So I went and saw Resident Evil: Extinction. It wasn’t as good as I was expecting (and I had very low expectations), though my reaction is probably colored by the fact that I went to see it at the massive Dome theater at the Arclight and sat near the front, and I actually had to hold my hands over my ears for most of the movie to keep my eardrums from exploding like a shotgunned zombie heads. The trailer, with its sweeping vistas of a dessicated Las Vegas, had somehow led me to expect something along the lines of Beyond Thunderdome, but Extinction is much, much, much more modest in scale. It’s basically the tale of ragtag band trying to survive in a future world where just about everybody has been wiped out or zombified by a manmade T-virus that apparently selectively targets those with no perceived appeal to the youth market.
I went and saw this one in spite of its lousy predecessor, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, because the original Resident Evil flick remains one of the most intense movies I’ve ever seen, though that’s almost certainly only because I hadn’t slept for three days prior to seeing it and I was in a near-hallucinatory state of fatigue. I think that even for the well-rested that movie is illogical and disjointed, and in the state I was in the movie was really messing with my head. And for some reason I still can’t fathom, it seemed like half the audience was walking in and out of the theater throughout the whole movie, and it was extremely dark in the theater, so all these people kept tripping on stairs and stumbling/lurching toward me just like the zombies on screen. It was all I could do not to leap up and start swinging. By the time I left the theater and walked out into the parking lot I was pretty paranoid and hopped up on adrenaline, which is probably a good thing because it may have saved me from being run over by a careening minivan. Ah, good times.
Anyway, I love zombie movies, so I still got a kick out of Extinction. It had its moments. (Though many of those moments were lifted straight out of other movies — notably Day of the Dead.) The first scene and the last scene were nice touches. The action was gruesome to behold (though not as gruesome to behold as the brief and painfully perfunctory scenes in which the characters express deep emotions). I guess if you’re not doing anything some afternoon and really want to see a low-budget postapocalyptic zombie action movie, this one’s an okay way to pass a few hours.
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