Resident Evil: Extinction

The best that can be said of this film is that it does, eventually, end. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) builds on the story introduced and prolonged in the first two Resident Evil films. It also borrows heavily from video games and the Mad Max Road Warrior films but lacks their grit and vigor—it relies too much on poorly rendered digital effects and not enough on story and character or imagination or logic or intelligence or basic filmmaking skills. But what more should one expect? This film surely wasn't conceived with the purpose of creating art or of making profound statements about humanity and the world. Surely it was conceived primarily in hopes of making a profit, of wrenching the last dollar out of the concept introduced in the video game and the predecessor films.

What is most interesting about this film? My answer would be the actress Mila Jovovich, who plays the main character Alice. She brings exotic energy and life to the film, furtively, haphazardly. At the film's beginning we see that a clearly evil and power-hungry scientist has cloned hundreds of copies of Alice in an effort to discover an antidote for the virus that has turned most of the world's population into flesh-eating zombies. He periodically brings one of the cloned Alices to life for reasons that are not quite clear—the clone always dies in some grotesque way. He also spends most of the film tracking the real Alice by satellite—her blood contains an antidote to the virus. He's somehow programmed her so that if the satellites issue a command she will obey it. She has unusual psychic as well as physical abilities for which the film offers no explanation (perhaps one of the earlier films explained). She discovers her cloned other selves at the end of the film, which leaves open the possibility of still yet another sequel in which they will play a role. This prospective sequel was perhaps the least heartening aspect of Resident Evil: Extinction.

The Mad Max link is a caravan of survivors wending their way through a desert in the American west, trying to survive in one way or the other, trying to avoid hordes of ravening zombies. Many of these survivors predictably lose their lives in the course of the film. At one point the caravan travels through an abandoned and wrecked Las Vegas, covered with sand, evoking "Kubla Khan" but also evoking certain images from the Planet of the Apes films. Of course, the Las Vegas monuments half-covered in sand in this film—the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, others—were replica monuments to begin with, pallid ironic tributes to the great works of the West. Perhaps this film is aware of the irony, and of the symbolic potential of Las Vegas as a metaphor for the lost and broken western world—brought down (presumably) by its own obsession with unfettered experimentation, science, and technology. At least I think this is the message the film wants us to carry away.