movie thoughts
So, ivyriver and I went to see Good Luck Chuck today... instead, we saw Resident Evil: Extinction had been released and was playing. Since, if you didn't know before, I find the original Resident Evil games to be the epitome of all that is good and right with survival horror themed zombie games and, further, I enjoy movies that start with naked Milla Jovovich... I was interested in seeing it. ivyriver, for her own reasons I won't expound upon, was quite excited to see it as well. So in a change of plans, we decided to see that instead of our original selection.
In short, I wonder if we shouldn't have just seen Good Luck Chuck. I mean, as a Dane Cook movie, I imagine there would have been copious "boom mike in the shot" scenes, but as compared to the remarkable feeling of... "eh? wtf? where's the satisfactory conclusion of the third act?" ... I don't know.
In the long form.... and cut to prevent spoiling...
To start off... the progression of the T-virus over the course of time alloted was a bit of a stretch in suspension of disbelief. Not so much in that the total of human civilization could fall so fast in such circumstances, as much as that the entirety of the earth's ecosphere could be destroyed to such an extent in only a short 5 years by a virus incapable of normal airborne transmission, which also had a working anti-virus available. Even a corporation as monochromaticly evil as Umbrella would, I feel, at least attempt to save the earth. (After all, what's the fun in lording over a giant desert planet? Without the spice or the sandworms, at least.) The thing that is the biggest difficulty for me to allow it how the T-virus has spread to such an extent that vegetation has died, fish has died... Granted, the T-virus is a remarkable organism (being able to cause living human, canine, rat, and crow to mutate and continue to function after death) but to cross not only mammal species boundaries and progress in a different fashion (simply killing) against an entire separate kingdom? Granted, they never approached the seas in the movie, so afaik there could be undead sharks (no doubt fitted by Umbrella with "frickin' laser beams" (tm) ) swimming in the depths.
Okay, so... breathing... moving on... and... okay. Cloning Alice. Well, given that Umbrella has already futzed her DNA to the point that she can make people bleed out of their eyes and die, cloning isn't that big a leap. The technology is several steps above the humble beginnings of Resident Evil, but a logical progression if you accept the events of Resident Evil: Apocalypse and the nagging suspicion that Carl Rove and Dick Cheney were on the board of Umbrella Corp. Having remained the only surviving and functioning high tech society of humans on the planet, it's not unthinkable that they would have amassed all of the combined data available to them as the world crumbled. And really, White Queen is a much cuter and more rational evolution of AI than Red Queen. But she has a point... Red Queen's actions were logical and necessary. In any event, after blowing the "sanitizing" of Racoon City (didn't the genius of Umbrella Corp wonder how far a crow feasting on infected flesh can fly in a single day? How about mosquitos and cockroaches? (Oops... evidently flies don't fall to the T-virus either... forgot...) but surviving in several Hive-like facilities, the board of Umbrella Corp has a plan for the restoration of humanity. This is the way that the plot in the end comes to a "Well, okay, that's great, but we're not done here" feeling. To wit...
Hey! It's Claire Redfield! Why isn't she wondering where Chris is hiding? C'mon. In the games, Claire's quest to find out what happened to Chris Redfield is her primary, driving force. (Until Code: Veronica, anyways.) Granted, I think she's capable of having (along the way) managed to round up survivors and put together a caravan of zombie food in the harsh future we must accept. Still, why does that connection reach out, yawning across a deep chasm of great backstory and instant character development, only to never make it to the audience? Did the writers think perhaps the audience, having swallowed everything else to this point, would balk at the remarkable coincidence that a convoy (containing an "RCFD" ambulance that must have survived the firestorm) led by the sister of S.T.A.R.S. leader Chris Redfield just happened to survive, hook up with Carlos, and eventually run across Alice wandering the desert? And since we've already gotten that far, what the hell ever happened to Jill Valentine? The first Resident Evil game revolved around S.T.A.R.S. but they've had only about 15 minutes of combined screen time. On the other hand, Alice (whom reminds me of a mysterious, red dress wearing woman named Ada, despite being sexily Milla Jovovich) stars throughout and even manages to wear some great survivor fashions. (In case you're wondering, the costumes are a collaboration between the film costumer and Milla's clothing line.) Even going with the "alternate universe exploration" concept, it's a different story than told in the games. And the ways in which it is very different start small and by this movie, are incredibly huge.
