Zombie-Bashing at its best

Rating: 9/10 (27 February 2002)

I was lucky enough to see Resident Evil in a Sneak Preview in Vienna, Austria. As usual for the horror genre the movie is rather short (around 90mins) but not a second of it is boring.
The movie starts off with a virus being released in an underground research center called "the Hive". The A.I. closes all exits and kills everyone inside to keep the virus contained. When our main character (Milla Jovovich) awakes in the shower, she has no memory of who she is. A group of soldiers takes her along to the Hive that is located under the building she woke up. They don't tell her much, only that she was supposed to protect the entrance. Everyone who knows the computer game knows what follows: tons of zombies.
The story evolves rather nicely since we never really know more than the main character. The suspense added by this to the known genre plot of "get out before they kill you" is a nice little extra. There is nothing to complain about the special effects and the action is well executed though obviously inspired by the Matrix in some places. The music is effective, loud and fits the movie.
I really enjoyed it and I think that fans of movies like "Pitch Black" or "The Relic" will enjoy it too. Splatter-fans might be somewhat disappointed, the gore factor isn't higher than in any of the movies mentioned above. Fans of the video games will notice nice little tidbits taken from the games and even if I played only part of one of them, I liked the attention to the details (for example the sound that the zombies make, the equipment used, the enemies encountered and most importantly: the end). I can only recommend this movie to fans of the genre and to everyone who played one of the games.