Resident Evil: Retribution
This is a bombastic improvement over the rest of the series, the explosions and overall action sequences are better. Paper-thin characters, just as the doctor ordered for brain shutdown entertainment.
This is a direct sequel to Afterlife, where the Jill sandwich overruns the oil tanker, disappears the Redfields, and bumps Alice into the water. She is captured by Umbrella, and once again Milla Jovovich is wearing some paper towels in a film directed by her husband. That’s got to be a sex thing.
After an apparent flashback to suburban life, married to Lock-Nah, interrupted by zombies, she wakes up again, this time in the Umbrella prison she is actually in. Suddenly, she is broken out by unknown hackers. And wow, it’s Wesker saving her from Umbrella, a heel-face turn that takes 5 minutes. His agent is a woman with a qipao, who talks in heavily ADR stereotypically Chinese broken English.
The prison is yet another Umbrella secret lab, deep in some USSR underwater lab, beneath hundreds of meters of ice. Resources were not a problem, on that location they built nearly perfect recreations of Shibuya, Times Square, the Red Square, a Moscow subway station, the Bundestag, and a random suburbia environment.
Their logistics acumen is off the charts, no wonder they are the largest corporation ever. To populate the scenarios, they even have an automated cloning machine that keeps churning out clones of main characters.
Anyway, there’s a strike team for exfiltration, but they need to reach them first. Continuous fight scenes ensues, until some people need to sacrifice themselves for the main characters to survive. The entire film takes two hours of “real time”, so this is a very fast paced stroll.
After endless fight scenes, most new characters are dead, but not the kid. Jill Valentine is good again, Wesker is bad again, inviting Alice to his HQ to stab them in the neck. Wesker’s headquarters is actually the White House, and hordes and hordes of zombies are surrounding it, like Helm’s Deep. Alice was de-infected at the beginning, now she is infected again for the powers. It’s confusing to keep track.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.