This is the worst film I've ever seen and I've seen Batman & Robin

Rating: 1/10 (21 July 2002)

This movie is awful and Paul Anderson (Not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson, who is a much more talented director and even though I don't like his movies I at least appreciate that he knows how to tell a story)has accomplished a great feat by making this movie bad on so many different levels: the plot, the dialogue, the special effects, the acting, the characterization, the gratuitous nudity (while appreciated by the men in the audience was no way justified). If only one of these aspects had been at fault I could have looked past it but unfortunately nothing was handled well. Firstly in an age of digital effects like those seen in Lord of the rings and Spider-man audiences have come to expect good effects not Zombies created with a bit of green make-up and dogs covered in tinned spaghetti the one digital effect they did spend any money on looked like it was created on an etchasketch, I was more impressed with the graphics in the game than the film. I understand the budget was fairly low but even low-budget horror movies have still managed to produce genuinely scaring looking effects, one only has to watch "From Dusk 'til Dawn" or "The Evil Dead" to see that.
The plot's only good point was that it was an original piece of work with nothing I could see taken from the game apart from some of the names and monsters, but if you took away the dogs, the licker, the umbrella corporation and racoon city and called the virus the U-virus or something similar then nothing would remind you even slightly of the game, which can sometimes be a good thing if the writer can come up with an original story better than the one in the game, but he can't, it's predictable (you know who the bad guy is after the first 15 minutes) there is no suspense other than that created by the overly loud sound-track which accompanies ever scare so you can hear the "surprise" coming every time. In an age of self-knowing films like "Scream" it's hard to believe that it takes the characters the entire length of the film to realize their in trouble and I'm pretty sure the word Zombie isn't mentioned once. This may have been a conscious decision to avoid getting called a "typical zombie movie" but that is exactly what the film is so why try and disguise it, there are gaping plot holes that the dialogue tries to cover over but fails, such as how the virus goes from an airborne virus, which would presumably affect the squad, to a contact transmitted one even though the virus clearly needs to be injected into rabbits and it would surely make sense to stay as an airborne virus to reach as many hosts as possible or to engineer it so that it couldn't become airborne from a safety point of view not change from one to the other as it felt like it. The dialogue could have been written by a child it was that simple and very stupid there was no wit, which is a well established feature of this type of movie and of life in general, but none of the characters display this "laugh in the face of danger" attitude audiences have come to expect and enjoy. I have read the George Romero Script on the net (although there is no guarantee it was actually written by Romero) and whoever actually did write it isn't important as it is much better than the film, even in it's first draft stage. The numerous characters are all given enough dialogue to give you a 3-dimensional feel to them and all are dealt with in a fitting way, the story is close to the game but still entertaining and suspenseful, the creatures are well used and fit in to the story aptly and while it would have required a much bigger budget it would have saved me the 2hrs of boredom sitting through the filmed version gave. Maybe it is unfair to criticize the acting considering the material they had but nobody made the most of it and there was never any sense that they were real people but instead objects to be dispatched by various badly conceived monsters and awful special effects. I can only imagine all the actors involved pleading to be killed off. How Mila Jovovich gets away with showing so much flesh in her movies including this one is a question I'd like answered especially when it is so unnecessary. I wasn't the only person in the audience who laughed out loud at some of the terrible scenes in this film and I can only hope that Paul Anderson isn't allowed to make any more films although with him already signed on for Resident Evil 2 it seems the movie going public will be bored by his awful movies for many years to come. An man sitting behind me in the cinema commented, once the film had finished, that it was "The best film I've ever seen" I can only assume this was the first film this person had ever seen.