Gotham City, forcing Jacob Kane to either choose the life of his beloved subordinate (who's about to be thrown off a building), or do something about it and Alice will detonate the van full of bombs in the park. I'm not 100% sure what Alice's motivations are, but it's a pilot episode and I will settle for 'crazy Bat-villain'. (Also Sophie is married to a man at the end of the episode, but at this point I'm just 100% done in terms of love triangles in CW shows)

Of course, the enigmatic Alice's true identity quickly becomes apparent to the audience. Alice let off Kate Kane, and seems to know a lot about the 'daughter that her dad wants'. Plus, Luke Fox notes just how long Bruce had looked for Beth's body and never found it. Eventually, after a certain necklace's gemstone ends up (rather conveniently) appearing in the hilt of Alice's dagger, Kate suspects that Alice might be Beth... while the audience gets straight-up confirmation that, yes, crazy ol' Alice is Beth, who survived the fall and now plots to essentially take over Gotham City with her sister. A lot of this doesn't really fully make sense, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt since we're still in the pilot stage. I just appreciate that they didn't stretch out this revelation for like the entire season or whatever.

Ultimately... the pilot episode's a pretty uneven but interesting one. A lot of it, I feel, stems from the fact that the show doesn't seem to find a right balance on not treating the audience like idiots (like, y'all know what Gotham City's all about, right?) and also delivering massive expositions. There are also some parts of the pilot episode that felt a bit iffy -- Sophie being noted as "the daughter that Jacob Kane always wants" felt like a random detail out of nowhere. Ultimately, though, it's a neat show that feels like a pretty great Batwoman adaptation. It's not without its faults, but I did like what I saw.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• We've talked about Batwoman's origins when she first debuted in the Arrowverse's Elseworlds crossover, so I won't repeat myself here. Again, her association as Bruce Wayne's cousin is original to CW, although the storyline of her returning to a Gotham City where Batman is MIA for a couple of years is taken from the 52 storyline, in which Batman and most of his sidekicks are missing after the events of Infinite Crisis. 52 is the first storyline in which the modern-day Batwoman debuted. 
• Alice, a.k.a. Elizabeth Kane, is a major character from the Batwoman stories, and her origin story is relatively similar to how it's being approached here. She was Katherine Kane's twin sister, lost and presumably killed during her childhood, and eventually rising up as a member of an organization called the Religion of Crime. 
• Kate's step-sister Mary Hamilton-Kane is based on Mary Elizabeth "Bette" Kane, a.k.a. Flamebird, from the comics. Traditionally Katherine's cousin, Bette Kane was originally introduced as the Golden Age Bat-Girl (a more comedic, clingy girlfriend type character more than a proper vigilante in a lot of her earlier stories), but was retconned out of existence during Crisis on Infinite Earths, in favour of making Barbara Gordon the only Batgirl. Bette Kane was re-introduced as the vigilante Flamebird (and later Hawkfire), originally starting off as a Teen Titans supporting character before becoming a Batwoman sidekick.
• Jacob Kane and Catherine Hamilton are Katherine's father and stepmother in the comics. I don't think Catherine Hamilton ever does much, but Jacob Kane's role as a more military-minded father that has problems with his daughter is relatively faithful to the couple of Batwoman comics I've read. 
• Luke Fox is presumably Lucas Fox (or sometimes Lucius Fox Jr), son of Batman's classic ally Lucius Fox, better known in New 52 era stories as the superhero Batwing. 
• Crows Security takes its name from the Murder of Crows, a group of special operations soldiers who are friends with Jacob and trained Kate in the comics. 
• Sophie Moore was Batwoman's first girlfriend in the rebooted comics, but was very much a one-note minor character. Here she gets a significantly expanded role. 
• Vesper Fairchild, whose radio show is played a couple times in the episode, is one of Bruce Wayne's many, many love interests. In the comics, she is also a radio host, and was Bruce's love interest in the late 90's and early 00's, but perhaps the most famous arc about her was her death in the Bruce Wayne: Fugitive storyline, where Bruce Wayne was imprisoned for being suspected in murdering her, leading to Batman abandoning the Bruce Wayne persona. 
• The "Welcome to Gotham" sign that was turned into "Hell comes to Gotham" with graffiti is a neat little homage to a very memorable defacing of a similar sign in the No Man's Land comics. At least that's what I remember it from, anyway. 
• The Wayne Towers' Batcave is clearly based on Batwoman's HQ in the comics, being an octagonal room with a tree in the center.
• The password to Wayne Industries' computers is apparently Alfred, a nod to the Waynes' faithful butler. 
• Bruce Wayne's canon in-universe birthday in the comics is indeed February 19th. 
• The movie in the park is, of course, The Mark of Zorro, the fateful movie that Bruce Wayne and his family watched as they went home that fateful night.

Movie Review: Resident Evil - Extinction

Resident Evil: Extinction [2007]

So as we close off the original trilogy of Resident Evil movies... and hoo boy, what an odd movie to end, huh? Apocalypse diverged wildly from the video games, but certainly at least felt like it was very loosely adapting the plot of the games, albeit with a shift in just who the protagonist is and changing the modus operandi of Umbrella. And sure, there is always a bit of futuristic sci-fi that doesn't gel with the games (psychic mutant powers in Apocalypse; the super-futuristic laser corridors in RE1)... but then we have Resident Evil: Extinction. 

But apparently, between Apocalypse and Extinction, the T-Virus has somehow spread all over the world, wiping out most of humanity, and we have this bizarre Mad-Max-meets-The-Walking-Dead thing going on. Which, again, I sort of took for granted when I watched this movie the first time, but I really kind of wished that they had built up to this better. Either by showing the virus spreading at the end of Apocalypse, or having the second movie actually ending with... I dunno, just something kind of different? I know the production of the second movie was extremely troubled, but still. 

At the very least, though, Extinction is far, far better paced than Apocalypse. Sure, the movie starts off bizarrely, with the exposition of 'hey, the world's fucked now', and the honestly odd scene of (an) Alice walking around in a mansion armed with nothing but the red dress from the first movie and being killed by a trap. Apparently dr. Isaacs is cloning Alice and using her over and over to... go through a lethal escape room? Okay. Meanwhile, the real Alice is off fighting gross hillbillies and their zombie dogs in a somewhat long scene that really doesn't add much to the movie. Again, though, unlike the very erratic setpiece-to-setpiece pacing of Apocalypse, at least the Alice-vs-hillbilly scene is paced relatively well. 

The main goal of the wandering Alice (who doesn't have good control over her psychic powers) and the remnants of humans running around in the aforementioned Mad Max homage, led by Claire Redfield (whose personality is just basically 'competent leader') and featuring two of the returning characters from the previous movie -- Carlos and L.J., and we see them just sort of wandering around and gathering fuel and supplies and stuff. We get to quickly be introduced to other members of the convoy like the teenage girl K-Mart; L.J.'s love interest Nurse Betty; cowboy man Chase; and radio man Mikey. Thankfully, I think the movie averts a lot of Apocalypse's problems by making sure the scenes focus mostly on Carlos, L.J. and Claire. 