The action, the carnage, and the sheer goodness of Milla Jovovich doing what she's done so well for so many films is excellent. The action is fairly fast paced as it occurs; the scares and surprises timed well. The overwhelming creepiness of the games and good sections of the other movies is present in a few limited scenes; the action is more in evidence throughout. Of course, having been directed by the man responsible for both Highlander and Highlander II: the Quickening I expect the action to be fairly good and the story to move along towards the end. (He can't blame inflation in Argentina for this ending, however.) While the story goes along well... Carlos dying as well as Rain did, but with more heart and knowing self-sacrifice, Claire getting the kids and some of the other survivors off towards ?? Alaska, there is after that a good dungeon crawl hunt for Dr. Asshole, the White Queen picking the winning horse, and then... an army of Milla Jovovich coming to Japan to kill the remaining Umbrella Corp board of directors? (Chaired, I should note, by a poor imitation Johnny Cage.) I've seen reviews on IMDB that suggest there will be a fourth Resident Evil film; these are often the same ones that give the film incredible ratings. I'm not so sure; even watching a digital army of psionic Alices waking up naked and marching through city streets, dual wielding khukri knives against equally digital zombies, to descend in righteous fury on the likely superinfected leaders of Umbrella Corp (who are trying in an ironic twist to survive the horror consuming them by fleeing to the Google Moon Base) doesn't fill me with goosebumps. In the brief time they appear in the movie, the kids, Claire, and K-Mart become very important as the only surviving humans trying to reach the only uninfected place available. (Because, in a world where even the jungles of Africa and the South American rainforest is consumed, Alaska is difficult to get to and mostly inaccessible... what? C'mon, the Umbrella Antarctic station was more believable.) Sure, a clone army of Alice can kill off the board of Umbrella. And maybe White Queen is correct and a cure for the T-virus can be synthesized out of the on hand stocks of a single facility; after all, there aren't a lot of living people still left. But in the end, that's not salvation for humanity. So what happened to Claire? Was Alaska really a bastion against the infection of T-virus? Can crows really be turned away just by the sight of Canada on the horizon?
In the end, there's this gaping sense of... so what? The story is not satisfactorily concluded; not the third act of the movie plot, not the third film of the trilogy, and in the end, not even the overall story as it has focused on Alice. The story of humanity is completely ignored in the final act of the film; Claire got on that helicopter with the kids. Then... nothing. They aren't even an afterthought. There isn't even a teaser or quick shot in the credits or hidden at the end of the film just before the rating card. It just... goes kind of limp. Alice delivers a good one-liner, full of menace, and looks out over what I guess will be the future of humanity... rank on rank of Alice clones. Even if the cure for the T-virus can be made and spread (btw, the antivirus so prominent in the first movie is only mentioned en passant), they forget that the T-virus does one important thing... it kills the host first then animates the dead flesh. Thus, "undead". So you cure the infected (speaking of which, whatever happened to that one doctor's little girl?) and you get... a lot of corpses. Whoopie. What about all of the intricate biodiversity required to produce all of the things we need to live? To simply be able to breathe, there has to be some mechanism to maintain the atmosphere; since it looks like all but the lowly tumbleweed and possibly some very hardy palms survived, that is a long term concern. Oh, sure, maybe cloning can fix it all eventually... or the army of psychic Alices. But the very human story and ultimate fate of humanity and civilization is just left... untended. Unresolved.
And we're left, after going to not a little length to ignore all of the above gaping problems, unsatisfied. As usual, ivyriver got it in one word just after the fade to black. It took me a lot of words above to get to the same place reasoning out why I felt that way in the end. I'm not even going to dignify the concept of "tame zombie slaves" with consideration. So don't ask.
