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.