Choppy Recycling

Rating: 2/10 (25 March 2020)

"Resident Evil," an adaptation of a video game, is a bad movie in essentially every regard: hackneyed, simplistic scenario (evil corporation unleashing zombies), adulteration by association of classic literature in Lewis Carroll's Alice books, rudimentary acting, perfunctory dialogue, loud music for the sake of being loud, inept style, generic action scenes. Despite all of that, this may have been a more enjoyable action flick, at least on a so-bad-it's-good or guilty-pleasure level, if not for some atrociously choppy editing. The quick cuts to get around actors being substituted for stunt doubles or to otherwise conceal the fact that they can't physically do what their characters can is worse than usual. Alice's fight with the dogs is one of the worst examples. Moreover, these flimsy constructions being passed off as action scenes are cobbled together with unmotivated, silly slow-motion shots. There are far too many close-ups of Milla Jovovich's consistently blank expression in lieu of actual dramatic tension, too. All of this is reflected in the soundscape, as well, which is a shambles of bombastic score and clanging metal.
The choppy editing is all the more conspicuous because the blueprint of the "Hive" occupies a significant space in a scene early on, only for the picture to loose all direction once inside the architecture. One moment, Alice is listening to exposition from some guy whose sister she just re-killed, and the next she's back with the group locked in a room surrounded by zombies. Another moment, Michelle Rodriguez's tough chick (yeah, I know, what a stretch for her, right) is diving for a gun underneath another horde of the walking dead; then, cut, and all of a sudden she's escaped with the rest of the remaining gang from the bitters below. Even some of the CGI is overly choppy, especially when we first see the monster recycled from the "Alien" series. As with the stunt work, quick cuts are also meant to conceal deficiencies in the visual effects. Play the score and sound effects loud enough and have Jovovich pose in various states of undress often enough, however, and, perhaps, nobody will notice or care, seems to be the logic here. Yet, worst of all are the movie's equivalent of video-game cut-scenes. With two of the main characters experiencing amnesia, the plot takes several breaks from the action to catch up on the backstory--the sort of poorly-directed bits of dullness that a gamer would likely press a button to skip in a video game so as to get back to killing zombies.
I knew there was a reason I had avoided this movie for nearly two decades now. I only came to it now for the references to Carroll's Alice books. Unfortunately, like everything else here, these are trite. Besides a protagonist named "Alice," who awakens from a state of unconsciousness, there's the AI's little girl avatar, and the AI itself is called the "Red Queen," although it really should've been named "HAL 9000," for how much it rips off yet another far better film, "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968). "Resident Evil" is rubbish. I think I'll continue to pass on the inexplicably-made sequels.