But we did learn something vital... Sony is either a component of, or possibly the controlling owner of, Umbrella Corp. There's no other way you'd find VAIOs as company laptops, even for VIPs, in an American based facility.
In short, I wonder if we shouldn't have just seen Good Luck Chuck. I mean, as a Dane Cook movie, I imagine there would have been copious "boom mike in the shot" scenes, but as compared to the remarkable feeling of... "eh? wtf? where's the satisfactory conclusion of the third act?" ... I don't know.
In the long form.... and cut to prevent spoiling...
To start off... the progression of the T-virus over the course of time alloted was a bit of a stretch in suspension of disbelief. Not so much in that the total of human civilization could fall so fast in such circumstances, as much as that the entirety of the earth's ecosphere could be destroyed to such an extent in only a short 5 years by a virus incapable of normal airborne transmission, which also had a working anti-virus available. Even a corporation as monochromaticly evil as Umbrella would, I feel, at least attempt to save the earth. (After all, what's the fun in lording over a giant desert planet? Without the spice or the sandworms, at least.) The thing that is the biggest difficulty for me to allow it how the T-virus has spread to such an extent that vegetation has died, fish has died... Granted, the T-virus is a remarkable organism (being able to cause living human, canine, rat, and crow to mutate and continue to function after death) but to cross not only mammal species boundaries and progress in a different fashion (simply killing) against an entire separate kingdom? Granted, they never approached the seas in the movie, so afaik there could be undead sharks (no doubt fitted by Umbrella with "frickin' laser beams" (tm) ) swimming in the depths.
Okay, so... breathing... moving on... and... okay. Cloning Alice. Well, given that Umbrella has already futzed her DNA to the point that she can make people bleed out of their eyes and die, cloning isn't that big a leap. The technology is several steps above the humble beginnings of Resident Evil, but a logical progression if you accept the events of Resident Evil: Apocalypse and the nagging suspicion that Carl Rove and Dick Cheney were on the board of Umbrella Corp. Having remained the only surviving and functioning high tech society of humans on the planet, it's not unthinkable that they would have amassed all of the combined data available to them as the world crumbled. And really, White Queen is a much cuter and more rational evolution of AI than Red Queen. But she has a point... Red Queen's actions were logical and necessary. In any event, after blowing the "sanitizing" of Racoon City (didn't the genius of Umbrella Corp wonder how far a crow feasting on infected flesh can fly in a single day? How about mosquitos and cockroaches? (Oops... evidently flies don't fall to the T-virus either... forgot...) but surviving in several Hive-like facilities, the board of Umbrella Corp has a plan for the restoration of humanity. This is the way that the plot in the end comes to a "Well, okay, that's great, but we're not done here" feeling. To wit...
Hey! It's Claire Redfield! Why isn't she wondering where Chris is hiding? C'mon. In the games, Claire's quest to find out what happened to Chris Redfield is her primary, driving force. (Until Code: Veronica, anyways.) Granted, I think she's capable of having (along the way) managed to round up survivors and put together a caravan of zombie food in the harsh future we must accept. Still, why does that connection reach out, yawning across a deep chasm of great backstory and instant character development, only to never make it to the audience? Did the writers think perhaps the audience, having swallowed everything else to this point, would balk at the remarkable coincidence that a convoy (containing an "RCFD" ambulance that must have survived the firestorm) led by the sister of S.T.A.R.S. leader Chris Redfield just happened to survive, hook up with Carlos, and eventually run across Alice wandering the desert? And since we've already gotten that far, what the hell ever happened to Jill Valentine? The first Resident Evil game revolved around S.T.A.R.S. but they've had only about 15 minutes of combined screen time. On the other hand, Alice (whom reminds me of a mysterious, red dress wearing woman named Ada, despite being sexily Milla Jovovich) stars throughout and even manages to wear some great survivor fashions. (In case you're wondering, the costumes are a collaboration between the film costumer and Milla's clothing line.) Even going with the "alternate universe exploration" concept, it's a different story than told in the games. And the ways in which it is very different start small and by this movie, are incredibly huge.
