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Resident Evil: Retribution
Sep. 14th, 2012 09:12 pmSorry to say this is one of the weaker installments in a series built on cheese and poor impulse control. After a brisk, brisk run-through of the epic battle promised and the last one, and the obligatory recap of the last episodes (with Alice conveniently skipping over incidents like her gaining an army of clones, her boyfriend turning into a Frankenstein, and L.J.), we get a quick rip-off of the Dawn of the Dead remake with Alice thinking she's a suburban housewife married to the guy from The Mummy, who died earlier on. There's no real reason for her to be a suburban housewife married to the guy from The Mummy, except perhaps whoever's running these depraved human experiments over at Umbrella is a shipper. In which case, you can tell he's evil for not putting an Alice clone with a Claire clone. C'mon, dude. It's the Apocalypse. Everything should be a dystopian sex party. Giving uber!Alice a husband and a deaf kid? What kind of sick mind does that? A Clana shipper?
Aaaanyway, that goes south and we get Milla Jovovich's trademark--a hospital-y yet openly fetishistic outfit.
She's got a better niche than Tyler Perry, you must admit.
As it turns out, since being captured, Alice has been relocated to an Umbrella facility in the former Soviet Union, where submarine pens have been converted into giant scale models of famous cities, where clones are used to test out the T-virus, thus letting it be sold to the countries of the world--so that explains how it got out and ended the world (remember when that happened? Between movies?). So now Alice and newbie Ada Wong (inexplicably wearing a slinky red dress in both A. combat and B. the cold-as-fuck portion of the world) have to go through facsimiles of New York and Moscow to escape. For some reason, the largest chamber is dedicated to 'Suburbia'. I guess because you really need all that space to simulate two-story homes.
That's actually a more video-gamey plot than the video games, but disappointingly, all the clones and It's A Small World After All doesn't really develop into anything. It's like if Cabin In The Woods had just been pain-worshipping redneck zombies. You'd expect there to be a "level" that Plant 42 has taken over and then it creeps into the "small town" level which is already overrun with Mormon zombies. But no, everyone just sticks to their own spot and even a nice, pro-gun-control Michelle Rodriguez clone doesn't get much play.
Beyond that, the movie just feels smaller. The previous installments weren't Spielberg, but they all expanded the mythos or progressed the plot. In this, they're stuck in a situation which feels completely first-act, Wesker has come back to life with no explanation, and Alice even gets her powers back, even though they had become completely boring and stupid in previous movies. Killing zombies with kung-fu, that's one thing, but killing zombies with psychic powers? Now you're just being silly.
I mean, there's a baseline of competence and low expectations that keeps this from being Battleship--an evil, superpowered Michelle Rodriguez clone swearing vengeance is a much better cliffhanger than anything Andrew Garfield came up with--but this really feels like another trip to the well, with reruns as the villains instead of bigger and badder foes, and people we actually care about like the Redfields replaced with underwear models. (I swear, there's a conversation between the Leon Kennedy dude and Milla Jovovich that sounds like they're in a contest to see who can act less. And English is, like, Milla's fifth language. She signed up for this shit thinking it was a documentary about Enron. What's your excuse, Leon Kennedy dude? Are you from Norway?)
Also, they give Alice an adorable moppet to mommy. People are comparing that to Newt in Aliens, but that fit Ripley's character, since one of the issues she was dealing with was her biological daughter aging and being estranged from her while she was in hypersleep. Then I guess it was brought into the mainstream with Uma Thurman in Kill Bill getting a little girl out of nowhere. Then Selena got a moppet in the last Underworld movie (with a British accent, despite being raised in an American lab, making the one interesting thing about the movie the supposition that accents are a matter of genetics), which makes it a trend.
I'm not exactly sure who it's supposed to ping. "Hey, ladies, wanna be a mommy but don't want to change diapers or get fat? Here, have a little kid who's at a perfectly cute age and automatically loves you without any effort on your part other than saving her from monsters"? Or is it "Hey, fellas, we know these ladies look really tough in their skintight leather outfits and kung-fu fights, but don't worry, give them a youngling and they'll immediately turn into loving maternal caregivers"? Something for me to avoid before Kate Beaton makes a comic about it and it's official Strong Female Character lore.
