Mediocre action film, so-so horror/sci-fi film, poor film

Rating: 2/10 (11 September 2004)

Loud and nasty; those are the two most appropriate synonyms I can think of to describe this film, which most likely won't be going down with either of the "Dawn of the Dead" movies, "28 Days Later," or any of the "Return of the Living Dead" pictures as a hallmark of zombie/rampaging virus victim movie-making.
Virtually devoid of plot, RE:A opts, instead of the more sophisticated, unsettling approach of any of George Romero or his successors' works, to give us 99% action and 1% dialogue, a poorly constructed ratio if there ever was one. The film is full of jump cuts, with captions and on-screen images implying sequences which would've been devoid of action and all talk had they been included. Those unfamiliar with the games will be left virtually clueless as to what's going on as the time line jumps between hours and days during the first quarter or so of the relatively brief film (about an hour and a half, according to my watch). This is a game-to-film transition gone very, very bad; it would be time much more well spent to actually play the game. The movie comes across as a Cliff Notes version of watching someone else play Resident Evil: Nemesis, except using live actors instead of CGI.
In a city of the undead, the human element is nil, and oft times the question comes up why we're even watching these people; Milla Jovovich is the only character even really remotely root able for, and the only reason for that is that she's a familiar face. Characters quickly come and go in rapid succession, getting killed minutes (and in one instance, seconds) after we find out their name, with no explanation as to who they are or why they're doing what they're doing. In a quarantined city about to be destroyed, there's only one motivation: Get out. This could've been played on similarly to the way Night of the Living Dead played on a similar situation, but every character aside from Alice has the same thought process, reactions, and attitudes, and are differentiated only by their physical appearance and dialect/slang (for some reason, Racoon City, apparently in Illinois according to the globe at the end, has equal parts population British, French, Russian, and American citizens). Had the director/producer/writers decided to include any dialogue in place of the unending action, and had that dialogue been well written, this is a film that could've had some potential maybe not as a great horror flick, but at least as a good auctioneer. Instead, from beginning to end we're subjected to computer graphics, CGI sequences, and virtually un-ending stretches of poor camera work and amplified gunfire as the undead are dispatched in poorly lit, badly focused environments that barely gives the viewer time to try and understand what they just saw.
What little speaking and character we're left with is divided evenly into clichés (the cold hearted business executive, the steely soldier, the tough woman cop, the token funny black guy, the token tough black guy, the mindless, unstoppable killing machine) and cliché ridden dialogue (an evil corporation/the government causes disaster because of greed and immorality; aforementioned steely executive has innocent people killed by steely soldiers; a pseudo-pimp drives around in a Cadillac shouting obscenities at white people; a brainwashed monster remembers love and relents). It comes as no surprise that one of the people responsible for this is Paul W. S. Anderson, who gave us the "inspired" House of the Dead, which opted to include images from a 1980s arcade game in lieu of actual footage. Anderson seems to like zombies and guns, but otherwise has no grasp on any sort of movie-making mechanics. He doesn't give the viewer a reason to care for the people getting killed, or even explain why they're getting killed, in some parts; early on in the movie, characters are confronted in a church by giant, apparently zombified lizards, who attack with enormous tongues and climb down walls. But as the film demonstrates, the virus causing zombification doesn't create anything, it simply reanimates dead cells, leaving us to question what these things were exactly, and where did they come from? Nowhere in the "living" world are there six foot tall, ten foot long reptiles that can snap a human neck by wrapping its tongue around one. The entire film follows this err in logic and lack of creative input, right up to the convoluted last five minutes of the film, wherein we're all but given the announcement that there will be no resolution, only the promise of a third film.