A review of the 2002 film Resident Evil from a fan who has played the games. It covers the mansion and the Hive, the Red Queen and the laser corridor, and how much of the games survives the trip to the screen.
The reviewer accepts that this is a cousin of the games rather than a copy, and enjoys the soundtrack, the staged fights and the ending. It lands at 5 out of 5.
Five out of five, and I’m saying it up front because I keep going back and forth on how to open this one. Here’s where I land on Resident Evil 2002: I’ve played the games, I know full well this isn’t a straight adaptation of any of them, and I had a great time anyway. There’s a mansion, there’s Umbrella, there’s the T-virus and the zombies and the dogs, and then it takes all of that and tells its own story with none of the characters I know from the games. Normally that would bug me. It doesn’t here, mostly because there’s enough game in it that I kept going oh, there’s that, and enjoying the fact that I’d spotted it.
I’m not a horror person, for the record. I don’t go looking for gore, and the jump scares in this one turn up every few minutes like clockwork, so I’d been a bit wary of going in. But there’s enough running and shooting and hitting things that I could stomach the ugly bits, which is more or less how I’d describe the whole film: horror wearing an action movie’s boots. Milla Jovovich wakes up in the shower of a big empty mansion with no idea who she is, and not long after, a squad of commandos crashes in and drags her and a stray cop underground. Everything from there is a chase through a very well-designed hole in the ground, and I was on board for all of it.
Down into the Hive
The hole is called the Hive, and it’s the best thing about the look of the film. Long white corridors, glass everywhere, that clinical Umbrella logo on the walls, and a train line dropping you into it from the mansion above. Somebody has stolen the T-virus and smashed a vial on the way out, so the Red Queen seals the whole place up and kills everyone inside to contain it. She’s the facility’s computer, and she turns up as a hologram of a little girl, which is creepy in exactly the right way because she’s so calm and polite about the whole thing. The commandos want to shut her down before she does the same to them, and Alice, who’s slowly getting her memory back in pieces, has to decide who she’s actually working for.
Then there’s the laser corridor. I can’t talk about this movie without talking about it, because it’s the scene I’d put in front of anyone who asked me whether to bother watching. The commandos walk down a narrow hallway, the Red Queen flips a switch, and a grid of lasers slices straight through them, and their commander goes in pieces. It’s fast, it’s brutal, and it’s oddly graceful, and it was amazing. Everything else in the film has to live up to it, and honestly a lot of it does.
Alice and Matt, the cop, and Rain, who’s the toughest soldier on the team, are what’s left after that, and the rest of the movie is them trying to shut the Red Queen down without making things worse. Shutting her down makes things worse, obviously. The doors open, the dead staff get back up, and that’s when it stops being a locked-room thriller and turns into what I actually came for. Watching the group split up and get picked off, one bad decision after another, is half the fun, and the film never loses its nerve about killing people off.
Where the games show up
The mansion at the start, the Umbrella name, zombie dogs crashing through windows, all of it is lifted from the games. So is the Licker, which is the best monster in the film: skinless, tongue-first, and horrible to watch scrambling around a room. None of the characters from the games turn up, though, so Alice is a brand new person who doesn’t remember she works for Umbrella, and I went along with that fine because Jovovich makes her tough without making her cold. Spence, the man who says he’s her husband, is the one who stole the virus in the first place, which is a decent twist on the way to a nasty end for him.
People will argue about that choice, and I get why. Other fans who liked it anyway land in the same place I do, calling it unfaithful but fun. If you want Jill and Chris and the rest, this isn’t going to be your film, and I’m sure plenty of people who’ve played the games will say so. For me the elements it kept were enough to make it interesting. The mansion feels like the mansion, the enemies feel like the enemies, and once the lights go out and something’s clawing at the door, it’s close enough to playing the game at two in the morning that I was happy. I’ll take a cousin of the game done this well over a copy that doesn’t move.
The noise, the fights and that last shot
The soundtrack is loud, industrial, metal-flavoured, and I loved it. It’s exactly the music you’d want under a woman in a red dress kicking a zombie dog in the face. The fights, Alice launching a running kick at a zombie dog and the walking dead shambling down the corridors, are properly staged, so you can see what’s happening and enjoy it, and that matters to me more than the blood does. There’s a lot of them, they’re inventive, and they don’t overstay their welcome, which is how I’d like every zombie film to handle it. Rain gets bitten and starts turning, Matt takes a swipe from a Licker, and the group thins out on the way to the surface in a way that keeps the tension up right to the end.
The ending is a good one and I won’t spoil all of it. Umbrella scientists get hold of Matt, and someone mentions a Nemesis program, which anyone who’s played the games will recognise. Alice wakes up alone in an empty hospital, walks out into a wrecked Raccoon City, and picks up a shotgun. It’s a proper cliffhanger, and it sets up more of this world without pretending the story is finished.
Rating: 5 out of 5. I really enjoyed this one, start to finish. The laser corridor was amazing and I loved the soundtrack and the action fights, and even with the jump scares and the gore I never wanted to look away. If you’ve played the games, go in expecting a cousin and not a copy, and I think you’ll have a good time.
