![]() I wouldn’t call them soulful-they’re highly processed and derivative, as one might expect-but they also have a real electric spark. But the films are far too strange for mass production. Anderson’s work-and the “Resident Evil” movies in particular-may resemble formulaic junk, concocted by committee in some corporate flavor-testing lab and served to those who have no taste. “Why does McDonald’s serve such bad food?” the top-voted response reads. Anderson a bad director yet successful?” one user on Quora, the crowd-sourced Q.-&-A. (On the site, Richard Brody has previously delved into the franchise's popularity.) Anderson himself has managed to accrue an abysmal lifetime rating of twenty-seven per cent on, and placement on countless worst-director-ever lists online. The franchise has since achieved the queer distinction of being both hugely profitable-with a billion dollars in global revenue-and utterly unloved by either mainstream critics or genre fans. This may have been the original sin that turned the films’ geeky target audience against them. The original “Resident Evil,” adapted from a Japanese video game, had been set to be written and directed by George Romero, the godfather of zombie cinema, but he was pushed aside for a young British writer-director-producer named Paul W. Go and watch it.Īlice, played by the Ukrainian actress and supermodel Milla Jovovich, arrived onscreen in 2002, as an unlikely feminist icon-a female action hero who, unlike, say, Sigourney Weaver’s character in “Aliens” or Linda Hamilton’s in “Terminator 2,” rarely seems to draw any motivation from her ovaries. ![]() But, really, it comes down to this: There was an incident, a virus escaped, everyone died. Everyone died.” Careful viewers-or viewers who care-may discern a few more details along the way: there’s a mega-corporation with a plan to bring about the apocalypse and “reboot the planet” there’s a well-groomed co-ed coterie of commandos that tries to help Alice on her missions and seems to rotate through the films at random there’s a malicious computer system called the Red Queen that wants Alice carved to bits. Then she tells you all you need to know about the world in which she’s kicking so much butt: “There was an incident. “My name is Alice,” she says at the start of the movie, as she does at the beginning of episodes 3, 4, and 5 in the series. O.K., fine, you’ll soon find out that the woman with the shotguns is called Alice. Who is this woman with the pair of shotguns and the tight pants? What’s this undead beast that wants to eat her face? When did Washington, D.C., get turned to rubble? Be patient, my friend, and nothing much will be explained. The films are best enjoyed out of sequence, with no prior knowledge of the plot. The sixth and final chapter in the “Resident Evil” franchise has just come out in theatres, and you may as well start there.
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