The movie also averts Apocalypse's pacing problems by making it clear that our antagonist is going to be Sam Isaacs, giving us a lot of fun Iain Glen scenery-chewing and showing him play it up as an amoral scientist experimenting on trying to see if he can 'domesticate' zombies and have one try and play with puzzles meant for children. And in typical evil mad scientist fashion, he's not averse to leaving behind his subordinates to be eaten by zombies. Interestingly, we get to see the 'bigger evil', with a council of Umbrella directors hiding out in their respective bunkers all over the world, and we get the foreshadowing of Albert Wesker (from the games!) as this cabal's leader. (There's also Slater, who sort of acts as Isaacs' secretary and handler, but he's honestly forgettable)

Perhaps my favourite action scene in this movie has to be the giant crow swarm, which is just utterly creepy. Apparently the crows in the post-apocalyptic world has been infected by feeding on dead flesh of the T-virus infected zombies and the sight of the gigantic swarm of crows crashing and smashing through the windows of the convoy's vehicles -- and the subsequent arrival of Alice as she uses her psychic powers to manipulate flames and burn the entire murder of crows... it's actually pretty dang cool, as much as I'm not a huge fan of Alice having random psychic powers. (We'll talk about that later)

Alice, Claire and Carlos discuss what's going on, and how they are starting to run out of small towns to salvage resources from, and they decide to hit Las Vegas for supplies so that they can go off to Alaska, where apparently there's a safe haven called Arcadia. Las Vegas in this world has been completely ravaged by the desert and is half-submerged in sand, which doesn't really entirely make a lot of sense but it is pretty cool. Isaacs, meanwhile, tracking Alice through the chips that Umbrella has placed with her, sends off a strike team despite the lack of authorization from Wesker and the rest of Umbrella's CEO's. 

Honestly, it is kind of silly that Umbrella's strike force involves dropping a crate that acts as a clown car for way too many zombies that we see in that fighting scene. It is a pretty fun, albeit over-the-top as usual, fighting scene. Basically everyone dies here (other than Betty, who died in the crow scene). Cowboy sniper man gets a pretty badass sequence shooting zombies before falling off the fake Eiffel Tower taking one of the zombies with him, and L.J. has had a bit of an odd running B-plot of being bitten and hiding his bite from the rest of the characters. It's honestly a bit of a plot point that makes L.J. look like an idiot, and I really wished that the movie had explored this more. It's kinda weird, really, how L.J. is this wise-cracking comic relief in the previous movie, and here he's just... well, he's got very little in common with his first appearance, let's put it that way. It fits the tone of Extinction a lot better, sure, but at the same time it's hard to see that he's still supposed to be the same character. 

There's a silly bit where Isaacs uses the Umbrella satellite to shut down Alice remotely, but she just uses her psychic powers to break the little microchip in her brain before busting out the kukri knives and start hacking away at the zombies as well as Umbrella personnel... who are, uh, in a tent like ten meters away from Alice. It's honestly kinda dumb, but, again, the movie is pretty fun.

Isaacs escaped, but gets bitten by a zombie and injects himself with way too much anti-virus which ends up mutating him into a dude with tentacle-fingers, and massacres Slater and the rest of the staff in the North American Umbrella base. The base's A.I., the White Queen, traps Isaacs in the base. Meanwhile, the rest of the living humans show up, intent on stealing Umbrella's helicopter to allow them to head off to the sanctuary of Arcadia. We get the actually pretty damn badass moment of the infected Carlos driving a fuel truck and slamming his way through a gigantic horde of zombies before blowing himself and the truck up, ending with a pretty cool scene of him getting one last smoke before a pretty dang glorious explosion. 

In the ensuing chaos, Claire, K-Mart and the rest of the convoy's nameless survivors pile into the helicopter and escape to Arcadia, but Alice elects to stay behind and end Umbrella once and for all. She teams up with White Queen to take out Isaacs, and, well, finds out the fact that Umbrella has been cloning her, and that they have a recreation of the original Resident Evil mansion. We get the pretty extensive final fight against the fully-mutated Isaacs, which takes place in the recreation of the mansion. It's kinda cool, even if, again, the random psychic powers that Alice and Isaacs lob at each other honestly feels very much out of place. Ultimately the fight ends up leading towards the laser corridor where Colin Salmon's character died in the first movie, and Isaacs gets cubed by the activation of the corridor by one of the Alice Clones. 

The episode ends with Wesker meeting with the rest of the Umbrella executives, and Alice promises death and vengeance upon them and their hiding out, having found a gigantic pod of many, many, many clones gestating and ready to fight in the facility. 

So. This movie... it's weird. The pacing and the scripting is a lot more well-done than Apocalypse. The movie knows the story it wants to tell, and gets to it pretty well. Hell, it even juggles the characters a lot better -- again, keeping Dr. Isaacs prominent throughout the movie (unlike last movie's Cain) makes for a more cohesive story, and keeping the rest of the secondary characters as a single group and a bunch makes it a lot easier to care and keep track of characters. It sounds kinda morbid, too, but reducing a lot of the lesser characters (like Nurse Betty or Mikey or badass sniper dude) into one-note characters -- most of whom die in either the crow or Vegas scenes -- does make it a bit easier for the movie to focus on Alice, Carlos and Claire. Granted, I'm not a fan of L.J.'s treatment in this movie, but it's not like I'm a huge fan of him or anything and honestly am not too broken up about it. 

But, well... this movie is where the weird sci-fi of the movie kind of went off the rails, huh? And perhaps one of the biggest gripes I have is Alice's really inconsistent psychic powers. Which alternates between being at her beck-and-call, Jedi-style, and she can just break apart entire rooms of floorboards or summon a fire tornado... and then we have some scenes like her post-chip-free Vegas bit when she just resorts to knives and shotguns. And there's the whole Alice Clone Army thing, which honestly feels kinda stupid and came out of nowhere. There's a bit of a handwave how Isaacs is trying to duplicate Alice's blood for a cure or something, but instead he throws the Alice clones into a lethal danger room, which just kinda feels pretty impractical and odd. Isaacs' plan really doesn't make sense (as I will rant about more in 'random notes' below) but thankfully Iain Glen has the charisma to pull it off. 

And honestly, the movie's flaws really bring the movie kind of down for me. It's kind of odd since it's definitely a far more solid story than Apocalypse, but it's just kind of there. Again, none of these movies are meant to be avant garde films or try to be anything more than 'ha ha fun zombie killing', but ultimately I feel like Extinction tries too hard to bring together a bunch of tropes and story elements (like the post-apocalyptic zombie apocalypse, psychic powers, clones, mad scientists) that don't necessarily work well together, making this feel like it's trying to mishmash other sorts of zombie movie and sci-fi movie tropes into one. And that ending with the Alice clones is just so utterly weird. Thankfully, the second set of movies are a bit more coherent. 

Random Notes:

• Umbrella just very casually have cloning technology now. Yep!
  
