A review of Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) from a fan of the games. It covers the sequel picking up in a ruined Raccoon City, Jill Valentine and Carlos, Nemesis, and Alice’s shift into something closer to a superhero.
The reviewer enjoys how much of the games made it onto the screen and how much bigger the action is, accepts the superhero Alice, and lands at 5 out of 5.
Another solid 5 out of 5 from me. Resident Evil Apocalypse picks up right where the first film left off, with Alice waking up alone in that empty hospital and walking out into a Raccoon City that has already gone to hell, and it doesn’t waste a minute getting going. The big difference this time is that the games are all over it. There are characters and monsters in here lifted straight out of them, and it’s a lot of fun watching them show up on screen. The action has been ramped up as well, so if the last film kept you leaning forward, this one has you gripping the armrest.
The set-up is simple, and it works. Umbrella has reopened the Hive to find out what went wrong, the infection has got out, and within a night the whole city is walled off with everyone still inside. The company lets its own executives out and leaves everybody else to fend for themselves. What follows is a night of running through the streets with a small group of survivors who don’t trust each other much, which is exactly the right shape for this kind of film, and it gives the story a real sense of a place falling apart around the characters. I’ll admit I was a bit worried going in, because the first film was such a self-contained little thing and I wasn’t sure a bigger budget wouldn’t just sand the edges off. It doesn’t, or at least not so I noticed while it was on. The city feels lived-in for about ten minutes and then it feels like a war zone, and the film spends the rest of its runtime somewhere between the two.
Jill, Carlos and the games
Jill Valentine is the big one. She’s a suspended cop here, and they’ve dressed her like the game character right down to the blue top. Sienna Guillory plays her quick and tough, and when there’s a gun in her hands she looks like she knows exactly what to do with it. Carlos is an Umbrella soldier left behind with his unit, another name from the games, and a small-time hustler called L.J. is there to crack most of the jokes. It’s a proper little team, and the more of them there are, the more the film feels like a game where you’re switching between characters as the mission changes. Other fans of the games have pointed out that this one at least tries to tie itself to the source material much harder than the first film did, and I’d agree that’s the part that sold it to me. Seeing a name I’d only ever read in a menu screen suddenly walking around with a face is a bit of a thrill, and I’m not too proud to say so.
The hook that drives the plot is a good one, too. The scientist who created the T-virus is stuck outside the wall while his young daughter Angela is trapped in a school in the city, and he hacks into the phones and offers the survivors a way out if they bring her to him. That gives everyone a destination and a clock, which suits this kind of movie perfectly. The school is a great change of scenery after the last film spent so long underground, and it’s full of infected kids, which makes for some properly uncomfortable moments before the group moves on. It’s the sort of scene where I found myself wanting the film to hurry up and also not wanting it to end, and I think that’s about the best thing you can say for a horror set piece. The team has to work out how to get a bunch of frightened kids out of a place that’s swarming with the dead, and nobody in the group is exactly qualified for it.
Alice, superhero
Alice has changed, and you can see it from her very first big moment. She crashes a motorbike through the window of a church and lands in the middle of a nest of Lickers, and from there she stays fast, strong and very hard to kill, because Umbrella has been experimenting on her. She’s basically a superhero now, and I know some people will roll their eyes at that. I’m okay with it. After the first film left her stranded and alone, giving her a reason to be this dangerous makes sense to me, and it keeps the action interesting. I’d sooner she was overpowered and fun than have the film pretend she’d learned nothing from the last one. The bike through the church window is exactly the kind of daft, glorious entrance I’m here for, and it sets the tone for how seriously the film takes itself, which is to say not very, and never in a way that got in my way.
The action is bigger across the board. There are zombie dogs, the infected kids at the school, a graveyard sequence, and the Lickers again, and it all moves at a pace that never lets you get comfortable. Spotting the game references turns into a bit of a game of its own, and Nemesis is the best example of one. He’s a huge, hulking bioweapon with a rocket launcher who walks through anything in his way, and he’s played very close to how he looks in the games. Watching him stalk the survivors through the city gives the whole film a sense of dread that the first one only touched on. Every time he shows up the film changes gear, and the survivors stop being a group of people trying to leave and start being prey. If you’ve played the game where he chases you from room to room, that feeling will be very familiar, and I thought the film caught it better than I’d expected.
The ending
Nemesis turns out to be somebody from the first film, which I’ll leave you to find out. There’s a moment where Umbrella forces Alice to fight him so they can show off what their project can do, and it goes somewhere more interesting than a straight brawl. Once that’s done, the city’s fate is sealed: a nuke flattens Raccoon City at dawn, and Umbrella covers it up as a power plant meltdown. The survivors barely get a moment to breathe before their helicopter comes down and everything goes wrong again.
The ending sets up another film without cheating you out of this one. Alice wakes up in an Umbrella facility and breaks out, and Jill, Carlos and L.J. pick her up on the way out. An Umbrella scientist watches her go and tells someone the programme is working, so it’s clear she isn’t as free as she thinks she is. I liked that it left a question hanging over her, and it gave the film a reason to feel like part of something bigger.
Rating: 5 out of 5. I really enjoyed this one, and it’s a solid follow-up to the first film. There are so many characters and elements picked straight from the game that it feels like a proper Resident Evil movie, and the action has clearly been ramped up. Alice starts to look like a superhero, but I’m fine with that.
