Schocktober 2021 #2

Watched on Blu-Ray

You have to be grateful to Paul W.S. Anderson for devoting himself so sacrificially to the video game series "Resident Evil" that he doesn't stumble anywhere near Uwe Boll level. With his own version, which is partly based somewhat loosely on the first games, the Brit tried to give old-fashioned horror a neo-stylistic touch in 2002, added a genre-typical survival horror component with the "Hive" and let zombies walk in it, which of course is largely the undoing of the special unit. With elements such as ammunition scarcity and numerical inferiority, he even succeeds in transferring important mosaic stones for the tension from the game template to celluloid.

The aspects brought together, which are kind to the genre, also help to give the horror-action mix its own flavour. Lots of mechanised backdrops mixed with neo-stylistic architecture, a calculatingly acting A.I. and enigmatic characters - the pop culture-like editing technique may leave you a bit bludgeoned with impressions, but you can definitely relate to ambience and the scenario. Interestingly, the screenplay canonises the viewer with threadbare and numerous plotlines at first, but resolves them piece by piece as it progresses, which then feels pleasant.

The fact that the film adaptation doesn't work so smoothly after all is mainly due to the technical side. In 16:9 format, the picture looks too TV-like, and the scene design also leaves a lot to be desired due to too many close-ups. The camera seems too far away from the characters, also shaking around with effort, which is ultimately counterproductive for the dynamics of the genre; at least they made an effort to choose unusual shooting angles. The music tracks by Marilyn Mansion, among others, contribute to this, providing a noisy sound in his typical way - but this usually seems very exaggerated and does not serve the franchise or the genre. A Trent Reznor might have had better contributions ready, as he has already proven many times under the patronage of David Fincher. On the other hand, the second wake-up sequence at the end of the film has to be listed as a successful counter-example, which actually unpacks the full pound of atmosphere for a whole 3 minutes - why the whole film was not designed in this way is not quite clear to me.

Another shortcoming is the characterisation, the dialogue and the actors' performances. A pale character structure turns the protagonists into fodder, so it's easy to guess who will escape the hive at the end. In addition, Michelle Rodriguez and her character Rain are particularly out of place, straining the audience's patience time and again with over-cool and pointless lines of dialogue. Anderson also tried to puff up the characters with pithy sentences, but failed grandly. The superficialities also more or less denied the actors to realise their potential, even if the effort is clearly visible. The characters are simply too pale to tease out anything positive.

Milla Jovovich, for example, is in the no-man's-land of acting, which her companions know how to top. No positive outlier can be singled out, and Heike Makatsch's performance in particular easily degenerates into a laughing stock. But "Resident Evil" doesn't want to be a monster of high cinema art, but a by-product for the video game, and here Anderson's contribution can be seen as one of the better ones.