• Also speaking or ridiculousness, Umbrella's cloning technology doesn't use tubes, but with spheres of water that are somehow held in place by clamps.
• And also, the virus doesn't just kill all life, it also somehow changes all of the terrain on the planet into deserts, which is the stupidest thing out of any line in these Resident Evil movies. Thankfully, even the movies themselves realize how stupid it is and completely drops this little plot point. 
• The movie never ever addresses any of the other missing supporting characters from Apocalypse. While Carlos Olivera and L.J. show up again, neither the little girl Angela nor Jill Valentine show up or are even mentioned. Jill shows up in subsequent movies, but Angela just absolutely disappears from the franchise. Not even a single line to mention whatever happened to them; even if the producers aren't sure, couldn't they have dropped a single 'we got separated' line when Alice and Carlos meet up again?
• Apparently the novelizations just straight-up say that Angela died in between movies. Oh dear, poor little girl. Anything regarding her telepathic abilities or being the model for the Red Queen is utterly just dropped. 
• Regarding Angela... it's really weird because K-Mart's role probably could've been perfect if she was just Angela all grown up, huh? Oh well. 
• After the homage to the first Resident Evil movie has worn out its welcome, is there really a point for Isaacs' team to build an elaborate recreation of the Spencer Manor with sci-fi traps and to make sure Alice repeats her 'wakes up naked and has to dress up in a red dress' sequence? And, seeing the large amount of Alice corpses, where does Isaacs keep getting so many identical red dresses in a post-apocalyptic world? 
• Speaking of Isaacs' stupidity... his plan in Vegas really doesn't work, huh? Like, the action scene is cool and all, but sending a massive swarm of zombies to take out Alice and the convoy doesn't work when the stated result that he wants is to get a fresh, non-contaminated sample of Alice's blood. Meanwhile, Isaacs also has access to a remote-shutdown for Alice, as well as the not-entirely-a-lie plan of making a cure for the T-Virus. Then again, Isaacs is also kind of insane. 
• I'm not entirely sure why none of the Alice clones work for Isaacs' stated cure. I guess because they're just not 'pure' enough? I dunno. 
• Do we just have a zombie dog scene every movie? Is that a running gag? Speaking of running gags, this movie also starts with Alice waking up in the mansion -- all three RE movies have more or less started off with Alice waking up and being confused. (Speaking of references to Resident Evil, we get the same laser corridor that killed Agent One, as well as Alice's "we're gonna die down here" line).
• He doesn't really look like it beyond being a mutated human, but Wikipedia and all other sources cite Isaacs as being the movie-verse's version of the Tyrant. Okay!
• Alice is real dismissive of the White Queen, but she is absolutely correct in noting that the Red Queen did everything in her power to contain the T-Virus infection to just the Hive and not, well, the rest of the world.
• Ali Larter plays Claire Redfield, and you might recognize her from Heroes where she plays Niki Sanders and a bunch of other characters. Other notable new actors that you might recognize include the singer-cameo Ashanti as Nurse Betty and Jason O'Mara (a.k.a. Jeffrey Mace from Agents of SHIELD) has a brief role as Albert Wesker in this one before being recasted.

Supergirl S05E01 Review: Pants!

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 1: Event Horizon

A new season for Supergirl, and... one that's pretty interesting? The season premiere for season five seemed to also double as a bit of an epilogue over some of the storylines of the previous season, and... it's sort of kind of... just there. We get some build-up of what I assume is going to be our main villain for the week, Ma'alefa'ak, released/summoned by the Monitor in one of the post-finale teasers at the end of season four, although Ma'alefa'ak spends a good chunk of this episode disguised as a creepy little girl, and for the most part just hides in the background and unleashes an old enemy of J'onn, a bland superpowered alien called Midnight, to serve as the villain of the week. The action scenes are... all right, if kind of samey. Midnight has nearly no personality, her powers are vaguely defined (and mostly involves a bizarre black hole CGI sequence that felt so much less impressive in comparison to this year's Flash's season premiere's CGI black hole) and she just mostly exists to make sure there's some action in this episode.

Oh, and also, we get a fun series of sequence as Supergirl's cape gets fucked-up in the first half of the episode, leading to Brainiac making a brand-new suit for Kara, activated by her taking off her glasses, and the sheer glee of Melissa Benoist going "pants!" is hilarious. Personally I vastly prefer the older suit -- but apparently the real reason they made this change is that it's more easier to film and it's a lot less colder for Meliisa Benoist to act in? I'm not going to really comment to much about it.

The two main focus of this season premiere, however, are Lena Luthor and her angry feelings of betrayal after finding out that Kara Danvers is Supergirl, and seemingly planning to retaliate. Also, CatCo is being taken over by "CLICKBAIT IS THE FUTURE OF MEDIA" bad boss Andrea Rojas. I've never been the biggest fan of the CatCo side of Supergirl, and... I dunno. I'm not overly enthused by this development. Andrea Rojas has a wonderful, hammy actress, and her relation to Lena Luthor is an interesting little tidbit... she doesn't really grab me. And honestly, the thought of spending huge chunks of this season's episodes with Kara 'fighting for every article' seems like it's going to be more melodramatic and tedious more than exciting. We'll see. Likewise, I'm not super-excited about the whole Obsidian North VR tech (very Young Justice season 3, huh?) or whatever, and I get that we kind of needed a bit of a break from the American-political charged last season, but going away into "technology is bad!" seems a bit odd.


Oh, also James quit, and apparently this means he's... barred from journalism forever? Can companies do that? I dunno. I must say that I really don't find myself caring much about this leg of the season premiere.

The other focus of the episode is Lena Luthor, who's gone a bit obsessed with Kara's betrayal, and between seasons, have created an AI she named Hope that questions her every move. Like, uh, why is she going through VR sessions of beating up Supergirl, instead of just doing it live? I absolutely love just how passive-aggressively Lena acts throughout her episode, particularly in her mid-episode meeting with Kara, heaping praise about how kind and nice of a person and oh-how-trustworthy Kara Danvers is. Turns out, though, that Lena's setting up a plan that stretches throughout the episode, seemingly about to reveal Kara's secret identity to the world when she accepts her Pulitzer prize, in conjunction with placing Andrea Rojas as the new head of CatCo... but during the award ceremony, Kara gets overwhelmed and just breaks down, blubbering to Lena about how she is Supergirl and she tried to tell her but she is so scared of losing her friend and all that jazz.

Y'know, I really don't buy that the apology alone was enough to make angry-angry Lena Luthor change her mind... but on the other hand, Melissa Benoist's acting was amazing in that scene, that you really believe that the character has been so conflicted and trying to avoid this heavy conversation for so long and is feeling guilty about holding it in at the same time. Of course, the reason that Kara chose now to tell Lena as opposed to so many moments she could've done so in the previous season is because the writers demanded it to be so, but, again, Supergirl's blessed with a pretty great lead actress to really sell this scene.


Interestingly, though, Lena doesn't seem to actually forgive Kara, at least not just yet. Sure, she doesn't reveal Kara's identity to the public (yet), but ends up going through a different way to maintain the upper hand by worming into Supergirl's life as someone she trusts. Lena Luthor has always been one of the more fascinating characters on this show, straddling the line between morally-trying-to-be-good and so-pragmatic-it-could-be-counted-as-evil, and it seems that this season we're exploring a version of Lena that's a bit less squeaky-clean.

