[star rating=”3.5″]
RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER. Written & Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (based on the Capcom video game characters), with Milla Jovovich, Iain Glen, Ali Larter, Eoin Macken, Shawn Roberts, Fraser James, Ruby Rose, William Levy, Lee Joon-gi, Ever Anderson. PAUL BLOM reviews
Director Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt’s Impact Pictures production partnership has been a successful one for over two decades with a host of exciting movies resulting from it. They include their first foray into video game adaptation with Mortal Kombat, the cult fan favourite outer space horror of Event Horizon, a CGI boosted re-imagining of Dumas’ Three Musketeers, and the historic disaster spectacle & romantic drama Pompeii.
But, their crowning achievement is the mammoth 6 chapter video game adaptation franchise Resident Evil, which 15 years ago helped to bring back the zombie genre (but with a kick-ass action and sci-fi punch). Up until the 5th chapter, the movies crossed the billion dollar gross mark and gave life to one of the strongest and most consistent female action characters of the 2000s (played with sensual intensity by Milla Jovovich).
This sixth and (reputed) last chapter aims to wrap up all the loose ends and reveal all about Alice and the Umbrella Corporation (Umbrella being the evil corporate entity responsible for engineering a deadly virus, turning those infected into ravenous zombies, and across one and a half decades and half a dozen movies our heroine Alice has been fighting them and the many villains & creatures they’ve spawned).
Shot here in South Africa, the movie is a return to the Hive, the underground Raccoon City facility from the first film, where Alice’s bloody journey began, and is now set to end. Battle-weary and without her superpowers, Alice has to take on these insurmountable odds at all cost. With the majority of the world population wiped out by this time, Alice is the only hope to execute a mission to save the rest of the planet’s survivors, leading her to this highly protected Umbrella location. On this fateful journey she meets up with old allies, and face arch enemies thought to be dead. With a string of action packed set-pieces driving towards the ultimate conclusion (with quite a few surprises and revelations unfolding), the film is a more gritty post-apocalyptic trip, in both it’s look and approach.
The highly effective make-up effects were done by Cape Town’s Cosmesis Advanced Prosthetics Studio. (This time around the deadly Red Queen computer is played by Ever Anderson, young daughter of the director and his star wife Jovovich)
It is difficult for me to pick the best of the Resident Evil movies – they all make part of the whole and while I don’t feel this is the top one in the batch, it is a very important component as a closing chapter, bringing it all together to wrap up this exciting series.
Knowing how much goes into putting a movie like this together, I do feel that a lot of detail gets lost watching it in a 3D cinema that is not optimal, with many of the scenes far too dark.
As The Final Chapter screening started I thought about a fun activity lying ahead – watching all 6 Resident Evil movies in sequence (as one should do annually with the Alien, Star Wars and Terminator franchises!).
South Africans, and Capetonians in particular, will get a kick out of the Table Mountain cable car opening scene!
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