Return to Raccoon City

Many years ago Capcom dabbled with the idea of a multi-player Resident Evil game. And we're not just talking two player co-op but a full fledged online multi-player experience. This is before online gaming had taken off on the console market and exploded like it has over the last couple years. The result was the Resident Evil: Outbreak series.on the Playstation 2. Needless to say the technology back then couldn't handle the task Capcom had set before themselves. While the main series had moved onto Resident Evil: Code Veronica and was nearing Resident Evil 4, Outbreak returned gamers to the initial spread of the T-Virus in Raccoon City. Playing as one of several survivors of the zombie outbreak, you were tasked with partnering with three other players to complete several scenarios in which our survivors escaped the city before it became a smoking crater to contain the T-Virus.

While the game's premise was great, the execution left a little to be desired. As I look at some of the titles that people are playing today though it could be that Outbreak was just a little ahead of its time. The Playstation 2 was never really intended to be an online gaming console and so connections were slow and very unstable. It was very hard to find a game where people's connections didn't drop 10 minutes into a scenario. This unfortunate fact made it hard to ever complete a scenario with players online. This fact was only compounded by Capcom's design choice to not allow voice chat but instead opting for pre-set voice commands mapped to buttons on the controller such as calling out another character's name or yelling "Help!". Fair enough to say it was very basic but it sure did ramp up the suspense when playing. Especially when you saw that when starting a game more often than not you were separated from the rest group. Much like the other games, Capcom saw fit to minimize the amount of guns and ammo you could find. Luckily they also included rudimentary weapons such as lead pipes and broom handles that characters could use to fend off the onslaught of the undead. So very much of this game was spent walking around alone, searching for your teammates with a broom handle that could break at any minute. Tense? Yes. Fun? Sometimes. Again it was ahead of its time and just not something that could do the concept justice given the hardware.

Fast forward to 2011 and it seems Capcom might be going back to that well with a new game called Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. As part of their new initiative of partnering with western developers, Capcom has partnered with Slant Six Games; who previously worked on the Socom series for the Playstation. Together, they plan to revisit the Raccoon City incident and bring a whole new style of game-play to the Resident Evil series. Much like Socom, the game will be a squad-based third person shooter in which you play as Umbrella operatives during the Raccoon City outbreak which took place during Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Along (with a CPU team) or in co-op, you and your team will clash with the legions of the undead, cross paths with memorable Resident Evil characters, and battle United States agents hell bent on finding evidence of Umbrella's involvement in the outbreak. Slant Six and Capcom plan to deliver this title in the Fall/Winter of 2011 so expect more news and coverage to follow on this title in the coming months. Also check out the press release from Capcom after the break. In the meantime I'm going to get my zombie survival kit ready. 

The Lost Art of Survival Horror

Just like in books and films, atmosphere can play a big part in your gaming experience. Setting and ambiance play a big part in immersing a person into the game that they're playing. The games that take full advantage of this fact and play it to their advantage would be the sub-genre of Survival Horror. Just as it sounds, the basis for the survival horror genre is just that, to survive given the bleak circumstances that surround you. Take the earlier Resident Evil games as an example. More often than not, the game have you very limited resources and forced you to strategically navigate through it. Things tend to get a lot more tense for a player when they can't shoot their way through a scenario.

Complete Global Saturation is Imminent

And now we continue today's look into the Resident Evil movie franchise with a review of the latest film, Resident Evil: Afterlife. Once again I will point out this post will contain spoilers. I'm gonna cover this pretty in depth and do a recap while pointing out the problems I had with this film. It's a recap/review in one! Lets go!

Right off the bat I will say I had certain expectations of this movie. Not high expectations because quite frankly I never have high expectations for movies made from comic or video game properties. However when I read that Afterlife would be heavily influenced by the great 2009 title, Resident Evil 5 I started to think that this might have some level of potential to surprise me. And so I went into this film with some level of enthusiasm. I would be greatly disappointed by a disjointed attempt to merge two vastly different worlds together into one with little to no explanation for anything.

The movie opens with a wide shot over Tokyo which is where the movie's villain, Albert Wesker has set up shop since the last movie. Cue your regular recap of the zombie outbreak caused by the release of the T-Virus and Alice's voice over covering the mass hysteria and lack of survivors. Once again we are introduced to an Umbrella stronghold where Wesker is confronted by Alice and her clone army. The best thing to happen to this franchise happens when they finally de-power Alice. Following a scuffle between Wesker and Alice, the plane they're on crashes. Moments later Alice crawls out of the wreckage but Wesker is nowhere to be found.