Ultimately, while the Lena stuff is undoubtedly interesting, and the cast is still as bubbly and enjoyable as ever, the season premiere is kind of marred by a very uninteresting antagonist in Midnight, and I must confess that I really don't find the journalism sub-plot to really deserve the massive amount of screentime it got.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Phantom Zone projector makes its appearance! While it's built by Ma'alefa'ak, the appearance of the projector is essentially identical to how it looks in the older comics. 
• Andrea Rojas is more recognizable to DC comic book readers by the name Acrata, a Mexican superhero who has the ability to channel Mayan magic to teleport from shadow to shadow, and ended up becoming a vigilante that fights crime alongside fellow Mexican superheroes El Muerto and Iman, working alongside Superman to crack down on a bio-terrorist group. Andrea Rojas' more famous appearance is perhaps in the TV show Smallville, where she ended up becoming a bit of the show's stand-in as a superpowered Batman, which the show was not able to use.  
• There have been several different characters with the name "Midnight" in DC comics, but the one that fits the profile of our villain of the week the most is M1DN1GHT, a minor enemy of Superwoman.
• As far as I know, William Day, Hope the A.I. and the Obsidian North company are all original to Supergirl. 

Movie Review: Resident Evil - Apocalypse

Resident Evil: Apocalypse [2004]

Okay, yeah, that was a lot less coherent than the first movie. 

One of the biggest flaws of Resident Evil: Apocalypse, I feel, is just how much of how this movie is 'just the middle part' of a trilogy. Anything viewers are expected to remember from the original Resident Evil -- the zombie virus, who Alice is, Matt becoming Nemesis, the mansion, the cover-up --  is glossed over with a very bland exposition at the beginning of the movie. And there's a lot of stuff that ends up clearly being set up and nothing is done with it because they know they have a third movie coming up -- like Alice's utterly random psychic power-up (more on that later) or whatever the heck's going on with Angela, a.k.a. the little girl whose face was used as the Red Queen in the previous movie. 

Apocalypse itself also feels like it jumps around and it wants to do a lot of thing, but it doesn't do any of it particularly well. The movie wants to do a lot of things! There's an apocalypse outbreak in a small town, adapting the plot of the video game Resident Evil 2 and 3 in extremely broad strokes. There's a bunch of mercenary soldiers from a shady super-company that shoots everyone and wants to nuke the city to contain the outbreak. There's Alice waking up with new superpowers. There's the introduction of the video games' Jill Valentine, Nemesis, Carlos Olivera and the Ashfords. There's Umbrella making super-powered... well, basically some superhero-style metahuman soldiers at the end-point of this movie. 

None of the things from the first movie are really explained all that well, and none of the things in this movie are themselves paced well. Plot points are raised and dropped almost as quickly as the main characters and the secondary characters scramble together to work with the enigmatic Umbrella scientist contacting them from afar and asking them to help his daughter, while things just sort of get tossed from one action scene to the next. And sure, some of them are memorable, but some of them really could've been cut short (like the pointless creepy church pastor scene, or the building-jumping suicide woman) or altered to fit some of the Alice/Nemesis/Umbrella storyline a bit better. None of them save for Nemesis's scenes really end up feeling like they are actually worth the time we spent with them... although admittedly, the Licker scene was all sorts of hilariously over-the-top video game protagonist badass, and the creepy zombie schoolchildren devouring the reporter was pretty terrifying. 

Also, for being a movie that's set in a city filled with zombies, after the initial premise... we really don't see much of them? I dunno. 

Anyway, the plot of this movie sort of follows a bunch of protagonists who eventually bump into each other, and I feel like that really ends up hurting the movie since we simultaneously don't spend enough time with any of the main leads, while at the same time I also feel like we're sort of plodding along. There's Alice, waking up from her weird abduction at the end of the previous movie. There's Jill Valentine, cowboy-cop with a tank top and attitude who tries her best to evacuate the survivors. There's Carlos Olivera, a former Umbrella hitman who gets abandoned under some flimsy excuse and apparently despite being a mercenary hitman he also doesn't realize that Umbrella is actually evil. Alice and Jill are basically just kinda there trying to survive, but Carlos is just kind of wooden and I feel like they could've done more ramping up his angst for being someone who used to work for Umbrella -- they did it well with Alice in the previous movie for sure.

There's also a bunch of secondary characters. There's Jill's fellow cop Payton, who's really only in the movie to be dragged along and give us a far less satisfying repeat of Rain's "I'm bitten, and I'll turn, but the others don't have the heart to kill me" storyline. There's Carlos's buddy Nikolai who sort of just is there so Carlos doesn't speak to thin air and gets killed pretty quickly. There's the reporter lady Terri, who sort of builds up into a whistleblower plotline that the movie completely forgets about halfway through, and is just an excuse to frame some scenes as part of Terri's news report. (Terri, at least, dies very memorably). And there's the funny-black-man L.J. and his custom golden guns who's... there for comedic relief? Eh? None of the main characters really are memorable and the focus is clearly on Alice... who also spends most of the movie in a 'I'm a badass' fugue. Alice and Jill are fun when they get to interact with each other, but otherwise, we jump around too much that none of the secondaries really make an impact. 

Again, the movie really jumps focus around, and that's not counting the neutral 'quest-giver' character, Umbrella scientist dr. Ashford, who refuses to be evacuated because her daughter (the aforementioned model for the Red Queen) is lost somewhere in the city. Beyond a brief nod of Ashford's role in making the T-Virus, and the cool bit with Ashford hacking into the city's CCTV system... there really isn't much that he brings into the table, he's just there to give Alice's team and Carlos's team their quest. 

And there's the revelation that Umbrella unleashes Nemesis (with some good-for-its-time prosthetics) who gets a pretty cool scene massacring the STARS members (a.k.a. cops with a funny name) before fighting Alice in the school. Jill also fights zombie dogs in a scene that I absolutely love for all the wrong reasons -- it's just so over-the-top 'look at this badassery' hilarity. As mentioned before, Payton, Terri and Nikolai bite the dust, although the main characters escape with Angela and the comic relief. 

There is, I suppose, the muted reveal at this point that Angela reveals that her father created the T-Virus to cure her own genetic disease to simulate her natural healing properties, something that is somewhat conceivably believable for a 'zombie virus' to be created for. But unlike the huge Alice/Spencer revelation in the first movie, this was done in a pretty muted way, and it's frankly kind of underwhelming. Neither is the revelation that Alice is more powerful than a normal human because she's also infected (but immune to the zombification). Any huge buildup to a dr. Ashford storyline gets pushed aside because Umbrella goon Major Cain shows up to take over the role as big bad, swiftly capturing the heroes and killing Dr. Ashford. 

