Resident Evil 6KISSMATE: Alright, my delightful followers, tonight is the last installment of the Resident Evil film series! Aptly named, it's called "Resident Evil: The Final Chapter" (2017) directed and written by Paul W S Anderson. Last reminder that the series is live watched by both me and Ana Mardoll!
The other films range from an alright but annoying flick, to a fun cheesy zombie movie. We'll see where this lands in the odometer! High hopes, low expectations, and all that. A light annoyance: The other films had clips and movement in their DVD menu. TFC can't be bothered. It shows a lack of effort.
Alice gives us a recap of how the T Virus began and who all was involved. None of the characters have their original actors. Oh no. That's a bad sign. Oh, this is one huge boot of the history this film series has been building. I am ~pissed~ that the last five movies were just flushed right down the drain! I feel like the movie's telling me "What do you believe, your eyes or what I tell you?" and that's FUCKED.
The last movie ended with HOARDS of the undead and demonic looking creatures surrounding the White House with Wesker commanding the last of humanity against a final strike. At least we'll get an epic war-battle to start wi- Why are we starting in a wasteland? Where's the epic war-battle? Where's Leon and Ada and Chris fighting side-by-side with an over-powered Alice? Where's Wesker smugly looking out over the carnage with a murder boner reflected in the window? I WAS PROMISED CAKE! I WAS GIVEN SAND! NOT COOL!
Alice's powers aren't working like before. We get a zom jump scare, but she should have known it was there (in the foot-deep water). She struggled to push it off when she should be able to bench press the Washington Monument. This feels weird. Alice BARELY fights off a flying creature (very piss poor methods, imho). Then sirens sound, then immediately turn off. All because a satellite (Red Queen?) saw her. And we still don't know what happened between last movie and this one.
Alice wanders into a bunker. She asks if anyone is alive, so I'm assuming everyone else is dead until told otherwise. She only came down in this bunker because she heard a war-room fax machine spelling out "Hello Alice" over and over. Red Queen has found her. Instead of staying quiet/in the shadows, Red Queen gives Alice information up front and tells Alice to stop her. The villain is telling the hero to stop them. In return, Alice will receive, get this, AN AIRBOURNE ANTIVIRUS that will destroy the T Virus on impact.
I can feel Paul's desperation to just finish the series, or his greed to make money. I can't tell which, but it's getting the same result: piss poor writing with a magic cure that is only now being mentioned. Alice isn't calling BS on any of this? "I can't harm Umbrella Company, but you are not bound by such restraints." Sending someone to do your dirty work isn't in your Three Laws, Red? Wait, the airborne antivirus is in the Hive. As in, where the Red Queen was first located? WHY DIDN'T SHE RELEASE IT?!
Why did Red want Alice terminated last movie, but wants to work with her this movie? Why did Wesker say that Red Queen is in charge of Umbrella, but now Red can't hurt Umbrella? How did Red get access to broken hardware? Why is Alice being so calm about this? Oh, so Wesker PRETENDED to give Alice her powers back. And then bailed on all of humanity. Because why? You'd think a mastermind like Wesker would have some reason to do anything he does. I mean, why else would he want Alice out of the Arctic?
Didn't Red say that Wesker is a traitor to Umbrella? It was last movie, so I don't know if that was purged, but... I'm keeping it in mind. On her way to Raccoon City, Alice gets captured by Umbrella. She wakes to find Doctor Issacs. The clone-killing asshole that died in the third movie? Oh, Alice killed his clone. That's a dick move, Paul. Wait, but then how does Red have sole ownership of Umbrella? Wouldn't we have had this conversation last movie then? Did he and Wesker trick Red in some way? This is such shit!
Isaacs made a pseudo-Christian adjacent cult. Anyone deemed a "non-believer" has to run in front of the zom hoards while listening to Isaacs moan on and on about God. Wesker is working with Isaacs, maybe? At least for now. Alice fights her way free, leaving Isaacs with one less hand. She zooms away on a motor bike towards the Hive. Wesker mentions there's an operative in Raccoon City, so hopefully that's someone we know.
Alice gets knocked out, again. She wakes surrounded by weird people in a dark place, again. We see another familiar face, this time it's Claire! Where's Chris? I thought she'd try to stay with her brother. Alice is sick (with what?) and tells Claire about the Hive and what's in it. Claire says it'll kill Alice to kill the T Virus, but we know Alice isn't infected again. "I saw you get infected." NO YOU DIDN'T. No one else was in the room with Alice and Wesker!
