Saturday, October 02, 2004
I just came home from watching Resident Evil: Apocalypse and even though I only have a teeny-tiny idea about what happened in the game, I was disappointed with this movie. I was expecting it to continue on the same level as the first one but I guess one can't have it all. While I am glad this movie picks up where the first one ended (they even filled in some scenes where the scientists open up the closed hive and who turned on the lights in Alice's lab room), storywise the movie lagged and lacked the substance I was looking for. The villains lacked the right amount of badness to be credibly nasty, the zombies from Michael Jackson's Thriller video looked more credible, the lickers and zombie dobermans had less exposure, and the tension to get out of Raccoon City was non-existent. The first movie raised the bar and I expected the movie to follow through and it didn't although both movies had the same writer (he moved on to directing AVP which also didn't make sense). I had the same problem with this one as Hellboy, where both writers and directors didn't take time out to flesh out the story and characters to non-fans of the original genre where it was lifted off. Hellboy's director gave in perfecting the visuals, which he got down pat, but not much on characterization. While Resident Evil: Apocalypse succumbed to giving the action too much screentime and not much into explaining who Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) was and what her connection was with the STARS (that said, I only found out about the details surfing the net after watching the movie). Another thing was that Nemesis' (Matthew G. Taylor) character was also hyped up and his appearance on-screen was totally intimidating but after the movie it was like "That's it?!" He was onscreen for a couple of minutes and then he's dead?! This sucks big time! And what's with the ending? Are we supposed to expect a third film of this quality?! It was very contrived and I have nothing more to say to that. The only thing cool about all this was Milla Jovovich and the fact that the movie people auctioned off Nemesis' costume for quite a sum.
@ 10:15 PM ---> 