In a rather hilarious bit, Cain forces Alice and Nemesis -- the two bio-weapons Umbrella created -- to fight each other. The idea that Alice gets turned into a bio-weapon is cool, and sure, Cain kills Ashford to make Alice go along, but it's kind of a flimsy premise. We get the pretty fun fight (which... sadly, isn't as dramatic as Nemesis's two previous outings earlier in the movie) before Alice realizes that Nemmy is actually Matt, her buddy from the first movie! Alice's refusal to kill the wounded Nemesis is deemed as a failure (she's clearly not conditioned, though, Cain's a loon) but then Nemesis recognizes Alice or something, and goes berserk, fighting the Umbrella goons before being killed. Cain gets punched by L.J. and left for dead among the incoming zombie horde, and the good guys escape. 

Special note is that while Cain's kind of a flat villain, there's a nice bit of pathos that he tries to kill himself only to find himself out of bullets, and it's dr. Ashford's zombie that kills him. On the other hand, Cain's pretty cool death scene is kind of undone by Nemesis's honestly pretty out-of-nowhere "I'm Matt all along, let me redeem myself" nonsense. Which didn't really work out well at all. 

...or they seemingly do, because a helicopter can't outrun a nuclear blast and they fall out of the sky. Alice gets impaled by a giant chunk of metal rescuing Angela... and then wakes up finding Umbrella has covered up any and all wrongdoing in Raccoon City, blaming a nuclear meltdown. Alice ends up waking up, and turns out that the conditioning that they use to program Nemesis doesn't take hold on Alice, and she slaughters her way through the Umbrella guards, even displaying some Professor X style mental powers to kill the guard manning the security cameras, before escaping with the rest of her group. The cliffhanger being that, of course, Alice's escape is engineered, and Umbrella has plans for her and has implanted something in her, leaving us in the same bittersweet ending as the first movie. 

And... and I do like a bunch of things about this movie, I really do. The setting of a city under siege, a super-company covering up the misdeeds, the action scenes, the ending with Alice seemingly escaping home-free but is actually a sleeper agent... hell, even though they aren't like fully fleshed-out characters, both Alice and Jill were pretty decent. But the movie just raises plotlines and side-characters and just sort of drops them and I wonder how the movie would've felt if Cain and Ashford were merged into a single character -- either a bastard villain or a sympathetic one would do -- and if the group were gathered together a bit earlier so we don't get scenes of Carlos just trudging along being kind of irrelevant until he meets the girls. Nemesis himself is also more of a plot device, and his eventual betrayal of Umbrella feels like a cheap shoehorned trick that doesn't feel earned. 

I dunno. This really felt like it had the potential to be great (even by the admittedly low standards of this movie franchise) if the plotting and story was a bit tightened up, but the execution felt pretty dang lacking. At the very least, though, the movie's utterly over-the-top stance on action scenes (just look at everything in the school scene, and also the church scene) does make it an utterly ridiculously fun movie to watch. 

Random Notes:

• I originally watched the movies knowing nothing about the games, and now rewatching them knowing that Alice is basically an original character... yeah, Jill, Carlos and even Nemesis look pretty bad next to her, huh? That church scene, badass as it is, ends up being pretty blatant character shilling. And sure, the movie franchise is all about Alice as the main character, but still.
• There's no excusing the utterly ridiculous psychic Jedi/Professor X powers at the end, though. Handwave all you want about the zombie virus giving Alice super-agility and super-strength and super-durability, psychic powers is just... why? And how?
• Milla Jovovich is fun, but the MVP of this movie is undoubtedly Sienna Guillory. She actually studied Jill Valentine's movement in the games -- she was always entertaining and I always liked her when I watched the movie the first time, but knowing the game this movie loosely adapts, it's clear that Guillory actually played through the game or at least studied how the character behaves. 
• I really did think that they were going somewhere with the Angela/Ashford stuff, I really was. It's something that I felt would've made for a far more emotionally satisfying end instead of the bizarre 'let them fight' thing that Cain steered the movie towards. 
• Likewise, for all of Alice's insistence that Jill needs to kill Payton because he's infected, I thought we were going somewhere when Alice finds out that Nemesis is Matt. But instead, Alice's belief in Matt is... rewarded? Buh-wha? I'd like it better if Nemesis actually showed signs of sentience early on, but throughout the entire movie until his redemption Nemesis is just portrayed as this unstoppable juggernaut of a zombie-man and it's just odd. 
• I low-key really like Nemesis little HUD visor that the faceless Umbrella goons look through. 
• L.J. is honestly a bit of an eye-rolling 'funny black man' trope, but he does get some real fun scenes in. Particularly in that first scene in the police department. 
• In typical movie monster escalation way, Alice kills multiple Lickers very effortlessly in the church. Of course, these Lickers don't seem to be larger and mutated like the final boss on the first movie's train. Jill manages to take out a bunch of zombie dogs, too. 
• Handwaving the records of the reporter lady's footage as 'staged footage that tries to insensitively ride the wave of a real tragedy' is actually a believable way for Umbrella to crack down on the revelation. 
• It's like, a nice zombie trope to have the graves in the church burst out and have hands drag the reporter girl and shit. That's a nice scene. But considering the T-Virus are transmitted either in gas form or via zombie-bite, how do the long-dead corpses of those entombed in the graveyard get turned into zombies?
• Speaking of which, again, as karmic as it is for Ashford-zombie to be the first zombie that bites Cain... he was shot in the head. Resident Evil movie zombies die when they get shot in the head, right? 
• It's pretty corny, but the way that Alice's iris end up briefly glitching into the Umbrella symbol was actually pretty cool. 
• In this movie's "hey, it's that guy!" Carlos Olivera is payed by Oded Fehr (Mummy's Ardeth Bay); Cain is played by Thomas Kretschmann (MCU's Baron Strucker); dr. Charles Ashford is played by Jared Harris (2011 Sherlock Holmes' Moriarty); and dr. Isaacs is played by Iain Glen (Game of Thrones' Jorah Mormont and Titans' Bruce Wayne).

Let's Play Pokemon Uranium: Part 22: Tenkaichi Budokai

We're about to reach the relative end of the story mode of the fan-made game Pokemon Uranium! This time around, we're fighting the Elite Four, or, well... this game's equivalent and genuinely interesting twist on the Elite Four.

Not much to say in the intro. Despite some of my misgiving with Uranium, overall it's been a pretty pleasant playthrough!

Movie Review: Resident Evil

Resident Evil (2002)

So... this is a bit of a different sort of review for me. I'm going to do Resident Evil movies this month of October! And... and it's really kind of interesting. I've watched the Resident Evil live-action movies on-and-off in the past, and definitely out of order. And I definitely watched this series way before I was properly introduced to the video game series. 

And it's really interesting how attitudes towards movie adaptations of franchises back then were. 2002's Resident Evil borrows a lot from the games, or at least what I can tell -- it's set in Raccoon City, it's in a mysterious mansion (like the first RE game); it's tied to a virus created by the evil Umbrella Corporation; convenient amnesia; there are some names like 'Project Nemesis' thrown around... oh, and there's zombies. Lots of zombies. In spirit, I think, the movie does its best to capture the somewhat over-the-top ridiculously-expensive-and-impractical giant sci-fi bases, as well as, y'know, zombies. Hell, there's even a fun video-game-y vibe into parts of the movie, like the bit with the laser hallway and the briefing segment playing out like a video game narrator explaining the minimap.