While Alice is looking over the defenses, she tells Claire that she smells a rat in the survivor group. Has Claire been here long enough to gain their trust, or is she a newbie? She's banging the doc, but that's all we really know. Why is Isaacs so fucking Christian? Crosses on knives, crosses in the medicine cabinet, crosses in the prisoner ward! Why this sudden aesthetic? I wouldn't mind too much if this wasn't a pre-established character that was in love with science and business first!
The camera work and editing is pretty jumpy and quickly shot. Fast pans, fast shots, fast zooms. It can make someone quickly lose focus or their lunch. Seriously, blink and you miss just enough to need context again. Alice fights off Isaacs' team, but loses Isaacs himself. Nothing else happened. You'd think a scene of gasoline and gunfire would make for interesting film, but it's so bland and boring. I don't know why these people are worth focusing on.
Undead have body heat? What? A team from the survivors go with Alice, to be traitors or fodder. Wesker releases some dog monsters after them. Some die. The hard-to-trust one dies via bad effect of door crush. It didn't even look like he was even there... Wow. Red tells Alice that Isaacs (while pointing to a Bible in a business meeting) released the T Virus on purpose to jump-start the apocalypse. Red tells us again that she can't hurt Umbrella employees, which fucks the first movie over a railing. Thanks.
We get a "tense" scene where they pass through a fan. Wesker reverses the blades, sucking in Ruby Rose and killing her character. Instead of Wesker continuing the blades, he lets them go with one death. Because he wants Alice to hurt? Wesker opens another trap, forcing the group to split up. One fodder goes out Gandalf vs Balrog style. Warning for those watching, STROBE EFFECTS with Alice. It's hurting me to watch this movie now.
A fodder dies, this time by Killer Croc mixed with a Licker (not as cool as it sounds). The effects are garbage and the strobe prevents sight long enough to fail to understand the action. As an action buff, this pisses me off. I CAME FOR THE ACTION. Alice finds a way downward and finds the cryogenic storage of all the Umbrella employees waiting out the apocalypse. It looks like the senate from the Star Wars prequals. Just as fake in effects, too.
Claire is in a glass box with holes. Alice is with Claire's boyfriend, Doc. If he isn't the Mole/Double-Agent, I'll be stunned. Oh god, Isaacs out with the undead vehicle is a clone too. The original Isaacs just woke up and is telling Wesker what to do. I don't like Wesker being on a leash. It doesn't even feel like Wesker anymore. I came for Douchebag Glasses and I'm getting Whipped Pup!
Alice makes it to Isaacs, who threatens to throw the ONLY ANTIVIRUS CANISTER against the wall, making it useless.I'm sorry, that one thermos was going to fix the WHOLE WORLD after you killed it? That ONE bowl of soup? And you only had ONE made, ever?! FUCK!!! Doc *was* the bad guy! Claire joins us with Wesker. Isaacs has a combat computer in his head, telling him how successful an attack would be. It's horrible and boring because it's wasting our time and giving us nothing back in return.
The Alice we've been following is a clone. I felt that was inevitable. However, she's supposed to be a clone of the founder's daughter! Remember the little girl from the second movie that looked and sounded like Red Queen? What a coincidence! FUCK THIS!!!! I get Alice being a clone. I never felt like she was the original because we've been given no assurance. But a man cloning his boss so he could watch her die repeatedly because she wouldn't give him control of the company? That feels really fucked up and not fun.
Umbrella went from ominous, to super villainous, to absolutely banana-pants, to just uninterestingly misogynistic. I miss the games now... Alice freaks out about her not being "real". Some ableist shit is thrown around. Some misogyny as well. Wesker gets fired, allowing Red to attack. Claire kills Doc. Wesker points out his own plot hole. This whole clone!Alice explains why she's able to connect to the T Virus so well. It's made for her. But again, it rewrites Movie 2, so I'm still pissed off about it. Even if it makes sense in retrospect too. It was ok for her to be the Viral Chosen, you know?
Isaacs fight Claire and Alice. There's no explanation for how he's so powerful and fast. Wesker had the T Virus. Isaacs? NO clue. Isaacs gets hurt to the slowest reaction to a grenade ever. But only dies to his clone stabbing him, calling him an abomination clone. Alice breaks the antivirus outside, destroying the T Virus with that small amount. Alice falls.
Claire congratulates Alice on her waking. Red tells her that the T Virus has been eliminated and didn't kill Alice because it only attacked the virus and not the host. "You and Alicia lied to me." "We had to make sure you would put your life above others." What? They risked all of humanity because they needed to know Alice had a good heart? WHY?! What was the point of lying?! "This was something no one at Umbrella would have done." Not even a janitor? A Star Trek fan who believed the needs of the many? A fucking guard?
