A great genre film

Rating: 7/10 (16 March 2002)

My review (*SPOILERS ABOUND, DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM AND YOU DON'T WANT IT SPOILED!!!!!*)

I just saw the movie, fellas, and I must say that it wasn't so bad. There acting was very decent and the story was great (the amnesia thing was played well -- it was never so "all of a sudden" and made for suspense). Some parts of the movie were just fodder (the dog scenes), but some parts were great (the laser wire scene, the scene where Michelle Rodriguez goes nuts with the machine gun, the scene where the licker mutates).
My only problems were that people died so suddenly. The black man should have lived longer, because he did a great job of being in control of the group. I was pretty disappointed when he died, even if he died in a horrendously cool fashion.
One good thing about the movie was that there wasn't any camp. No winking or purposely bad acting or comedy. It surprisingly took itself pretty seriously. The film also had the great sense of "panic" that the games have, and the ammo conservation suspense from the games was present as well, which just made the film more believable. The super computer thing wasn't played out so badly either. There was a reason why it made the labratory go haywire, it didn't just do it for no reason, in some sort of self-righteous, anti-technology statement like I thought it would.
Overall, I probably wouldn't go see it again, but I'd buy it on DVD if it had a lot of cool extras. It was infinitely better than Tomb Raider and more accessible than the techno-jargon mess that was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I went in expecting a crap-fest of bad CG and poor acting, and I got decent acting with a decent story, cool, non-cliched characters, and AN AWESOME FREAKING ENDING. Talk about Omega Man with Charleton Heston here. It was just neat.
My final rating: 3 and a half stars out of 5. I recommend it to everyone here if you're into genre films. Its no Dawn of the Dead, but its the 5th best zombie film I can think of right now.