The actual story, though, and especially the characters, are all original to the movie franchise. The movie tries to capture the spirit of the games while going in completely different directions with the characters... and considering how literally all everyone talks about many of the sequels is 'oh no, they ruined [X] from the games', looking back I can actually see why the original Resident Evil movie was actually liked so much. 

The plot itself is... pretty simple. It's certainly inspired by the first game, but not a straight-up adaptation of it. A mysterious corporation set up against the backdrop of not one, but two sci-fi villains. There are the brainless zombies going around, but there is also the Red Queen, the enigmatic, creepy artificial intelligence controlling the super-high-tech underground base and also speaks with the voice of a little girl, which just adds to the creepy factor of it all. The cold open shows a virus canister (hilariously, the canister's fluid is shaped like a double helix, which is just kind of funny and clearly not there for any practical reason) being released and the systems in what seems to be a regular office going haywire, but the cuts to points of view from what seemed to be a computer says otherwise.  

And then we cut to a mysterious mansion, where our main character, Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up naked, walks out and immediately gets accosted by a bunch of soldier boys in commando outfits. There's also some random cop dude called Matt Addison who gets caught and dragged down into the underground facility known as the Hive. Our main character Alice is utterly amnesiac, which is apparently the side-effect of a nerve gas released by the automated defenses. The commando leader, James Shade, gives us some exposition about the Red Queen, the Hive, and the fact that Alice and her partner Spence (who they find later on, also amnesiac) are actually elite guards under Umbrella's employ. 

And the base seems empty and deserted, so all they have to do is to shut down a haywire computer, right? Not really, because Shade and half the team gets butchered by a glowing corridor with laser beams, which end up slicing Shade's buddies to death and in one of the cooler scenes in the movie, turns into a laser net and turns Shade into many meat cubes. The hacker, Kaplan, manages to disable the Red Queen. Mission complete, right? But by disabling the Red Queen... they release all of the zombies trapped with the quarantine doors. The zombie effect is honestly what you'd expect, but it's all honestly pretty well done. We get Rain (Michelle Rodriguez!) bitten by a zombie that she thinks is a confused civilian, before the huge zombie swarms arrive amidst a soundtrack of fun rock. One of the commandos, Rain's buddy JD, gets sucked into an elevator filled with zombies in a pretty cool imagery. 

And, well, throughout all this Alice keeps getting flashbacks to her memory as it starts to return, and the effect is interestingly haunting. As the civilian cops, Matt, keeps talking shit about Umbrella Corporation, Alice keeps wondering that if the mysterious deal she made with a mysterious woman isn't actually an indication that she might be the cause of this.... but then she has to fight zombie dogs. Oops! The zombie dog scene, while certainly cool because of the presence of zombie dogs, is kind of underwhelming to me. I'm not entirely sure why. Still, Alice shows off some badass Black Widow super kung-fu spy skills, as, well, her muscle memory starts to return. 

Around the midway point, Matt turns out to have been working with his now-late sister to blow the whistle on Umbrella Corporation, and they are like activists or something. And Alice remembers that she's, well, Matt's sister's contact in the Hive, but again is still confused on what her role in the fall of the Hive really is. Again, all this corporation stuff is fun and gives a nice little story and backdrop to the universe instead of just 'oh no zombos'. 

With the clock ticking down from a complete locking-down of the base, our heroes decide to reactivate the Red Queen and grill her for answers, and she's... well, she's not very helpful. I thought the Red Queen was bizarrely out of place the first time I watched this movie, but I've come to appreciate her so much more. She is an antagonist whose methods are... actually relatable. She's a manipulative bitch that's clearly not telling our heroes everything and is manipulating them to die, sure, but in the context of this movie it's actually not hard to argue that the Red Queen is simply doing her best to keep the zombie plague contained. It's just that keeping the T-Virus contained also means killing all the humans, our protagonists included. Our heroes blackmail the Red Queen with a rigged remote shutdown, forcing her to help out. 

We then get a pretty long sewer/maintenance tunnel sequence, where I'm surprised no one died! There were a few close calls, but the only one who gets bitten is just Rain (who was already bitten before). And hey, RE-movie zombies will infect you with their virus if they bite you! Kaplan gets separated from the group and there's this pretty huge moment of him about to shoot himself... but then shoots a zombie instead and slinks away into a corridor that the zombies can't follow? This bit could've been choreographed a bit better, I feel.

Then we get a sequence where Alice's memories start to return, and she remembers that the Hive also manufactured an anti-virus, and they can cure Rain. But just as this is going on, Spence, Alice's partner, also gets his memory back and we get the whole revelation -- Alice and Lisa were trying to blow the whistle, while Spence wanted to sell the virus to the highest bidder and is the one who tossed the virus into the room and initiated lockdown, in a nice callback to the cold open of the movie. Spence traps the rest of the survivors (Alice, Rain, Matt) in the lab before going off to the monorail train to go off with the virus... only to get his ass killed by a mutated super-zombie we've glimpsed a couple of times throughout the movie, a Licker. The Red Queen straight-up gloats about how awesome this is, how this Licker monster will evolve into a bigger beast after eating live DNA, and the Red Queen insists that she'll only let Alice and Matt escape if they kill Rain -- because Rain is infected, and cure or no cure, the Red Queen will not let anyone infected escape the facility. Again, sadistic and cruel, but you can kind of understand the Red Queen's intentions. 

Unfortunately for the Red Queen, she gets fried and shut down by the surviving Kaplan, who opens the door to the lab and our four main characters are home-free! They kill zombie Spence, get into the train with the virus and antivirus in tow... and then the goddamn Licker attacks, killing Kaplan and giving us a huge boss fight. Rain's zombification is complete (and we got a pretty long angsty 'kill me if I turn' sequence, too) just right in this moment and we get a pretty cool bit of Alice managing to trap the Licker and dropping him through the floor's opening doors (why do those exist on a train) and turn the Licker into a burning flesh-stain. 

The movie's over, the two unambiguously good guys survive... but Matt is wounded by the Licker and his wound is pulsating... and then the two of them get abducted by people in white Hazmat suits! Matt's just gone, taken for something called the Nemesis Project (dun dunn dunn) while Alice gets wrestled and wakes up naked in yet another abandoned facility. It's actually a pretty effective downer ending, actually. Even though Alice and Matt succeeded in everything, Umbrella Corporation recovering the virus ends up with a gigantic fuck-up as Alice walks the abandoned Raccoon City to find that the entire city has fallen to a zombie plague. And she gets a shotgun and prepares to fight zombies some more... in the sequel!

Honestly, a very solid movie. I did remember being a bit baffled that the movie takes itself so slowly -- it took around 35 minutes before our heroes actually start fighting zombies and the bit with the laser corridor, while undoubtedly cool, also felt weirdly placed in a zombie movie. But I really do like how the Umbrella/Red Queen/Alice-Spencer thief storyline ended up being played out. Sure, the amnesia plot device has never been my favourite, but this is one that I felt like it played well since it's limited to the first two acts of the movie. The characters are perhaps not the most well-developed, and some of the Licker CGI is a bit dodgy by modern standards. And the adaptation's perhaps not the most ideal to the original vibe of the movie. But it's overall still a pretty solid sci-fi zombie flick. 

