This movie is a perfect poster child for why you need a future plan for a movie franchise. There are so many things that were changed for this movie to work, but then subsequent titles after this film act like its events never happen. Either that, or they quickly clean everything up and forget about all of it. Why? Because someone thought it would be a great idea to just destroy the entire world and turn it into Mad Max 2. That's not a joke, the filmmakers were very prominently inspired by the Mad Max series for this entire premise. These two elements could work, but only if they were willing to stick to their guns. Spoiler Alert: They didn't.
That's not to say that this is a wholly bad movie. This is actually pretty entertaining, but it would have worked better as its own standalone film. The entire world is now destroyed. Entire bodies of water dried up and the T-Virus killed 90% of its entire population. Alice is now Mad Max on a motorcycle, going through the deserts and sticking to areas where Umbrella Corp cannot track her. We are also following an entire group of survivors led by Claire Redfield. They go through abandoned cities and ghost towns to gather resources with which to survive. LJ from the second movie is still here, as is Carlos. Both of them are on the convoy and helping them with a bit of muscle to help kill zombies and protect their group.
We see a lot of stuff that doesn't exactly contribute to the main plot. Mostly, it's just them killing zombies and dying from random attacks, especially from that of the crows. Both Alice and the refugees are separate for the first part of the movie until this fight with the crows and she helps most of them escape their attack. There are plenty of deaths, though, and it's clear that they are losing hope until Alice tells them about a possible refuge in Alaska, which kindles a little bit of optimism.
However, Umbrella Corp is still looking for Alice, even going so far as to frequently clone her in hopes of multiplying her blood, which can be synthesized for a cure. Dr. Alexander Isaacs is head of this project, but he answers to Albert Wesker, who is making his real character debut in this movie, for some reason. It's not that he's not part of the story, but he plays such a small part that his big first appearance could have been saved for a better contribution. In here, he's just sitting in a chair and telling Isaacs "no" when he wants to send a team to take Alice. Isaacs ignores this answer and manipulates Wesker's voice audio to command it be done anyway.
Some things are done quite well in this movie. Isaacs is a great villain, manipulative and sinister with no conscience for human life. For him, the ends always justify the means, and he wants to create a cure so that they can use it to leverage what is left of the populace and gain control over them. There are all kinds of things wrong with this approach, because all of the cloning and all of the power they use for their facilities should be used for resources since the world is, you know, basically dead.
They even go so far as to create super zombies that they have limited control over. These are far more vicious than normal zombies as well as physically stronger. In the end, it doesn't matter a whole lot, they are still just walking dead people, they can just run a little faster now. This attack kills all of the remaining prominent survivors in the convoy, aside from Claire. LJ was infected by the T-Virus in an earlier scene, so he was dying the whole time and turns into a zombie because he hid his injury from them. This is rather hypocrytical of him, because he gave Carlos a hard time for doing the same thing in the second film.
They almost get to Alice and nearly capture her, but they fail and Isaacs is bitten by one of the super zombies who also has a more aggressive form of the T-Virus. With their entire convoy aside from just a few survivors now dead, the plan to reach Alaska is now to take a helicopter from Umbrella Corp after getting through an entire legion of zombies. One very high point in this film is when Carlos decides to sacrifice his life to give them an entrance. The last zombie attack left him infected with the virus and so he drives a giant fuel truck through them, and causes it to explode. Before it does, though, he finds a nice little rolled smoke and uses it to light the fuel. He has a nice little puff before the end. Absolute boss way to go. Proper respects.
Once Dr. Isaacs gets back to the base, he takes the anti-virus in large doses and this turns him into a tentacle tyrant. The special effects in this movie is hit and miss. While the crows in the earlier scene look pretty decent, the Isaac tyrant looks awful, especially when he actually uses the tendrils. It also makes no sense at all that Isaacs has Alice's telekinesis powers. The fight they have isn't terrible, and it brings back a nice callback to the laser hallway that killed most of the special forces team in the first film. This would have been a lot better if they hadn't already done so in the earlier Alice clone scene at the beginning of the film, but it was pretty cool to see Isaacs get chopped to bits from the grid laser.
During all of this, one of the movie's greatest weaknesses pokes its head up. The clones. These clones could have been a pretty cool plot for the next movie, but as you will see from the next review, this cool little gimmick is whizzed down their legs. We are given the promise of a cool war between Umbrella and super powered (somehow) Alice clones led by the real Alice herself. It is teased at the end and they do next to nothing with it. The entire plot point of these clones is rendered completely useless as a result. They spent all of that effort into multiplying Milla Jovovich and all of it was wasted.
Another very large brick wall that this movie faced was the plot device of Umbrella Corp's control over Alice via computer satellite. Not only does it help them track her, but it also gives them her off button. They use this in two parts of the movie, one was done so that they could find her and sic zombies on her. The other turned her off completely... for a few minutes. Then she literally destroys their control over her with her mind. Somehow, even though the satellite is in space, she gains back control from Earth. This was a very badly used plot point that really should have been retconned between movies 2 and 3. It's not as if they didn't retcon tons of other things.
As said before, this is a pretty decent addition to this series. It's far better than the second film because it takes itself more seriously. The problem, however, is that it is a Resident Evil movie and it does little to nothing for the entire movie franchise. This is a common problem from here on out and this is the last time that the movies ever reach the quality of "decent". Paul WS Anderson obviously had no idea what he was doing and was flying by the seat of his pants the entire time. He looked at the series, pulled a lot of the coolest elements but had no idea how to impliment them in a meaningful way. He thought he could put in cloning, the tyrant, Wesker, zombie crows and cool action scenes, and it would amount to Resident Evil. Well, it doesn't, and the series has suffered hard because of it. They made this movie pretty good on accident. They did not make that "mistake" again. If you have seen this series, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Virtua Bites.
