"Resident Evil" (2002)

Resident Evil for better and (mostly) worse abides my no standard film logic. It's not a horror, action or sci-fi film (though it has elements of all those). The plot hurdles forward without batting an eye at logic or motivation. Characters are there to be framed by the camera, fight off threats, or die at the hands of zombies and computer programs. In short, it is a glorified video game (perhaps not entirely surprising considering it's actually based on a video game). Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson is a competent director who knows how to get a desired effect. The film looks and acts like video game, but it also mostly never looks cheap (except for some poor CGI towards film's end).

However, as much as I love zombie dogs getting kicked in the face by a kickass woman, no amount of technical or visual competency can make up for how empty and hollow Anderson's story is. Anderson's characters are convenient and disposable props for the film's action setpieces. The setting, an underground, high tech research facility, is unreal and undefined, serving only to look elegantly, technocratically cool. Anderson seems to have no real interest in exploring the bare-bones themes that underlie the film. The Umbrella Corporation is an overwhelming corporate, scientific and military evil, but the company is impossibly shadowy and all consuming. There's a potential critique of the military-industrial complex and corporate capitalism run a muck, but they are way, way down on the low end of the totem pole of the film's concerns.

The film revels in its superficiality, the object-ness of the environment and its characters. It pauses in moments of self-aware satisfaction at the glorious bombast on display. As if: Yea, did you see what just happened; wasn't that neat? If nothing else, my inner ten year old certainly got a kick out of it -- I don't mean that entirely as a dismissal or insult, but I don't intend it entirely as a plaudit either.