Random Notes:

• I feel like this movie is particularly bad with names, other than Alice, Matt, Spence, Rain and Kaplan, I don't think anyone's names is really said out loud and I don't even know what Spence and Kaplan are called until their respective big moments.
  
• The Licker's CGI alternates between being actually cool to 'yeah, this is a 2002 movie for sure'. I think the parts where it kind of sort of felt off for me was its initial released-from-its-cage scene, as well as when it 'evolves' after consuming Spencer. Apparently the Licker is created when the T-Virus was injected into a live organism. Okay. It's a cool ghoulish creature with a long tongue and giant claws, I like it. 
• I do like that they picked the Licker as the first 'weird' zombie variant instead of something like Nemesis, the Tyrant or the Hunter. The Licker has such a uniquely distinct design and also feels so much like this gross body-horror creature. 
• The Red Queen's pretty interesting, isn't she? She goes from pleading like a little child to "you're all going to die down here" and doesn't really say anything to warn them that, oh, there are god damn zombies around. Sure, you could say that she's just doing what's utterly necessary to stop the T-virus from getting out, but she's also clearly a sadistic bitch about it. 
• Also, does she just... somehow not know who stole the T-Virus and released it? She seems to be pretty much aware of everything going on in the Hive, but I guess she just doesn't know it was Spence who unleashed the virus? Honestly, giving the Red Queen the revelation that she is trying to prevent the virus-unleasher from escaping would go a fair bit of way in making her feel like a more justified extremist. 
• The movie universe's T-Virus is noted to basically stimulate things that remain alive after a body is dead, like the nails and hair that grow and the remains of electrical impulses in the brain. Scientifically hogwash, but this is a zombie movie and I'll buy that explanation. 
• That random office lady who got guillotined while trying to escape an elevator is needlessly brutal, but par the course for this franchise. 
• Speaking of needlessly brutal... Kaplan was too slow to save four of his friends, during the zombie horde he nearly killed himself, somehow survived that giant zombie horde by sneaking away, and even got injected by a cure only to die via surprise Licker arrival. Poor Kaplan. 
• I'm not sure why there's a bit of drama with Alice flashing back and forth to photographs of her and Spence being married. This isn't really explored at all, and Shade quickly tells her it's just a cover story. 
• Sure, bringing Alice along is kind of understandable since she's just suffering from short-term amnesia, but dragging Matt Addison along? The commandos have no reason to believe he's anything but a cop, wouldn't it be easier to cuff him somewhere in the mansion and leave him there?
• Colin Salmon plays James Shade! Superhero-TV viewers know him as Walter Steele and General Zod, and you might recognize him from James Bond movies as well. He's cool! 
• It's so strange to see Alice just be a mundane super-athletic commando considering she basically becomes a straight-up metahuman superhero in later installations. 
• Alice's red-dress-and-shorts combo... it's frankly impressive what Milla Jokovich can pull off in that dress. 

Kamen Rider Zero-One E07 Review: Kobe

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 7: I Am A Hot-Blooded Humagear Teacher

Not the biggest fan of this episode's victim-of-the-week plot, which, at this point, it's sort of a retread of a lot of the previous ones. The Humagear finds a lot of passion or purpose in their job, does one or two things that a properly-programmed Humagear AI shouldn't really be able to do, and eventually develops a 'soul', before being tragically fucked up by the Metsu-boys. It's just that this episode really hammers home just what the criteria of an 'awakened' Humagear is, with the Humagear of the week, school basketball coach Kobe, realizing just how much he wanted to teach his students and help them win a championship, and gaining sentience while witnessed by Aruto, Fuwa and most of the cast. The complication in this episode, I suppose, is the introduction of the 'reset to factory settings', which so far is seemingly only done by Hiden to the completely-destroyed Humagears that were transformed by Metsubojinrai, but the ethics come into question when Kobe, whose only crime is being a bit too passionate in helping the kids, ends up under the threat of being reset by an unsympathetic (if comedic) principal and Fuwa (who's just a poop in this episode).

It's interesting that the titular hot-blooded humagear coach isn't as hot-blooded as I would expect a Japanese 'hot-blooded' character to be. Maybe I've gotten my perceptions skewed after one too many shonen anime? The actor who plays Kobe is pretty neat, but ultimately I feel like the storyline was a bit perfunctory. I did like that for all of Kobe's training, the school kids actually lost their game, which is neat -- just because you give your all doesn't mean you'll succeed in your first try.

The first threat in this episode is Jin, who's back to sentience and cheeriness, and apparently now able to voluntarily access his Kamen Rider form without being forced into it. He's accompanied by "Assassin-chan", a Humagear specifically programmed to assassinate Kamen Rider Zero-One, so I guess the Metsubojinrai.net boys are being a lot more proactive? Watch them never utilize the assassination program in future episodes. "Assassin-chan" never really got that much screentime, but he did get a little one-note quirk of basically ending a lot of his generic villainous minion lines with a wacky little comedic bit.

Much more interesting than the episodic plot is whatever the fuck Valkyrie's doing. Engaging Jin and Assassin-chan in the first half of the episode, Valkyrie ends up using the fight as a trial run for the Freezing Bear key, which, when slapped onto an untransformed humagear, is able to instantly freeze them and lock up their systems. And while Jin is busy fighting with Zero-One and Vulcan, Valkyrie and her AIMS science squad absconds with Assassin-chan and the Dodo Key.


After the heroes (and the audience) are distracted by the basketball tournament and the ethics discussion on whether Kobe should be reset (Fuwa is insanely aggressive about this, what the hell Fuwa), Kobe ends up gaining sentience. Jin shows up and gives a monologue, telling Aruto and Fuwa about how the criteria of a Humagear awakening is them gaining sentience... which, to be fair, Fuwa's panic at sentient AI isn't completely wrong. Of course, Fuwa and Aruto's bickering was what was needed for Jin to turn Kobe into the Mammoth Magia.

We get a pretty awesome double-henshin of Zero-One and Vulcan, but the Mammoth Magia is apparently able to suck in Flaming Tiger's fire hadokens. Again, the most interesting part of this sequence is Yua, who activates Assassin-chan, has him transform into the Dodo Magia, and then continue acting on the "assassinate Zero One" programming. And as we get a 2-v-2 between the Kamen Riders and the Magias, Valkyrie shows up with a brand-new Progrise key, helps Zero-One access a new form that's perfect to counter Mammoth, then assists Vulcan in taking down Dodo. Normally I'd be miffed that it's the dude that gets the huge, elaborate finisher sequence instead of the credit being shared, but throughout this episode Yua seems to be working on her own angle, and even blowing up Dodo seems more to be hiding the evidence more than anything... and as proven by Jin being unable to find the Mammoth Key anywhere, Yua and her enigmatic employer seems to have some larger plan in place. Yua's old catchphrase of "every tool has its use" gains a new layer of creepiness as we get to see the flashback of her reprogramming Assassin-chan as he convulses on the bed of the AIMS van.