The action, the carnage, and the sheer goodness of Milla Jovovich doing what she's done so well for so many films is excellent. The action is fairly fast paced as it occurs; the scares and surprises timed well. The overwhelming creepiness of the games and good sections of the other movies is present in a few limited scenes; the action is more in evidence throughout. Of course, having been directed by the man responsible for both Highlander and Highlander II: the Quickening I expect the action to be fairly good and the story to move along towards the end. (He can't blame inflation in Argentina for this ending, however.) While the story goes along well... Carlos dying as well as Rain did, but with more heart and knowing self-sacrifice, Claire getting the kids and some of the other survivors off towards ?? Alaska, there is after that a good dungeon crawl hunt for Dr. Asshole, the White Queen picking the winning horse, and then... an army of Milla Jovovich coming to Japan to kill the remaining Umbrella Corp board of directors? (Chaired, I should note, by a poor imitation Johnny Cage.) I've seen reviews on IMDB that suggest there will be a fourth Resident Evil film; these are often the same ones that give the film incredible ratings. I'm not so sure; even watching a digital army of psionic Alices waking up naked and marching through city streets, dual wielding khukri knives against equally digital zombies, to descend in righteous fury on the likely superinfected leaders of Umbrella Corp (who are trying in an ironic twist to survive the horror consuming them by fleeing to the Google Moon Base) doesn't fill me with goosebumps. In the brief time they appear in the movie, the kids, Claire, and K-Mart become very important as the only surviving humans trying to reach the only uninfected place available. (Because, in a world where even the jungles of Africa and the South American rainforest is consumed, Alaska is difficult to get to and mostly inaccessible... what? C'mon, the Umbrella Antarctic station was more believable.) Sure, a clone army of Alice can kill off the board of Umbrella. And maybe White Queen is correct and a cure for the T-virus can be synthesized out of the on hand stocks of a single facility; after all, there aren't a lot of living people still left. But in the end, that's not salvation for humanity. So what happened to Claire? Was Alaska really a bastion against the infection of T-virus? Can crows really be turned away just by the sight of Canada on the horizon?
In the end, there's this gaping sense of... so what? The story is not satisfactorily concluded; not the third act of the movie plot, not the third film of the trilogy, and in the end, not even the overall story as it has focused on Alice. The story of humanity is completely ignored in the final act of the film; Claire got on that helicopter with the kids. Then... nothing. They aren't even an afterthought. There isn't even a teaser or quick shot in the credits or hidden at the end of the film just before the rating card. It just... goes kind of limp. Alice delivers a good one-liner, full of menace, and looks out over what I guess will be the future of humanity... rank on rank of Alice clones. Even if the cure for the T-virus can be made and spread (btw, the antivirus so prominent in the first movie is only mentioned en passant), they forget that the T-virus does one important thing... it kills the host first then animates the dead flesh. Thus, "undead". So you cure the infected (speaking of which, whatever happened to that one doctor's little girl?) and you get... a lot of corpses. Whoopie. What about all of the intricate biodiversity required to produce all of the things we need to live? To simply be able to breathe, there has to be some mechanism to maintain the atmosphere; since it looks like all but the lowly tumbleweed and possibly some very hardy palms survived, that is a long term concern. Oh, sure, maybe cloning can fix it all eventually... or the army of psychic Alices. But the very human story and ultimate fate of humanity and civilization is just left... untended. Unresolved.
And we're left, after going to not a little length to ignore all of the above gaping problems, unsatisfied. As usual, ivyriver got it in one word just after the fade to black. It took me a lot of words above to get to the same place reasoning out why I felt that way in the end. I'm not even going to dignify the concept of "tame zombie slaves" with consideration. So don't ask.
But we did learn something vital... Sony is either a component of, or possibly the controlling owner of, Umbrella Corp. There's no other way you'd find VAIOs as company laptops, even for VIPs, in an American based facility.