Ironically enough, this kind of plot would work perfectly for Big Barda (at least, in comparison to genius ideas like having her be raped by Superman and killing her off). Her and Scott aren't a high-profile enough couple that it would be a game-changer, like a Spider-Man or Superman baby would be. And since they're so well-established as suburbanites, a baby would put them back in fish out of water territory. It would strengthen the conflict of them wanting to be a normal couple but constantly being called to adventure, since now there's a reason for them to want a boring life besides personal preference. And you couldn't even complain that having a kid ages them--they're immortal.
I'm calling it--once we get these bitches back in canon, they need to have a Little Barda delivered to them out of the blue.
Aaaanyway, that goes south and we get Milla Jovovich's trademark--a hospital-y yet openly fetishistic outfit.
She's got a better niche than Tyler Perry, you must admit.
As it turns out, since being captured, Alice has been relocated to an Umbrella facility in the former Soviet Union, where submarine pens have been converted into giant scale models of famous cities, where clones are used to test out the T-virus, thus letting it be sold to the countries of the world--so that explains how it got out and ended the world (remember when that happened? Between movies?). So now Alice and newbie Ada Wong (inexplicably wearing a slinky red dress in both A. combat and B. the cold-as-fuck portion of the world) have to go through facsimiles of New York and Moscow to escape. For some reason, the largest chamber is dedicated to 'Suburbia'. I guess because you really need all that space to simulate two-story homes.
That's actually a more video-gamey plot than the video games, but disappointingly, all the clones and It's A Small World After All doesn't really develop into anything. It's like if Cabin In The Woods had just been pain-worshipping redneck zombies. You'd expect there to be a "level" that Plant 42 has taken over and then it creeps into the "small town" level which is already overrun with Mormon zombies. But no, everyone just sticks to their own spot and even a nice, pro-gun-control Michelle Rodriguez clone doesn't get much play.
Beyond that, the movie just feels smaller. The previous installments weren't Spielberg, but they all expanded the mythos or progressed the plot. In this, they're stuck in a situation which feels completely first-act, Wesker has come back to life with no explanation, and Alice even gets her powers back, even though they had become completely boring and stupid in previous movies. Killing zombies with kung-fu, that's one thing, but killing zombies with psychic powers? Now you're just being silly.
I mean, there's a baseline of competence and low expectations that keeps this from being Battleship--an evil, superpowered Michelle Rodriguez clone swearing vengeance is a much better cliffhanger than anything Andrew Garfield came up with--but this really feels like another trip to the well, with reruns as the villains instead of bigger and badder foes, and people we actually care about like the Redfields replaced with underwear models. (I swear, there's a conversation between the Leon Kennedy dude and Milla Jovovich that sounds like they're in a contest to see who can act less. And English is, like, Milla's fifth language. She signed up for this shit thinking it was a documentary about Enron. What's your excuse, Leon Kennedy dude? Are you from Norway?)
Also, they give Alice an adorable moppet to mommy. People are comparing that to Newt in Aliens, but that fit Ripley's character, since one of the issues she was dealing with was her biological daughter aging and being estranged from her while she was in hypersleep. Then I guess it was brought into the mainstream with Uma Thurman in Kill Bill getting a little girl out of nowhere. Then Selena got a moppet in the last Underworld movie (with a British accent, despite being raised in an American lab, making the one interesting thing about the movie the supposition that accents are a matter of genetics), which makes it a trend.
I'm not exactly sure who it's supposed to ping. "Hey, ladies, wanna be a mommy but don't want to change diapers or get fat? Here, have a little kid who's at a perfectly cute age and automatically loves you without any effort on your part other than saving her from monsters"? Or is it "Hey, fellas, we know these ladies look really tough in their skintight leather outfits and kung-fu fights, but don't worry, give them a youngling and they'll immediately turn into loving maternal caregivers"? Something for me to avoid before Kate Beaton makes a comic about it and it's official Strong Female Character lore.
Ironically enough, this kind of plot would work perfectly for Big Barda (at least, in comparison to genius ideas like having her be raped by Superman and killing her off). Her and Scott aren't a high-profile enough couple that it would be a game-changer, like a Spider-Man or Superman baby would be. And since they're so well-established as suburbanites, a baby would put them back in fish out of water territory. It would strengthen the conflict of them wanting to be a normal couple but constantly being called to adventure, since now there's a reason for them to want a boring life besides personal preference. And you couldn't even complain that having a kid ages them--they're immortal.
I'm calling it--once we get these bitches back in canon, they need to have a Little Barda delivered to them out of the blue.
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