The Executioner in his full glory

From here she goes in search of Claire Redfield and the others from the previous movie . She travels to Alaska via plane to find this infection free outpost named Arcadia but finds only one person on the island, Claire. Unfortunately it turns out that Claire has been brainwashed by some device that is attached to her chest. Upon it's removal she experiences some memory loss, leaving our two heroines in an uneasy alliance as they take a plane and travel back to civilization to look for more survivors. The two travel to Los Angeles where they find a rag-tag group of un-infected people taking shelter in a prison. They manage to precariously land their plane on the roof and introduce themselves to this new group. It is here that we learn that Arcadia wasn't actually a place in Alaska but a tanker off shore that was housing survivors. The ship can be seen off the coast line from the prison rooftop but no contact had been made for days. So our group bands together in an attempt to escape their prison as the zombie hordes close in. This of course only happens due to the effective force of The Executioner. 

So our group reluctantly lets out this mysterious prisoner, named Chris, only to discover that he's Claire's brother amidst the chaos. Claire is still suffering from memory loss so there's little time for a family reunion. Chris helps the few survivors left form an escape plan and they make it to the surface via a sewer tunnel, and by they I mean Alice, Chris, and Claire. Together they make it to the shore and take one of the lifeboats from the Arcadia back to the ship and board it. As they investigate the seemingly quiet tanker they discover what else but an Umbrella logo. And inside they find thousands of survivors, all outfitted with devices on their chests to control them. Claire and Chris set about rescuing the survivors as Alice goes deeper into the tanker. Naturally this leads to the final confrontation of the film.

Shawn Roberts as Albert Wesker

Low and behold our villain, Albert Wesker, has returned after being absent since the opening ten minutes of the film. He's very quick to highlight the fact that he is also new and improved as the powers he had taken from Alice are now his. However there is a flaw in his plan as he needs Alice's DNA to stabilize the virus within himself. Chris and Claire finally arrive on the scene as Alice is dealing with Wesker's pet hounds. The two of them are eventually overpowered and are only saved by the intervention of Alice who lays waste to our dear villain. Still we're left with a cliff-hanger ending as our heroes and survivors are soon swarmed by hundreds of Umbrella planes. And we fade to black. Clearly we're in store for yet another sequel. Actually I think Milla has already gone on record saying that there are plans for it. However there were so many problems with this movie that it seems like another movie is needed just to explain everything. 

And here's where the review kicks in. Like I said above, this movie has a lot of problems and they begin after the initial ten minutes of the movie. First off there's Alice herself. I like Milla Jovovich, I really do but her character is a bit of a odd issue with these movies. The best thing to happen to this franchise happens when they finally de-power Alice. If you read my post recapping the first three movies, with each installment it seemed Alice gained some new fantastic ability to battle the forces of Umbrella. It made the movie terrible unbalanced when the heroine is far more powerful than the people she's fighting against. It made even less sense that the company she was fighting against were the ones that kept giving her these abilities! 

The next problem is when Alice finally met up with Claire in Alaska in the field of planes. It's here that Afterlife's potential begins to break down. See, the device implanted on Claire's chest came from Resident Evil 5 where it was a vital plot point in the game. Here it's a means to an end, almost specifically used to create a sense of tension between the characters that never really makes sense. Even so, in Resident Evil 5 the device does not cause memory loss. Completely just a twist tossed in for seemingly no reason. The same can be said for the introduction of the Executioner. If you're asking yourself, "What the hell is the Executioner?" then you're asking the right question. Allow me to clarify; the Executioner is a monster from Resident Evil 5 that was created by the evil organization, Tricell, via experimentation and mutation. All of that is explained in the game. 

However in Resident Evil: Afterlife this big, hulking monster shows up out of nowhere without any sort of explanation whatsoever and after it has been dispatched it's never even mentioned again. Not even referenced. But I digress or else I'll forget to mention that locked in the prison that was another game character brought to life on film in the form of Chris Redfield, played by Wentworth Miller. You might notice I kinda name dropped Wentworth Miller. Only for the reason that the other survivors are throwaways for cool deaths in the movie. One of which introduced us to the new zombies with their tentacle like mandibles. These came from the highly successful Resident Evil 4 for the Gamecube. Again, there was no explanation for the introduction of new zombies. They're just there and the viewer is supposed to accept it. At least in Extinction there was a reason for the more rabid zombies that were able to run around at high speeds, savagely ripping people apart. 

