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).