Ultimately, the actual procedural parts of this episode is starting to feel samey (although pretty competently done), but a lot of what made this episode extra-interesting is more about the revelations. Far from being the strongest that Zero-One has to offer, but not a weak episode by any means.

Random Notes:

• Izu has a lot of great scenes in the background in this episode. Between the utterly confused and baffled look when Fuwa basically ripped Zero-One's briefcase out of her hands, to her supportive background clapping when Aruto transforms into Freezing Bear, and her futilely blowing on Aruto when the Mammoth Magia returned his fire attack onto him... I honestly wonder how much of it is improv on the part of the actress and how much of it is in the script. 
• Also among the clapping supportive background characters is Assassin-chan, who had a whole applause ready after Jin's transformation.
• I know he's "getting used to it", but it really is stupid for Fuwa to run around using the shotgun in Shooting Wolf mode in the first fight against Jin, yeah? 
• Jin yells out his sound effects as he activates his wing-blade things. That's adorable. 
• The Gimmick Watch:
• "Blizzard! Authorize. Progrise! Attention, freeze! Freezing bear! Fierce breath as cold as arctic winds." Freezing Bear's finisher is Freezing Impact. 
• Can I just say how cool the 'frozen over' segments of Freezing Bear's chest and shoulder armour looks?
• Know Your Magia: Two very popular prehistoric animals this time around, the Mammoth, a larger ancestor of the modern-day elephant which lived from the Pliocene to Holocene epochs; and the Dodo bird, a flightless bird from the island Mauritus who was driven to extinction in 1662 thanks to humans.
• I am 99.9% sure that this is the first time that "Valkyrie" is spoken on-screen. 
• So... we get a couple of flashbacks to some of the Humagears who we explicitly know are considered by the Metsuboys to be candidates for being 'friends'. Gut-Buster Taro (the comedian) was in a similar process of realizing how happy he was at bringing smiles; Mamoru  the security guard was transformed after a heroic sequence of defending the Hiden employees; Seine had a flashback to her human counterpart's life when she's doing her life's dream. And I think G-Pen was... understanding of his employer? I dunno about G-Pen. 
• The only exception is Anna the tour guide and the sushi chef, both of whom weren't awakened to a unique Magia (they both turned into generic trilobites) but definitely went above and beyond in trying to fulfill their respective jobs and understanding human emotion.
• So also, presumably the other Magias like Scissormenz and Bus really loved their respective jobs of being a barber or a bus driver; we the audience just never saw that. 

The Flash S06E01 Review: A-ah! King of the Impossible!

The Flash, Season 6, Episode 1: Into the Void

So the previous season was... it wasn't the best. One would argue that some of the CW shows have outgrown their age, and with a lot of shakeups among the superhero TV shows, with many shows ending, some long-runners concluding and many new ones starting, it does make me wonder, sometimes, where it leaves The Flash. I absolutely loved the first season to bits, and I might go as far to say that it's my favourite superhero live-action season ever, but at the same time, there are so many problems plaguing seasons two through five that it's hard to recommend the show as a whole to people that aren't already DC fans. The second half of season two, as well as most of seasons four and five, were easily the biggest offenders here. Honestly, at this point the only reason that really does make me excited about this show is just how well the cast's chemistry is.

Season 6 does seem to be building up to something. With the 2019/2020 season building up to the epic Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover which will also conclude Arrow, it genuinely feels like we're at least building up a huge epic. And while I am enough of a fanboy to have little shivers down my spine when the Monitor shows up at the end, proclaiming that the Flash must die for billions to live... I do wonder about where the rest of the season is going to go.

The season six premiere just seems so... muted, and more of the same. It does some of the things you expect from a season premiere, lobs in a threat-of-the-week, a villain-of-the-season, and an ominous bigger-picture teaser for the Crisis at the end, but ultimately I feel like there were a lot of the same road being retread. I do acknowledge the need for Barry and Iris realizing that they really do need to cope with Nora's death, which is a neat little storyline for them this episode -- both are overworking themselves and are refusing to admit that they have a problem, because, honestly, how can they? Candice Patton and Grant Gustin really do sell their scenes when they finally break down, and that's a pretty neat emotional sequence.

The plot-of-the-week is... simple enough. We get a fake-out with Godspeed, who turns out to be just another random mysterious impostor, although we do get a pretty awesome sequence with Flash clothes-lining him. The actual threat of this episode is in fact Chester "Chunk" Runk, a kid who accidentally became comatose thanks to an experiment gone wrong, and his mind ends up manifesting black holes in Central City. We get some neat effects, and a glorious, glorious usage of Queen's Flash Gordon Theme, and Chester does seem like he might be a potential new supporting character for the future, but it's... it's kind of just another superhero plot, y'know?

Meanwhile, Caitlin ends up dealing with Killer Frost incontinence, and I do really appreciate that it ended up being Ralph that correctly guesses that Killer Frost is kinda being tsundere about wanting to live her own life, and both Caitlin and Frost end up agreeing very happily to share their body, which is neat, well-acted and all, but at the same time, does really feel like we're retreading some old ground. At least Killer Frost got a sweet, sweet new costume out of it. Caitlin and Frost's dialogue have always been hit-and-miss, and I do hope that this new cooperation between the two is going to finally be the dart that sticks as far as this take on the character goes.


The other big Caitlin thing, of course, is her former colleague, Ramsey Rosso (played by Heroes veteran Sendhil Ramamurthy), who is certainly going to be a main character going forward. Initially being portrayed as a grieving son who refuses to accept his mother's death, he turns out to be trying to find a cure for his family's blood disease, and ends up experimenting with dark matter, which transforms him into a monstrous metahuman at the end of the episode. Our new big bad, or an arc villain?

Ultimately, I do sound a bit too negative, I feel, because it's ultimately a very solid season premiere. I just am afraid that this season will end up like all the previous ones before it, so I'm tempering my expectations a lot. The cast, at the very least, was absolutely fantastic, and I was genuinely surprised to see Carlos Valdez still sticking around as Cisco considering there were so many hints throughout the previous season that he was going to leave. We'll see how things play out from here on out, and we'll see just how my schedule will allow me to catch up with any of these superhero stuff, because, honestly, at the rate my IRL schedule is going, I'm not sure I'll be able to watch any of these in a timely fashion.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Opal City is the hometown most associated with the DC superhero Starman, but the Elongated Man also operates out of that city in the comics. Ralph client, Sue Dearbon, as we've mentioned in season 5, is his comic-book counterpart's wife. 
• Chester P. Runk, a.k.a. Chunk, is an ally of the Flash associated with the 80's-90's run starring Wally West, a scientist who was transformed into a living black hole due to an experiment, and ended up initially abusing his powers before eventually being befriended by the Flash, who convinced him to release the people he had trapped within his personal black hole. 
• Ramsey Rosso, a.k.a. Bloodwork, is a relatively new villain, introduced in 2017 as part of the Rebirth reboot, where he was a hemophiliac who ended up experimenting with his own blood to find a cure, only to gain blood-manipulating superpowers in the process.