Alice learns about being greater than the people that created you, or something. The dying, disabled woman gave her memories to a young, abled woman so Alice could finally have a childhood. One she NEVER said she missed or wanted. Yay?? Ew. Alice drives off to the horizon. She mentions that the world isn't quite safe yet, and we see monsters flying towards her. She says her name, and it goes black. The FUCKING End. FINALLY. GOD!!!
This movie isn't good at all! It destroys what was canon and makes the new stuff uninteresting. Even the action was either unwatchable or unenjoyable, or both. 0/10. Save your time for a rewatch of the first one again.
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ANA: We're doing the last Resident Evil movie! I'm not very excited because I kinda remember not liking it and being really disappointed? BUT I saw it in theaters without captions and that means I miss about 1/3 of the dialogue, so it might be great now! Like, I cannot count how many times a movie didn't resonate with me in theaters and then I saw it with captions and it was like OH, I needed the WORDS.
Oh, right, they recast (and/or rewrote) the origin story for the T-virus, which is annoying and possibly retcons the wheelchair-user from RE2:Apocalypse. It's kinda a kick in the crotch if you care as much about Apocalypse as I do. MY PRECIOUS LORE. We were told certain things about the T-virus, about the Red Queen, about their origins and they just.... rewrote it all. You can't do that six movies into a series! And I remember the silly twist ending and *why* they're doing this (Alicia is Alice) and I feel like they could've arranged for that *without* rewriting everything and telling us to forget what came before.
We open on a ruined White House and where was the cool epic LOTR-esque battle we were promised? Even if we get it in a flashback or something, we now know the outcome. She drinks from the reflecting pool, which is somehow hiding a massive zombie even though that thing is, like, a foot deep and didn't Wesker give her back her powers? Where are they? Goddammit. And I'm guessing we're pulling an Aliens 3 and every meaningful character who couldn't be booked for the film is now dead. Sigh.
Ballsy move to not let the audience in on what the hell is going on. This doesn't feel like the same movie series at all, even though it has the same director as the last 2 films. Something has gone terribly wrong here. Alice is going down into a scary dark place because I think she heard a fax machine. And we STILL don't know what happened at the White House to her comrades, friends, and loved ones. Cool, COOL. Oh my god, it's a literal fucking fax machine. Printing "Hello Alice" from the Red Queen. Good grief.
She dangles an "airborne antivirus" to Alice, and this movie is actually worse than I remembered. Where was this magical antivirus all this time? You'd think Wesker would care. Or all those scientists locked up underground. Shorter Red Queen: "I can't work against the Umbrella Corporation, but I can HIRE someone to do that." WHY. Also, she's killed employees before (which was against her original remit and unexpected by the corporation) because she valued "all life on earth" over "company protocol" so I mean??
The movie shouldn't START with this, you know? If there's going to be a deus ex machina to save the earth, that should be a "wait, there's a better third option!" reveal around the second half. Cool, cool. The Red Queen says that Wesker led them all to the White House to get killed and only pretended to give her her powers back, which is the weaksaucest way to admit they regretted that plot point. Ew.
On the road, something (a trap?) blows out Alice's tires. You were coming from the White House; how are you not in either a motorcycle or a tank? Umbrella agents catch her and uselessly kick at her a little before letting her murder them all. She passes out anyway, for reasons, and wakes up- YOU'RE DEAD, DUDE. THE ONE ACTOR THEY COULD COAX BACK WAS THE DEAD ONE?
Why are there little crosses hanging everywhere? Oh, good, it's an apocalyptic Christian cult. Why. WHY. They reused Isaacs because he looks familiar, but this is so out of character for him and I hate it; they could've just made up a low level Umbrella executive who rose to the ranks when people began dying.
I really hate the little-girl-poses the Red Queen is taking in her scenes. The PREVIOUS backstory was that the head programmer missed his dead/dying daughter, so the "creepy child computer" made a certain degree of sense, now it feels all wrong.
Alice has now been knocked unconscious TWICE, which is a sign that the writers couldn't work out scene-segues and just needed her to repeatedly wake up in media res. I remember now why I didn't remember the movie; it's so disjointed and fractured. She's being menaced by pretty people and Claire, so there's that. (Kissmate: "Where's Chris Redfield?" Me: "He will never be spoken of.") Has Claire been with these people for forever and she trusts them OR NOT? You can't have them be both dangerous strangers and beloved comrades!
I could write a better script than this while sitting on the toilet.
"THAT'S RUBY ROSE!" is a thing I just screamed so sharply my voice cracked. I do like the idea of siege warfare in the zombie apocalypse. I think I hate everything else going on (except Ruby Rose). So Isaacs just has unlimited ammo because plot reasons, sure. Okay. Everything is so contrived that there's no excitement because the puppet strings are just too visible. WHY is this random Umbrella employee so committed to Isaacs that he's willing to Bond Henchman it up with this chick who is clearly Apocalypse Walking? YOU HAVEN'T EVEN GOT A NAME TAG!