Finally we get to just a glaring example of uninspired film making. The fight sequence between Wesker and the Redfields has the unfortunate case of being both cool and horrendous at the same time. The fight is a shot for shot remake of a fight that Capcom created in Resident Evil 5 between Wesker and Chris Redfield (and Redfield's in game partner) in the climactic chapter of the game. It's sort of cool to see the sequence replicated in live action but therein lays the problem. Instead of coming up with a really cool fight scene to show off Wesker's new abilities, they just copied what Capcom did a year ago. I'll include video so you can see for yourself. First up is the clip of Wesker versus Chris Redfield and his partner from Resident Evil 5.

And here is the shot for shot remake in Resident Evil: Afterlife.

Claire, Chris, and Alice get ready for the final showdown.

Now I know Paul Anderson was really inspired by Resident Evil 5 and he wanted to pay homage to it in a way. That's great and I love that he wanted to stay close to the source material. However all of these ideas seem as if they were shoe-horned into the movie. The Executioner, the new zombies, the magic chest spider charm; all of these things were introduced in this film without much thought. It was more like he was saying, "Look it's like the game!" and that was it. In the end though it didn't make any sense since all of it just came out of nowhere. Everything just happens without motivation or explanation and in that sense the movie just doesn't work. Maybe it's time we leave the game franchises along and stop trying to translate an interactive medium to one where you sit and watch. You can never replicate that experience on film. In the end it just comes off as being cheesy to the mainstream audience and the fanboy audience gets into an uproar about the misuse of the property. Like a friend of mine said recently, Hollywood needs to lay off the intellectual properties taken from other mediums and concentrate on being original instead. Let the games industry stick to what they know best and the movie industry do the same. Intermingling has only led to terrible films that aren't good for the fans or the studios that make them.

We have a Biohazard!

I'm going to warn you from now, this post contains spoilers. You have been warned!

With the disclaimer out of the way let's get down to business. Video game movies are terrible. There I said it. Fan boys may rage but there has never been a good movie based on a game. I'll give the first Resident Evil movie some credit for being a prequel to the games but that's where it ends. Like many people I hold the opinion that the Resident Evil movie franchise would be great popcorn flicks if they didn't have the Resident Evil brand name and influences shoe horned in. Afterlife is a great example of trying to merge a movie world and game world into one and failing to make sense of it.

Milla Jovovich stars as Alice.

Here's a quick recap of the franchise for those who haven't been following. The movies follow the exploits of Alice, a former Umbrella Corporation security officer who along with Matt Addison, escape the original outbreak of the zombie virus in the first film. The second movie tracks Alice and other survivors after the outbreak has reached the populace of Raccoon City, infecting thousands of people. We also find out that after the end of the first film, Umbrella had taken custody of both Matt and Alice to conduct various experiments on them. So Alice goes from former security guard to super powered zombie destroyer.

Nemesis is one ugly s.o.b.

We later find out that the same research turned Matt into the gruesome Nemesis creature, who carries a rocket launcher and Gatling gun. Yes, you read that right. He wields a mini gun. That aside, the movie also introduces the first character from the game series to cross over to the movie series in the form of Jill Valentine. Her role is kept to a minimum though because Alice is our hero here. The same could be said of the other aspects from the game that get introduced such as Umbrella's mercenary team and the Nemesis itself.

The movie climaxes when Alice has a fist fight with the Nemesis project on the rooftop of a building with their escape chopper. Again you have read that right. The giant beast that carries a rocket launcher and mini gun engages our super powered heroine in a fist fight. After a plane crash following the defeat of the Nemesis creature Alice finds herself back in the clutches of Umbrella for further experimentation. Yes, they give more powers to the individual that has been fighting against them. It doesn't make any sense! Do you have a headache yet? Take an Advil before you proceed, there's still one movie left to recap!

Ali Larter side by side with her game counter-part.

The third movie, Extinction finds the world in total chaos as the T-Virus outbreak has reached a global scale. We meet a band of survivors led by another character transplanted from the game series in Claire Redfield(as played by the always awesome Ali Larter). These survivors travel around in fortified buses searching for shelter while Umbrella searches for a solution to the outbreak in their underground labs. Oh yea, and Alice is back with telekinetic powers which she uses to roast a murder of zombie crows.

She helps the dwindling band of survivors steal an Umbrella helicopter so they can set off to Alaska where there are reports of a location that is infection free. Meanwhile Alice sticks around to find that not only has Umbrella started to create clone copies of her but the chief researcher has transformed himself into a live action Tyrant. Still, he's no match for Alice and the magnificent powers that he gave her. Once again she saves the day so to speak and promises to take Umbrella down with her army of clones. And that is where we are left until the events of Afterlife. Check back for my review of the movie tonight.




*Update!*
For added effect I'm now including a clip of the fight between Alice and the Nemesis for the sheer absurdity of the sequence. Enjoy!