Flak Magazine: Review of Resident Evil, 3-30-02

Horror movies, at their best, don't desensitize us to violence; they give us countless chances to practice looking at it. By the end of the movie, we think: "This is the way the world is, a continuum of gore, mutilation and innocent corpses." Usually incidents along such a continuum are reported in one line in a newspaper brief, but they are there, onscreen. Someone who has seen an artery spill or rigor mortis in real life will not always flinch from its re-creation; they can use it as a chance to react again — more confidently — to the loss of life, or limbs.

Knowing this, the eternally hopeful viewer will point out that Resident Evil could have been a meditation on death, helplessness and institutionalized (and therefore mundane) evil. It is not. The story fails, its flaws spread out and you spend your time thinking about its failures rather than getting involved in the action or characters.

For example, Resident Evil is pushy with its sound. Not a moment goes by in the action-horror flick when there isn't a loud effect, a dripping or a shuffling or that familiar ghostly hum that's supposed to suggest silence in a deserted laboratory or air duct. These should scare us into imagining the promised zombies, but the sounds are simply too isolated and too individual — all they conjure up a foley artist too close to the microphone. During fight scenes, or just before them — in the disturbing silence when, for example, a character would be thinking about exactly how to dropkick mutant Dobermans in a manner that crushes their spinal cords (something that you suspect would require concentration) — you only get repetitive guitar and techno scores, making the same rising or falling sound over and over, something akin to a Korn bass line or a CD-ROM booting up.

For a zombie movie to be uncomfortable with silence is a bad sign. Zombies are all about slow, lurching arrival and overpowering accumulation. Resident Evil doesn't do slow. It doesn't even do non-slick.

In the Doberman scene, we focus on our amnesiac cipher/hero/surgical fashion victim Alice (Milla Jovovich), and not on the undead Dobermans. They are unconvincing creatures, and unlike Tom Savini's makeup for George Romero's seminal zombie trilogy, they have no story to them. There is nothing interesting in the way the blood hangs from their faces or a sinew reaches from neck to tip of chin. They look like, and apparently are, regular dogs pasted with Ragu. Instead, the emphasis is on the slickness: Alice, her ridiculous jump kick and a close-up, slow-motion shot of a bullet casing her gun discharges.

The message of the film — communicated via the insecure jumpiness of its action and editing — seems to be that The Matrix was a good movie (it's even directed by a Mr. Anderson). The video-game series the movie springs from knew that zombies eat your brains with a dull, lapping rhythm. They have what has been called a "nightmare slowness." You can see that quality in the Romero films, but also in the Sept. 11 footage: It's the same speed as that first plane hitting the tower on video, over a bored firefighter checking a gas leak, the hum of the engines lazily filling the air.

For Resident Evil to lack that fundamental zombie-movie precept is a major failling, but movie isn't a complete waste. One of the movie's admirable moves is to place conspiracied evil in the hands of a corporation, not a government, giving its characters lines like this lonely piece of dialogue: "Corporations like (evil zombie-making megacorp) Umbrella think they're above the law. They're not. Hundreds of thousands of people think the same way." This is a nice nod towards anti-WTO ideas, but the fantasy setting ultimately renders it useless. Our characters are deep below ground in Umbrella's "Hive," a research and experimentation facility run by a unstable supercomputer, the "Red Queen" (Matrix, Matrix, Matrix), who has recently killed all the workers. (In doing so, she has also let loose a mutant "licker" monster, that, like a lot of digital effects, does not seem to exist at the same frame rate as the film around it.) The corporation angle would have been a nice thread to expand throughout the film. As it is, it's barely perceptible, only there when clunky video-game exposition explains nine out of every 10 homes contain Umbrella's products; when a bunny is seen being injected behind the ear; and when the phrase "just do it" surfaces, perhaps accidentally, into random dialogue.

Without such substance, Resident Evil's very anemic storyline turns into a kind of plot as pornography. It keeps alluding to an ultimate theory or solution to explain what was going on in the Hive, or among its amnesiac characters, but it never really lays down all its cards. It just keeps releasing tidbits and changing them arbitrarily, up until its final shots. As if glimpses of conspiracy and shadowy figures are enough, and there needs to be no real coherence or point. Endless unraveling theories about governments and corporations with impossible and violent power differ from facts about such governments and corporations in that they suggest the world's injustice makes sense … if you could just peek into the boardroom where the cabinet of CEOs and CIA directors meets. A more mundane mixture, like that in the Romero films (Romero once had written a script for this production) would involve both a recognition of the oddity and uniqueness of the world's terrors, and the familiarity and ordinariness of defense against it (shotguns, a farmhouse, a mall).

Lacking those layers, Resident Evil becomes just another movie whose plot is about a group running from a source of terror. But even still, all is not lost. When such movies (often just chains of setpieces) have no overreaching mass-market desires (as, for example, the Jurassic Park films did), they can enjoy massacring their characters, savor their denouements, make them a source of wonder. They can constantly reaffirm how malleable the human body is, how easily it can be squished, squashed, compressed or jellified (and how bad aim or simple errors or problems of weight can lead to these conditions). A familiarity with this is no sin. If the nations' newspapers editors watched more gore films, maybe they would feel less comfortable with their blasé reporting of civilian casualties.

That kind of joy in men becoming bodies is given a little bit of room to breathe in the film. If you cut out your tympanic membranes and ignore the Marilyn Manson soundtrack, you can appreciate the loving detail with which the Red Queen traps and kills those whom it feels it needs to, and the shots of corpses in an impersonal, deserted workplace. But this strength plays up the film's greater weakness: The director seems to be more at home with murderous computers than the walking dead. At their best, movies like the one Resident Evil wants to be (Aliens, the first thirty minutes of Saving Private Ryan) say that, to continue their own narrative, humans will survive beyond absurdity. Resident Evil never quite gets out of the absurd, instead stuck inside the arbitrariness of its story.

— Ben Siler (sorryevil at yahoo dot com)