Harold Goldstein
The third installment of Resident Evil (Extinction) has finally come and in all honesty, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The successful video game franchise that is known as Resident Evil deals with one thing only: Survival Horror. In every sense, this genre has propelled the series to its current stature on various gaming systems. What the movie series incorporates is something else entirely: Action Horror. And this is where the film falls apart. In this third tale, the T-virus has spread throughout the seven continents annihilating nearly all sentient life and killing the world slowly as everything turns into an eternal wasteland. Traveling through the ‘deserts’, Alice (the hero) walks a lonely path as she tries to survive on her own without wanting to deal with people. On the other hand, a group of survivors travel by bus to search for a land not densely populated with mutated zombies while surviving members of the Umbrella Corporation (the ones who created the T-virus) try to find a way to ‘domesticate’ the zombies in an effort to save the world. As you can clearly tell, the story is somewhat all over the place. There is no real sense of accomplishment when the survivors actually find a place that might be not populated with zombies. Also, the final fight scene between Alice and a power-crazy scientist filled with T-Virus mixture is very short and stops abruptly with no sense of accomplishment either. It’s like nothing really happened and the filmmakers thought that you would be happy with it. Not to mention, a slight hint of another installment coming to finish the movie doesn’t bring much hope into Resident Evil fans. Generally, he music was terrible. Yes, they did have the soft sounds of something just waiting to pop up but it’s nothing new. It was just regurgitation of old horror movie music but translated and refurbished with a electronic feel. The effects are average at best. One scene with an army of mutant crows that battle the human survivors does a good job of enticing some attention. Simply put, there was nothing special. The Resident Evil genre is supposed to make you jump out of your seat, not make you feel tired of watching monsters getting smashed, slashed and shot to death. Milla Jovovich (as Alice) does have some funny moments and can be witty in some points of the film. They do bring back some veteran characters from the second film “Resident Evil: Apocalypse”, but they don’t do much to impress. “Resident Evil: Extinction” might be good as a standalone film but as a product of a successful video game franchise, it isn’t very impressive.