Though I think they all got panned by critics, they all made pretty good money, so I am not alone.
Seriously, what’s not to like, though?
A hot chick, not some little tiny waif (though Milla is thin), kicking ass. A likeable protagonist.
No moral lessons about “We are the real zombies” just tons and tons of zombies and monsters dying.
Fun characters, even though most of them are about as shallow as a pan.
Very few really annoying characters - there was only one, I believe, who hid his zombie status, and at least there was no drama about “Kill him! No!”
Continuity! Who’d have thunk it? Continuity in a bunch of mindless zombie flicks.
I never played the games much, except the first one - too many jump scares for me. (The movies have them too, but not really as much, and plus it’s just not my kind of game.) Everybody says video game movies suck, and most of them do (and trust me, this is no grand opus either), but they were damn entertaining. Like candy or popcorn - you just keep eating them.
And one more, possibly out this year: Resident Evil: Rising. Which I will probably watch (though on DVD). It’s supposed to be the final movie in the series.
I also like the series, and one great thing they did was to stray from the plot if the video game series which they were based on. They used elements of the video games, and certain characters, but the movies are really a completely different franchise.
The first one is probably the best video game adaptation movie. Which is admittedly a pretty low bar, but I enjoyed it.
I watched one or two of the sequels, but don’t really remember much about them, other than it was pretty obvious that they had much smaller budgets than the first.
I like them too, I believe I’ve seen them all. I think Extinction was the best, I like the post-apocalyptic survival genre anyway. My least favorite was the one where they were in some sort of virtual reality area (maybe that was the latest one?)
She “bonded” with the T-cell virus at a cellular level, the only one to do it successfully.
Also the plot is: Evil corporation creates evil virus as a bio weapon. Continues experimenting with it until it brings about the downfall of the entire world. And yet they continue experimenting. In their experimentations, in the early times, they find one subject - Project: Alice - who reacts differently to the virus than anyone else. I never fully understood why they wanted her back, other than she was “theirs”.
The birds were a bit silly. But it wasn’t the focus of the movie.
I thought the first one was great. I didn’t care for the other 2 or 3 I’ve seen. They seem a bit too thin on plot and character. The action sequences are of course cool in all of them.
But I’ve wondered: now that Umbrella has pretty much destroyed the world, now that there’s no more money for them to make, no more limos or yachts for the execs to buy, no more 4 star restaurants for them to eat at, no more deluxe resorts for them to stay at…
**
WHY DO THE BIG SHOTS AT UMBRELLA STILL ** ACT AS IF THEY"RE IN THE CATBIRD’S SEAT???
They get hate not only from the normal critics but the video game crowd as well, since they have only a tangential relationship with the games. It’s fun seeing the monsters rendered in high quality, though.
There’s also some CGI Resident Evil movies made in Japan that are more faithful, Degeneration and Damnation. Damnation was pretty fun, lots of big dumb dumb action scenes and shameless pandering. The fight at the end with tyrants, lickers, and rocket launchers was pretty satisfying.
Yeah this made me wonder, too. In the last movie they visit the Umbrella testing facility, where it is shown that they showed a rendition of the T-virus in Moscow, sold it to America, and then showed a rendition of the T-virus in NY and sold it to Russia. Ok, great…but now you have destroyed the world. So why on earth are you still trying to study the virus? Where are you even getting the money and the resources? Why is your test facility still up and running?
I was under the impression that all the Umbrella big wigs were all dead. The Red Queen AI was running Umbrella. It kept following it’s programming of studying the T-virus and permutations, etc. If it required human labor, it had the capacity to crank out cloned humans, probably conditioned to obey, or it could control them with the robotic bug thingies.
I really like the first one a lot, and I have to admit that a lot of that is based on the music. There’s kind of an interesting story behind the music on the DVD commentary.
Anyway, the others are all mediocre in my opinion. I always felt like I was missing some piece of the backstory. I kind of feel like Seinfeld (JERRY: Why did they kill that guy? I thought he was with them? SUSAN: No, no. That’s not the guy. That’s a different guy.) I liked it as a zombie movie, but somewhere it left zombie movie behind and I missed something.
