Absolutely terrible.

Rating: Null/10 (14 August 2003)

I quite liked the Resident Evil games. They were scary and highly atmospheric. Not *excellent* games, but still very good. This film, on the other hand, is horrible. I think the main problem is that no-one takes computer games (interactive art, to me) seriously. "Oh, it's just a computer game!" most people think. But computer games have come a long, long way since the times of Pacman and Tetris. Many computer games have deep, compelling storylines, great atmosphere, and can stand shoulder to shoulder with other works of art. Computer games are not all action. That's a very very wrong perception that way too many people share. Resident Evil is not an action game. Therefore, the film based upon it should logically not be an action film. And yet it is. And on top of that, it's an action film with horribly cheap and boring action sequences. The film is bad on so many levels that I can't even describe it. The camerawork is a disaster. Far too many closeups, combined with horrible editing, give us a sense of complete confusion. Not only that, half the time it's impossible to tell what exactly is happening, because the movie doesn't show it. If you're making an action film, that's a really really bad idea. But this movie suffers from even more problems. The writing sucks, and despite the presence of a couple of good actors, the characters are just not interesting. The structure of the plot is terrible - there is barely any increase in tension, people just get butchered the one after the other. The climax is also nothing special at all. What's even worse, the movie does not convey a sense of place or of a logical sequence of events. In one scene the characters are fighting a ton of zombies (which look ridiculous) and in the next they're in an entirely different room, without the movie having told us how they actually got there. The movie is lacking in structure. The music... I shouldn't even mention it. I know that many people today enjoy listening to music which consists of three sounds being looped, but for a horror movie, this is the wrong soundtrack. The sets were actually quite good, but I don't think they were right for this movie. They should've set it in a mansion, and made it gothic. That works so much better for horror movies. And they stole a scene from Cube, which was a much better movie (and not a horror movie). I guess this movie is to the games what Hypercube is to Cube: something that has a plot which somehow slightly resembles the original, but was created by people who didn't understand what the original was about. Terrible. I was willing to give director Paul W.S. Anderson another chance, despite his movie Event Horizon being absolutely abysmal, but after this - forget it. It's not even worth renting on DVD.