DVD: Resident Evil (Resurrected Edition)

Resident Evil

Resident Evil stars Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius and James Purefoy and is written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.

Resident Evil is based on the popular video game of the same named. A virus known as the T-Virus is unleashed in an underground research facility, The Hive (property of the Umbrella corporation), which is localed right under Raccoon City. When the T-Virus is unleashed the underground's security mainframe, Red Queen puts the place on lock down. So a group of commandos and soldiers travel down to clear up what has happened down in the Hive. The only way to the Hive is through a house which is guarded by Alice (Milla Jovovich), but she was effected by some nerve gas that is part of the defense of the Hive, that makes her forget who she is for a short period. Alice along with another person who was at the house Matt Addison (Eric Mabius) travel down to the Hive. While traveling down to the Hive through the train they find Spencer Parks (James Purefoy) who was with Alice on protecting the house, and he too was effected by the defense gas.

As they get to the Hive they make there way to the Red Queen and shut her down. When they do that it unlocks all the doors and turns off all security measures. Without knowing the group who now only consists of Alice, Spencer Parks, Matt Addison, Chad Kaplan (Martin Crewes) and Rain Ocampo (played by Michelle Rodriguez) has let out the people who have been infected with the T-Virus, turning them into Zombies.

Let me start off say I have always enjoyed all of the Resident Evil video games, Capcom really does a great job on making scary moments and throughout the games your constantly tensed. The movie on the other hand, I though it could have been better, It was not scary, the acting was so-so, the graphic was in my opinion OK, nothing great though.

Maybe it was the writing but I thought the whole thing was laughably bad, the actors seemed to me that they put no thought of emotion, they seemed bored and just said what was written without feeling. Really dull. I guess you would have to say that the story too was for me not that exciting, nothing really grabbed me and did not let go.

One beef I have with these monster movie is that Zombie at some extend are crapping "bad guys" in movies. One thing that I really hate about the Zombie cliche is that they aways walks slowly and the victim running ALWAYS trips and looks back and eventually gets killed. Now one who gave them a good change was the movie 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later, the Zombies in this movies where running, they were smarter. Those were much more exciting.

Overall Resident Evil is a very forgetful movie you could watch it once and then maybe days later it would be forgotten. I would have to say that Resident Evil is a Skip.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

The sequel to the first Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Apocalypse stars Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr and Thomas Kretschmann and is written by Paul W.S. Anderson and directed by Alexander Witt.

The sequel to the 2002 Resident Evil movie based on the Capcom zombie game starts off right where the first let off. The T-Virus has come up to the surface and is starting to spread through Raccoon City.While the Umbrella Corp. has been evacuating the city, one of the first priorities was a scientist Dr. Ashford (Jared Harris) who created the T-Virus. He says we would not go without his child Angie (Sophie Vavasseur) but as she is on her way out of the city her car gets in an accident. As The Umbrella Corp. is getting all civilians out of the city, the Virus makes its way to the gate so they decide to shut off to everyone there.

One of the people left in Raccoon City is Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) along with her friend Peyton Wells (Razaaq Adoti) and a news reporter Terri Morales (Sandrine Holt). They stick together and shack up in a church, where they are attacked by three monsters and are saved by Alice (Milla Jovovich). Alice help these three survive. Dr. Ashford learn about his daughter and finds out that she when to go and hide at her junior school. So he contacts the four Alice, Terri, Jill and a bitten Peyton and has them rescue his daughter for a trip out of the city before the Umbrella Corp. explodes a bomb in the heart of Raccoon City. He also gets a ex Umbrella soldier Carlos Oliveira (Oded Fehr) to help the others.

The man who is in charged of the evacuation and is some how connected to Alice's past, Major Cain (played by Thomas Kretschmann) he unleashes the Umbrella Corporation experiment from the Nemesis program (Which they mentioned towards the end of the first movie). The experiment is named Nemesis, a destruction force that can destroy anything in his way. Cain wants to try to match Nemesis against Alice.

As positive I must say I like Resident Evil: Apocalypse must better than the first. I though it was doing much better, story-wise but still disappointed with the overall movie. Most of the same issues I had with the first movie are still present here.

The newest cast members Sienna Guillory who plays Jill Valentine which is the character from the video game original Resident Evil and Oded Fehr playing Carlos Oliveira who is from the Resident Evil 3: Nemesis game. They were a pretty good addition to the movie, I do like Oded Fehr from the Mummy movies I thought hes a really good actor.

While it seems to me it seems that with this sequel the series is turning to a more action rather than horror type of movie. I really liked this one better because it uses more from the video game. But overall I would say this sequel is a Skip.

DVD

The DVD of this Resurrected Edition has both the first and the second of the Resident Evil movies from the series. Aside from the two movie the features include The Evolution of resident Evil: Bridge to Extinction, Exclusive Sneak Peek Scene from Resident Evil: Extinction, Diary of an Apocalypse, Zombie Dog POV Test, Undead boot camp, Stuntman Set Tour, Memory Retention Training Quiz, Evil Archives: 5 Photo Galleries.

The DVD here is really simple, If you don't have or seen the first two, this is the DVD to get. But if you do have it then there is not much here for you except a 5 minutes bridge to the third feature film. The Resurrected Edition of Resident Evil is a Rent.