Resident Evil [2002] - Movie Review
6Resident Evil [2002] - Movie Review
Released in 2002 and directed by Paul WS Anderson, and starring Milla Jovovich as our main character Alice; The film opens with the Umbrella logo and has narration about The Umbrella Corporation, telling us that they are a Pharmaceutical Company and one of the largest corporate entities in the country, with their influence felt by nearly everyone with 9 out of 10 homes having their products, so a pretty big company, probably something on the scale of Amazon or Microsoft from our world. I do like this opening as it is quite reminiscent of the games and sets the mood nicely, I’m not sure if Umbrella was *that* big in the games I think their influence was more felt in just Racoon City rather than the whole United States, but this movie isn’t in the same canon as the games, it’s completely separate, with only elements carrying over from the games.
So after that we get the first real scene, in a workplace with lots of people around and a lab where a guy is using some mechanical arms to put some tubes containing virus samples into a case and then he throws one at a table, breaking it open and the contents spilling on the floor and getting sucked into the ducting, then he hurries out and leaves.
Then we see that the virus is detected by a security camera and an alarm is sounded which the workers think is a fire alarm, they try to evacuate but something is not right and they are all locked inside.
Then we see some workers trapped in an elevator trying to get out, and then the sprinklers go off and some type of poison gas starts spraying out and makes the workers locked in the rooms all either unconscious or dead, and a pretty cool and intense bit where the woman trying to escape the elevator presumably gets decapitated.
So by this point I’d say the movie is off to a pretty good start, and shows us how the outbreak starts but hasn’t yet revealed who the bad guy is who started it, or why he did so.
So then it cuts to Alice waking up on the floor in the shower in a large mansion, sorta like the Spencer Mansion but not exactly, it isn’t the main setting for the film, but it does have similar statues and stuff.
Then Alice starts looking around for anyone else but she has amnesia and doesn’t remember who she is or what she’s doing there. But then a guy grabs her and tries to lead her somewhere but a few seconds later a group of armed soldiers rapel down and smash through the windows, they are kinda like this movie’s version of the Umbrella Security Service, with their black paramilitary uniforms; they arrest the man who just grabbed Alice, who’s name is Matt, and their commander starts interrogating Alice, saying he wants a report from her and calls her soldier showing that she is a soldier as well like them, but she has memory loss and doesn’t remember anything.
They decide to bring Alice and Matt with them and they open a door with a computerised lock on it and head down the stairs. This leads them down to a warehouse of sorts, with lots of boxes with Umbrella logos on them and logos plastering the walls everywhere.
Why so many logos? I mean I know they’re telling us the audience that it’s an Umbrella facility, but wherever I’ve worked before they don’t have *that* many logos on absolutely everything, I’ve always found that funny in films and stuff where they do that, like they’ll have the company logo’s even on their computer monitors and the badges on the vehicles and things, where I’ve worked the monitors will just be ya know like Panasonic or LG or whatever and the cars and vans are just Ford, like they don’t have.. Tesco badges on *their* monitors and vans and stuff. That’s just one of those little things I’ve noticed they do in movies.
We see a train, similar looking to the one from RE2, but instead of saying Galaxie 5000 it says Alexie 5000 or something, so I guess that’s another little thing where it’s like.. similar to the games but different.
The Movie is pretty much a Mish mash of the first and second games, combining a loose-version of those together into one story, with the start being in a mansion and then they go in the train to the lab after only about 10 minutes or so, so it’s a little bit of RE1, but mostly the lab section from RE2
The power is out and one of the women soldiers goes under the train through some doors that open up in the floor of the train, when she reconnects the cords back together, she sees a hole ripped in some mesh, and then while she’s looking down it there’s a jump scare when another soldier pokes his head down to talk to her, I can usually see them coming from a mile away but that actually did made me jump.