Resident Evil Degeneration/Sony Pictures/2008/R


What happens when the director of Mortal Kombat has in three swift turns rendered your signature survival horror game series into live action donkey taint? It's time to go the Square Pictures route, and release a full length cg animated film *actually* based directly on your game series. Now I have to admit, I never actually saw any of the Paul WS Andersen Resident Evil live action films. To date, the only RE film I had seen was a bootleg of the 2000 Japanese cg "Biohazard 4D-Executer". When the trailer was released last year for Degeneration, a lot of people assumed this would just be some leftover cutscenes slapped together into a "feature".
Now surely I was not expecting anything approaching the epic scale of Square Picture's Final Fantasy Advent Children...but pretty soon into this thing I realized this was a real treat.

The first few minutes seem a bit lackluster. Using animation that looks like circa 2001 ingame cutscenes, we're woven a quick narrative frenzy of news clips depicting angry protestors(at this point you're thinking "Is THIS the animation?) Yet, as if Capcom wanted to pull a "psyche!" on the audience, once the film really begins it's like night and day. I actually was pretty impressed, all things considered with the movie's animation. And I liked the idea to star the series two most famous protagonists, Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield(who hadn't starred since a decade prior in Resident Evil 2) The movie starts off in a major airport, where it seems like a large bulk of the movie takes place. Claire Redfield is waiting for family, when all the sudden a senator comes walking by, looking like a late 80's arcade end boss. But is he a bad guy? Before you have time to think, T-Virus ravaged zombies attack...and as if a zombie attack wasn't enough, in comes Zombie 9/11 with a zombie infested large passenger plane slamming in(who says you need a Qu'ran and boxcutters to bring down a plane?) Soon the government shuts down and quarantines the whole airport, and sends in Leon Kennedy. And this folks, is where the glorious concerto of zombie shooting ultra violence commences. I won't give too much away; other to say it involves a shady major pharma corporation, staged terror bombings, government coverups, and a very familair giant eye shoulder creature. You know, the usual stuff.

My only real complaint is that I didn't see this in theaters. It also reaffirms my view that cg animated adaptions are the only video game based films that are any good. To this day, I have never once seen a video game based live action movie that wowed me(Though Silent Hill comes close) Is it a deep theatrical experience? No, but it's one mother of a thrill ride and well worth seeing at least once. The animation is pretty good to damn excellent, the thrills and R rated action is there, and the intrigue isn't merely skimmed over. And unlike a lot of game-movie adaptions, it fits directly into series canon.