Official™ Renophaston review of Resident Evil: Afterlife

I saw Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D last Friday, but I enjoyed it! Alice is back, and she’s here to change the world! (This may sound like a reference to Captain EO, the first 3D movie I ever saw, but really she just has a gun that shoots coins.)

Spoilers ahead, but they might be inaccurate because it was a few days ago that I saw this, and my memory sucks.

The Good:

You all remember that my biggest problem with Resident Evil: Extinction was its lack of water. Well, this movie made up for that with spades to spare! Paul W.S. Anderson, the director of the first Resident Evil is back, and he brought with him what made the first movie great. I mean, this movie starts in the rain!** There’s a beach, burst water pipes, a lake. This one time, the main characters were underwater for like five minutes, and also there was a boat. And it wasn’t just some throwaway boat reference; it was a major plot point! It’s obvious Anderson understood where the franchise went adrift after he left, and thankfully he returned to set it back on course. Aquaman ain’t got shit on this movie, other than his powers.

** Not to be confused with Rain Ocampo, Michelle Rodriguez’ character from the first Resident Evil movie… or is it? Aside from RE, Michelle Rodriguez is best known for her role on Lost, a TV show about an island (surrounded by water, of course). Coincidence? Let’s examine the rest of her oeuvre. She followed up Resident Evil with a surfer movie called Blue Crush. Then she played Chris Sanchez in S.W.A.T., “Sanchez” of course coming from the Spanish for “sanctified”, which to Christians brings to mind the Baptismal rite, cleansing the soul with water. Later she voiced a Marine in the popular video game Halo 2. Then in 2005, she played Katarin (in the same year that Hurricane Katrina flooded the Gulf Coast) in another video game adaptation called BloodRayne. Then she starred in a movie called Battle in Seattle, Seattle being known colloquially as “Rain City“. It’s hard to believe the director was unaware of these facts during filming. Oh, and the last movie I saw in theaters before RE:A? Machete. Who was in it? Michelle Rodriguez. (“Michelle”, incidentally, is the feminine form of “Michael”, a name which comes from the archangel Michael, who is known for (among other things) drawing water from the rock at Colossae.)

Also: Zombies! I didn’t know this movie was gonna have zombies! If someone told me this movie was gonna have zombies, I’d have believed them, but nobody did because I don’t have any friends.

The Bad:

Iron Man 2. What a piece of shit. If I had a dollar for every time I saw this “film”, I’d still be out five bucks.

Water and co-star Ali Larter in RE:A

The Ugly:

They introduced Chris Redfield in this movie, which was exciting for some reason. He spent a good chunk of the movie locked in a jail cell. I thought it was funny because in an infamous line from the first game, Barry calls Chris “the master of unlocking“, and here he was locked up. Ha! But then I remembered that it’s Jill Valentine who’s the master of unlocking. So pfft. Nevermind. Chris was in that game, though, and with Chris’ appearance in the movies, we’ve finally come full circle, and ended up in a completely different place.

Aside: I gotta admit, you guys–references to the past take me back. I can’t believe I beat that game. Everything about it was annoying. I give it an “F” for Effort. “Survival Horror”? More like “Survival Horrible Game”!

Still, it had Zombies.

Alaskan water... brr!

The Verdict:

Lets go down the list:

• Zombies? Check.
• Action? Check.
• Dimensions? Check, check… and check. (that’s 3; last one had 2)
• Multiple Jovoviches? (Jovovichlones?) Check.
• Water? More than you can count!

This movie has everything for everybody, and unlike the those big shot “movie” critics, I think that’s enough. I want to say it’s the best Resident Evil movie with the initials REA, but I can’t really remember Apocalypse. Maybe it was good? And what if the next movie is called like Resident Evil: Attrition or something and it’s great? Can’t take that chance! But I’ll give this one four tens out of five!

Out of a hundred.

Full disclosure: I tried not to let it color my review, but I should mention that there was something wrong at my theater, and stuff kept falling out of the movie. Ba-ding chang!

