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[sc:tctop]The T-Virus has escaped The Hive, taken down Racoon City and now it’s killed the world. But the rule of a third is to revisit the origins and pass on a revelation that makes your head explode. Does this live up to the hype and reward the loyal viewer? Cory and Ruthie are about to find out.
RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION
Years after the Raccoon City disaster, Alice pits her bio-organic super skills against armies of the undead in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas. Las Vegas means fun in the sun. Well, at least the sun is still there. Except for a few rusting landmarks, it looks pretty much like the rest of the desert – or the whole country, for that matter. The crowds are now flesh-eating zombies: the mass undead, the oozing, terrifying sludge of what remains. Here, the nightmare isn’t over yet, so the newly upgraded Alice, along with her crew will make a final stand against evil – with one goal: to turn the undead dead again.
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“But the rule of a third is to revisit the origins and pass on a revelation that makes your head explode. Does this live up to the hype and reward the loyal viewer?” – by that definition it doesn’t live up to the hype as they didn’t really return to the actual Hive and Alice had powers to use instead of being powerless like others and the big reveals (Alice’s blood is the key and the clones) weren’t head exploding reveals exactly (they were cool but not head exploding arguably especially the clones since we saw them in the opening) so by the rule scale it doesn’t really pass but I still loved it; it’s easily my second favorite of the series!
You have a day time setting which at the time it was released was a fresh take on zombie attack settings, usually they were always in the dark, and you had fast moving zombies which was fresh to the genre at the time of release. You had zombie birds introduced which was a first to the zombie genre I believe so that expanded on the dogs (who never get old for me in the series) and you had some awesome characters in Claire which was another game shout out as she’s a character in the game series also and K-Mart (excited Spencer will be back in the final) as well as the return of LJ, Otto was enjoyable even though he didn’t last long…it was just a good group. There was action without forgetting about the character moments, there’s just a lot to like about this movie.
I third doing another triplecast when the sixth movie comes out!
I agree with Ruthie, I loved Ali as Claire; though Cory’s statements aren’t inaccurate – Ali has played more stoic characters than not one could say, not that that’s a bad thing – she has a type which is good but you do like seeing actors outside of their normal roles…still I thought she made a good Claire. To address Cory’s comment about Claire not really feeling like a leader in this, there is a novel on this movie that details things more so many it’s explained more in there why she leads and Carlos doesn’t; the book also reveals K-Mart’s real name, Delilah, but I’m still going to call her K-Mart as her reason for naming herself that was awesome – “That’s where they found me, Claire and the others; plus everyone I knew was dead so I figured it was time for a change.”. RE4 does a good job of showing why Claire is a leader – she’s always on watch when she’s not sleeping, she fights to the last ounce, and she’s got some smart moves.
I was sad LJ died because he was good for the comedy, but it’s a fair point to say “Really?!” regarding endangering the group, however you have to keep in mind unlike the others Carlos and LJ knew there was a cure so maybe he was hoping to run across some vials and he’d be safe; Carlos I would have missed more had they not tried to do the forced romance plot with Alice – these two had basically zero time to really get to know each other but they’re suppose to love one another beyond a physical level? Not buying that. So had there been less of that in the build up to his exit I might have missed him more, but because that was a big factor in his storyline it turned me off to wanting to see more of him. To be fair, they didn’t do a horrible job of making me believe Carlos was intrigued by Alice but I don’t buy they knew each other enough to be all lovey dovey at times like the film suggested; it’s the same with Luther in RE: Afterlife – yes they’re visually appealing but they don’t know each other enough to make a romance believable. Maybe there’s missing in-between moments but the only people we’ve seen Alice really in moments getting to know are Matt and Spence in the first movie, Claire in RE3 & RE4, and arguably Rain in RE1 and RE5 even though that was a clone…everyone else has been moments based like Chris in RE4 or Jill, Carlos, and LJ in RE2 and by some extension the boys in RE3 where you could buy friendship but they never really talk about anything to warrant a relationship. It was sad Oded wouldn’t be in more films, but I wasn’t as sad as others to see Carlos go because he was more love interest plotted then showcasing him as an individual plotted.
K-Mart was awesome; I’m glad she’s going to be in the final film! Ali is normally a blonde, I think she’s actually a brunette though, but she’s a red head in the films, Paul and company made sure her hair color matched Claire’s from the game – they say in the commentary what the shade is but it’s a very specific color they use for her. Alice said the reason she left the Raccoon group was because she thought they’d be safer away from her; Carlos and LJ never say what happened to Jill though which I thought was odd given Jill was a big part of their group, but I guess they kept that vague to really surprise Alice at the end of RE4/start of RE5. I know why they did it visually, it creates an action scene, but logically I’ll never understand why they didn’t drive around container in Las Vegas since the trucks weren’t going to fit under the bridge in front of them anyways…that’s always a “Take you out of the moment” moment for me with the film.
Interesting theory Ruthie regarding who’s the real Alice; I tend to think Alice is the real Alice because they showed her walking away from a plane crash without powers in RE4 so if she could do that then she could survive the one in RE2 with powers and some healing assistance from the lab at the end of it. The clones seem easy enough for Isaacs to make so I tend to think he started post RE2 on it and Alice is the one we saw in RE1.
The laser grid take down of Isaacs was good. The music in this movie was good; great choice for the break music. Congratulations to Ruthie on getting all of the end questions right!