"Well, the good news," I say to Kissmate, "is you can no longer continue to slander Apocalypse by calling it the worst Resident Evil movie." There's a big narrative flaw here in that you can't have a group of people who you want to protect AND/BUT you think they're dangerous and likely to turn on you. You gotta pick one to really stick the landing. If there is a traitor, it's either the Obvious Douche or Claire's boy toy. The latter for maximum betrayal points because he's sweet and soft-spoken and a doctor.
Don't really feel like they should be called "Cerberus" if they don't have three heads. Everyone jumps off a cliff into Mystery Water and I would've found it hilarious if it was only a foot deep. Me just now, "God, this movie is a punishment. I genuinely think you would've enjoyed SUPER MARIO BROTHERS better."
We get a new backstory that Umbrella planned the apocalypse, which is more or less believable than the previous backstory of selling it to every country on earth as a weapon and asking them to be super careful with how they use it. Goddamn, it's like Oprah in here. "You get a retcon! And YOU get a retcon!" They're messing with ALL the previous movies. All of them.
Now we're retconning the very first movie: the virus was released deliberately and the Red Queen is having a programming conflict because she can't hurt an employee (except when she does) but she values human life. I mean, at least they got that right: that the Red Queen values human life. The previous movie was repeatedly WRONG regarding her motivation, so all that was a Wesker lie? I guess? Because...?
The fodder gets picked off like after-dinner mints and it doesn't really have any impact because they haven't been characterized at all. We're now chanting "let's go, lasers, let's go!" but it was just a falling trap into an enormous cavern that looks like where Gandalf and the Balrog fell.
I cannot tell what is happening in this movie, because it's so dark and there's a strobe light. Remember when Apocalypse took place almost entirely at night, yet you could see what was happening? They go through a cryogenic storage chamber that looks just like the Senate from Star Wars and I feel like all these sets from other movies probably fit together to form a gnostic message if only I knew how to read them.
Alice is, I think, readying to bomb the cryogenic chamber and, like, yes, eat the rich and all, but there might be some maids and butlers in there too and this feels kinda not-great when there are only like 4,000 humans left on earth or whatever? Alice and Boy Toy head down to the inner chamber and meet up with Original Recipe Isaacs (not to be confused with Extra Crispy Isaacs outside). Alice is a hardened combat veteran and Isaacs has been in cryogenic storage for years and surely needs a good stretch, so to keep this from being immediately over they give him "Combat Contacts" made of plot armor.
Then we come to the biggest retcon of all: Alice is a clone and her "original" was the dying daughter whose disease started all this. (And the clones were hired as heads of security at various hive points? "And YOU get a retcon!") I do like the "don't worry, I'm not going to kill you" and then just the stalk-off so that Claire can do it. And I do love-love-love the legal shenanigans of Alicia firing Wesker so that the Red Queen can smoosh him. I eat that shit up. Everything else is still bad.
Kissmate points out that this at least explains why the T-virus connected to Alice as a Chosen One, if it was made for her. I don't know why they used progeria when that's a real thing that exists and it doesn't work like this, though. Just make up a new disease! No one is going to mind! Remember when Wesker was infected with the T-virus? That was cool. Claire and Alice just barely managed to defeat him. I bring that up because now they're both being beaten up by a frail old Game of Thrones actor.
*SCREAMS* Alicia and the Red Queen knew that Alice would survive the cure. They lied to her because they "had to know" whether she would be selfless enough to give her life. Which makes NO SENSE. Why would this cold calculating computer risk ALL OF HUMANITY on the chance that Alice might not be selfless? Why is it so important that Alice be a good person?
Also, "That was something no one at Umbrella would have done"? There wasn't ONE selfless secretary or semi-decent programmer? What about the eco-terrorist girl who worked there, just as an example? We're supposed to take as canon that all those innocent Hive employees who died way back in the first movie were all selfish bastards simply because they worked for the biggest corporation in America? Really??? I preferred Alice as a random lottery T-virus lottery winner to "our lord and savior Jesus Christ". Heck.
Alicia spent her last minutes downloading her memories into a contact lens for Alice INSTEAD OF locking down the Red Queen to protect her (and humanity) from Isaacs. PRIORITIES. Alice ends going the Blade route, driving around the world and fighting T-virus dragons who haven't been hit by the anti-viral wind yet, because I guess everyone needs a hobby. That was just awful, and I feel vindicated for not liking it in theaters. The first five movies were great, though.
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