The final word: Resident Evil: Afterlife brought the rotting corpse of the Resident Evil franchise back to theaters!

water + beach = match made in heaven (except I hate beaches)

The Official™ Renophaston review of Resident Evil: Extinction

I saw it: Resident Evil: Extinction. I should preface this review by saying that I’ve seen both Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse, beat the first Resident Evil video game, played parts of the second, and watched my brother (whaazzzup, Ste!) play RE: 4. I didn’t particularly like any of them. But I like Milla Jovovich and I love zombies. Make a movie with both of these things in it, and I will have sex with its corpse. That’s almost an apt metaphor, because I don’t think I’d like to have sex with a corpse, and I don’t think I liked this movie. I’m going to review it now, like this (minor spoilers for the first few minutes of the movie):

The Good:

Milla Jovovich. Well, actually she wasn’t all that good in this movie. But after the movie I checked her website to see if she put up any more music demos, and she did! (You can find them here!) She really needs to put out another proper album, because her movies are hit and miss, and modeling is boring, but I like her music, except some of the Peopletree Sessions, but she only did that album on accident.

Another good thing was I saw a trailer for The Strangers, which looked pretty scary. You can see it here. (You’ll have to sit though a trailer for The Darjeeling Limited first, but that isn’t so bad.) The Strangers has Scott Speedman in it, and I like him. Felicity is one of the shows I like. He was awesome in Underworld, which was a pretty awesome movie. And speaking of complete circles, Milla Jovovich had a song on the Underworld soundtrack! (I c wat u did ther!)

Yet another thing: there was this one part of the movie where (original idea alert!) this one guy who was bad left this other guy to die even though he probably could have saved him, and someone behind me said, “That’s fucked up!” I really appreciated that, because I was confused and thought that maybe that was the heroic thing to do. This is the kind of “added-value” experience you can only get if you see the movie in the theater—why do you think it’s cheaper to rent a movie on DVD than to see it in the theater?

The Bad:

OK, I know they explained it, but there was a serious lack of water in this movie. I mean, I live in a world with a lot of water. There are literally knobs all over my house I can turn and water will come out instantly, whenever I want. How am I supposed to identify with any of these characters if they live in a place with a shortage of water? That’s ridiculous. And since I couldn’t identify with the characters, the whole movie was completely incomprehensible. They might as well have been speaking Aramaic. It was all Greek to me. I also don’t understand Japanese. I understand a little bit of Spanish and Hebrew, but that’s pretty much a lie.

Plus, the acting, writing, story, and special-effects were all pretty bad.

The Ugly:

Someone behind-the-scenes had the great idea to airbrush all the face out of most of Milla’s close-ups. This was very helpful in reminding me that Milla is beautiful, like how laugh tracks remind me that fart jokes are funny, even if I don’t understand them. I’m pretty sure I would have been able to figure it out even if they didn’t draw it all over her face, but as I said, I knew who she was before coming into the theater, and a good filmmaker always assumes the audience is made up of retards. So why is this in the “Ugly” section? Because they only did it most of the time, and they only did it to her face. There were some shots of her in the movie that were untouched, and while I could still tell she was beautiful, I’m not sure the other people in the theater with me could. Or would. Or did.

Also, this movie had two black people in it. WTF?

The Verdict:

If this movie was actually a series of webisodes leading up to Resident Evil: Vengeance or something, they would probably make me want to see the movie less, but I would still see it because it has Milla Jovovich and zombies in it. Kind of like the 30 Days of Night: Blood Trails series, except that series made me decide to not see 30 Days of Night because the webisodes I watched really sucked. Ha! I get it! 30 Days of Night would be cool if the vampires weren’t all violent, careless, and gory, like… zombies…

Maybe I will see it. (That’s the punchline.)

If you’re going to see one zombie movie this year that’s based on a video game and stars Milla Jovovich and Oded Fehr, see Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Or you could see this one instead, but I don’t think it’s as good. I give it a D out of 10 zombies.

The final word: Resident Evil: Extinction should have been called Resident Evil: The Least Entertaining One of Them.