It is very sad to say that Resident Evil live action iterations never improved. All of them, up until the writing of this article, have never surpassed the decency of the first Resident Evil film directed by Anderson. The animated movies have a far better track record, but those are considered niche Resident Evil fan viewings. If you have any interest in the games, the animated movie series is far more worth your time. These live action films, even as stand-alone movies, only show the viewer how nonsensical and repetitive they become by the end.
If you have been paying attention, you'll understand that Alice is the prime example of a Mary Sue. She literally is never seriously injured more than being knocked out, beyond a strategic loss of some fingers. Any screw ups she has are all minimalistic and survived with hardly a scratch. Her stunts are extremely unrealistic as a result. She becomes the cornerstone of this entire story, even when she only played a very tiny part in the beginning. She was in the Hive in order to infiltrate it and prove that they were doing illegal experiments. Beyond living on top of it in a strange undercover marriage story that makes no sense, Alice's role was basically meeting a contact and exchanging data.
Now, in this story, she is everything and anything that is or ever will be important. They shoe-horn her into this horrific plot like she was everything that matters with whatever is happening. They even go so far as to [SPOILER ALERT] make her out to be the CLONE of a top share-holder of the Umbrella Corporation. She is now, suddenly, the daughter of one of the head scientists who was cloned in order to... live her better life because she has a rapidly aging disease that caused her to become sick and need to freeze hersel--- Okay, seriously, this whole thing just flew directly off of the rails.
All of the sudden, Wesker's double-cross in the last movie was retconned. Not only was it retconned, but the powers he gave back to Alice are now fake and she's still a "normal human" who can do death defying stunts without fail and kill anyone and everyone. You know, just normal human things. Wesker's part in this is, once again, minimalistic. Why they even bothered to bring him back after he seemingly died in the fourth movie is an answer lost in time. He barely even matters in the entire film after being one of its most continuous villains, only to be killed by a door chopping his leg off. He seriously bleeds to death and that's it.
They bring back the scientist from the third film who died and say that he was actually a clone. This one is for real, just trust us. He basically takes Wesker's role in this film and still does a very bad job of it. Alice continuously bests him in comically stupid ways and he keeps proving why they should have never cloned him or given him any sort of authority. Dr. Isaacs just has the cure for the T-Virus in his jacket pocket and it somehow can be broken outside and spread across the entire world, curing everyone and killing the zombies or something like that. However, if it's broken inside it will not go anywhere and be useless. The logic behind all of this is so flawed, it really makes the head spin.
Anderson thought that if we just put a mindless time limit on how long the human race can survive, it would bring up the tension. Somehow, in X amount of hours, the human race is going to be killed by... zombies or the T-Virus or something. Anything to make the plot keep moving to some sort of goal. Then he thought that he could just retcon everything we know about Alice and say she is a clone now. Like, she's also got amnesia because she can't remember anything about her past, guy, just, like, deal with it or something. That's not a joke. Dr. Isaacs literally comes out and tells her that she can't remember anything about her past. This comes out of left field and has never been delved into. In the original movie, she was a double agent working to bring down Umbrella, now she has a super badass action hero past of not knowing who she is or where she came from because she was cloned from blah blah blah.
For the sake of losing myself in a story, editing is not even something I try to pay attention to when watching movies. The plot and characters normally take the forefront. That is, if there aren't enormous, glaring issues. The editing will give you a headache with how quick and choppy it can get. When getting images for this review, locking onto a single shot was an absolute hair-pulling experience. There are flashing lights in dark spaces, especially if a gun is being fired and it is absolute migraine fuel. The acting has not been good for a few movies now, if it was ever considered good to begin with. However, that is the very least of its problems by this point.
This was a chore to get through. Paul Anderson said that he was going to have Alice die at the end, but ended up not doing it because he... said he did things to make the ending so emotional. Emotional. Paul needs a dictionary or something with very detailed descriptions of vocabulary words. There is literally nothing emotional about any of this. I barely even remembered that Claire Redfield somehow wandered her way aimlessly into this movie. To be honest, I don't even remember if it was Jill or Claire. They're both so superfluous to everything going on because Alice takes up the screen with no room for other characters. Her emotionless journey, coasting through the world on stunt wires, culminates to nothing more than a very long and pointless search for a cure that apparently doesn't work immediately. That's right, she breaks the vial outside so it can travel across the world "but there's still so much to do!" Well, that's nice. I hope it reaches the people before they are savagely ripped apart by undead things or mutations of a horrific nature.
There was nothing about this movie that even came close to entertainment. You are far too transfixed by the nonsensical plot, eye-gouging editing, Mila's lifeless portrayal of a wooden Mary Sue, hordes of easily avoided zombies and pointless plot devices showing up on the screen before being discarded for more wackiness. This isn't a chore to get through, it's downright brain torture. This entire series lost the plot and just decided it was cool with that, because it did it again and again and again. It's really no wonder that both Mila Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson fell far out of favor in the film industry after this travesty of a series. Monster Hunter did not turn out any better because Anderson decided to put his wife front and center, again, and ignore everything he didn't like about the games, which was everything, apparently. We may have gotten one good film in the beginning, but this whole decade of trash movies and storytelling was not really worth it. Thankfully, the series is Virtua Dead.
