endtroducing... Resident Evil

Rating: 4/10 (27 October 2007)

Well, I just watched RE 3.. and I really have to say the writer (some Paul Anderson, apparently) does deserve credit for taking his profession to a whole new level. Seriously, he achieved something DJ Shadow did for music back in the days: making a whole album/script out of samples, without ever using one bit of content he came up with himself. Just that for a film, this concept somehow doesn't seem to work as well as it did for electronic music. The most obvious ripoff, as others have remarked before me, is of course from Day of the Dead - RE 3 is in fact barely short of qualifying as a remake: cf. the underground base with the zombies around the elevator area, the virtually identical telephone-scene with the "educated" zombie and the mad scientist etc., etc. But by no means does it end there. Other "featured" movies would include Mad Max, Alien(s), Matrix, X-Men, even The Birds... you name it. Virtually every scene feels like you have seen it somewhere else before, and as usual the originals were somewhat better.
To be honest, apart from this, it wasn't that bad. Holes in the plot are frequent, yet not big enough to earnestly distract you, and dialog/acting is not bad enough to ruin the tension. Alongside low expectations, not having any relations to either the series or the game plus having a soft spot for Milla Jovovich (I loved the 5th element when it first came out) certainly helped making this flick quite tolerable for me. All in all, I felt adequately entertained, which after all is about the only reason one would watch an action/horror flick like this. Clearly in the "If You Got Nothing Else To Do, Might As Well Give It A Try"-category, 4/10 from me.