Resident Evil - Apocalypse (Special Edition)
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Actor: Megan Fahlenbock, Mike Epps, Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Shaun Austin-OlsenBrand: SONY PICTURES HOME ENT
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 94 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-12-28
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Resident Evil - Apocalypse (Special Edition)
DVD Review: Slow, stupid, and almost downright offensive!
Summary: 1 Stars
Following the moderate success of the first "eh, good enough" film, Resident Evil: Apocalypse continues the story of Alice, one of the few survivors of the T-Virus outbreak that turned the Hive facility's employees into flesh-eating zombies. The Umbrella Corporation has reopened the Hive and the T-Virus has escaped into the Raccoon City above it. Now, Alice - who is now superpowered thanks to Umbrella tinkering with her DNA - must once again escape hordes of zombies, hellhounds, and Umbrella-created mutations before the whole city is nuked off the map.
With her this time are characters that are actually from the games the movie is based on - sexy cop Jill Valentine (played by Sienna Guillory) and Carlos Oliveira (Oded Fehr). Since the Alice character was inspired by the Jill character, they are almost exactly the same atttude-wise, and do we really need two of the same character in the same movie? Sorry, we don't. The movie is supposed to take place during the Resident Evil 3 game which Jill is the star of, but whenever Jill gets in trouble in this film, Alice swoops in like Supergirl and saves her ass. They totally waste the Jill character just to keep the awful Alice story going, and it's sad to see the character that stars in the game get upstaged left and right by a character that was never in the games. Booooo! Maybe they should have just left the game's characters out of this film so they could keep the film and game separate.
This brings up the problems with the story. Since Alice wasn't in any of the games and this film is supposed to be about the third Resident Evil game, this puts the film in the "it's kind like but kinda not like the game" category, so you don't even know where it exists in the canon of the games' storyline. Second, some of the plot points are incredibly stupid from the start. After all, why would a corporation design a research facility with a special security system designed to seal the place off should something disasterous happen and then try to reopen the facility not once but TWICE once something so bad happens that the place needs to be sealed off? Couldn't they take the hint the first time they reopened the place and lost an entire Special Ops team inside? And wasn't the guy that escaped that was infected with their T-Virus enough of a hint that there had been a T-Virus outbreak? The logic that sets this film in motion is so annoyingly flawed. You'd think a major coporation like Umbrella was smarter than this. They could have at least tried to explain it off that the Hive was reopened with the purpose of letting the T-Virus escape to see how effective their bio-weapon was in a major city? That's one of the explanations they give in the game, but they don't even do that in the film.
Second, why are they giving Alice more and more powers? How are we supposed to relate to her? Part of the appeal of zombie films - or most films in general - is that you can relate to the characters. You can mentally put yourself in their position, and you worry about their well-being. But what happens when the character you're supposed to relate to becomes so powerful they can do somersaults, know tons of martial arts out of the blue, and can kill people with telepathy? Alice becomes so powerful and superhuman, you never fear she won't survive. It's called the Superman Syndrome - a character becomes so powerful, that you don't care what happens to them because you already know.
Now there's the Nemesis. They turn a badass killing machine into a good guy in the end! Part of what makes some villains so fun is that they're so bad - they're so bad, they're good. That was part of the appeal of Nemesis. But instead, they turn him into a kinder, gentler Nemesis who saves the day in the end.
The Resident Evil movies are supposed to be zombie movies, but they're made into action/sci-fi bullcrap. Sure, zombie films have some action in them, but it's more realistic action. Sadly, these films use stylized action that look like they were taken from the Matrix Bargain Bin with its slow motion bullets, wire-fu, and choppy editing to try making the film look "cool". And they fail miserably. Zombie films make the action secondary, but this is an action film and the zombies are secondary.
The first film spent half its running time zombie-free, as they tried to set up suspense and that's pretty understandable. This time around, there should be zombies galore, right? But the plotting is so damn slow, you almost forget there are zombies in the film! And even when the zombies are on-screen, they use this filming style that looks like choppy stop-motion animation! Who thought this was a good idea in post-production? Whoever has this film editor hired now on ANY film, fire them immediately.
UPDATE - This visual characteristic is called "dropping frames," and it usually occurs accicentally during editing when transferring footage from film to digital editing software. When the software is having trouble converting one of the frames the footage for whatever reason, that frame is "dropped". The blur yousee is the footage skipping over the missing frame. It happens rarely, and when it does happen, it's either barely noticeable to the audience , or it requires the editor to make adjustments or find a different method to convert the footage. But in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, it appears that the editor is intentionally dropping frames to create this visual effect. Why? Is there something wrong with the zombies that they have to obscure the audience's view of them? Do they think (erroneously) that it makes the zombies scarier? Or are the zombies too visually disturbing that they have to be blurred in order to make an R rating? Whatever the reason, this is a TERRIBLE visual characteristic, and whoever masterminded this decision needs to go back to college and take a few film classes.
I'm sorry, the LJ character is so blatantly offensive. Do we really need the loud-mouthed black comic relief these days? The only way this would have been more offensive and cliched is if they had some Vaudeville-esque performer in blackface tap-dancing and eating watermelon throughout the film.
And I'm certain that the only reason they made it possible to kill the zombies by snapping their necks was to tone down the gore and get it past the MPAA with an R rating, not to mention that video games still have the "just kid's stuff" reputation, and thus movies based on video games suffer a similar stigma so they have to be toned down for "the kids." But this is supposed to be a ZOMBIE FILM, it's supposed to be gory! The games, which are supposedly "just kid's stuff," actually have MORE gore than the movies made about them. So as far as zombie films go, the Resident Evil films are pretty tame. Hell, they could have gone with more gore, taken it out so the film could get an R, then put it back in for an Unrated Version on DVD. That would have been more acceptable than these zombie film abominations.
And am I the only one who is so tired of the blue tint they see in every action/sci-fi film since The Matrix? I haven't been to a single city where the lighting is blue EVERYWHERE at night. Enough with the blue lighting, damn it.
Believe me, if I could have given this film 0 Stars, I would have. This is truly a horrible film. Horrible-looking, horribly-written, horribly-directed, and so on. It's such a shame that video games are being so poorly represented on film this way.
Description of Resident Evil - Apocalypse (Special Edition)
Alice is back and forced to face off against an unstoppable, bio-engineered killing machine in the action-packed sequel to the sci-fi smash hit.2002's popular video-game-derived hit Resident Evil didn't inspire confidence in a sequel, but Resident Evil: Apocalypse defies odds and surpasses expectations. It's a bigger, better, action-packed zombie thriller, and this time Milla Jovovich (as the first film's no-nonsense heroine) is joined by more characters from the popular Capcom video games, including Jill Valentine (played by British hottie Sienna Guillory) and Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr, from 1999's The Mummy). They're armed and ready for a high-caliber encounter with devil dogs, mutant "Lickers," lurching zombies, and the leather-clad monster known only as Nemesis, unleashed by the nefarious Umbrella Corporation responsible for creating the cannibalistic undead horde. Having gained valuable experience as a respected second-unit director on high-profile films like Gladiator and The Bourne Identity, director Alexander Witt elevates this junky material to the level of slick, schlocky entertainment. --Jeff Shannon
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