The big problem with it for a lot of people was its extreme lack of source material in the script. Not only do we not get any characters from the game, but there's barely anything about a house. Instead we get more of a mystery science fiction thriller movie, in stark contrast to the survival horror featuring giant spiders. Mila Jovovich stars as Alice, and yes, there is a lot of Alice in Wonderland symbolism that leads to literally nothing. All of it stems from an earlier version of the script, where the Alice stuff actually had something to do with what was in the plot. They changed so much of it, that it hardly matters at all.
Alice has amnesia, which is always a terrible sign with any movie wanting to do cheap twists. Seriously, the house puts "Forget everything" chemicals in the air for no reason at all. So, we're whisked away on the plot as a SWAT team from Umbrella Corp and lead them from the house, down into the basement where there's an entire headquarters doing experimentation called the HIVE. She's taken with her... "husband" Spence who is played by James Purefoy and they go through the facility, which is now completely silent.
The SWAT team has no idea what the HIVE was working on because Umbrella never told them, they just deployed them to the location and thought they could figure it out on their own. Again, this makes no sense, but they go through and within minutes, most of them are dead. How did they die? Laser trap security systems. By the time we get to the zombies, there are two SWAT people, one of them played by Michelle Rodriguez.
What follows is a lot of confusion. One of the people they bring along with them (played by Matt Addison) was involved, but only because he was looking for his sister. Alice soon finds out that his sister was her contact and now she is a zombie who is dead. Sad day. The zombie hordes and the zombie dogs are fun for the most part, and the lickers come into play at the end. For the time, the computer generated images are pretty good. They're nothing to write home about but they do their job and the artists blended it pretty well.
The plot is full of truck-sized holes. Paul W.S. Anderson is not known for his stellar storytelling, more for slightly following the lore while telling a passable narrative along the way. Keeping to that narrative, however, will prove to be his biggest weakpoint when it comes to the Resident Evil series that this movie started. Sad to say, it was all downhill from here. The moment that this movie took the brother of the zombie sister and sliced him in the arm, the words "Nemesis Program" got people hyped for a sequel that would... fail to deliver. There was Nemesis and he was a prominent figure, but the excution... we'll leave that for the next movie review. Virtua braaaaaains...
