Five years have passed since the original outbreak of the T-Virus, and much of the world’s population has been infected. The water supply is rapidly dwindling, and nearly every form of animal life has been overrun with zombies. Alice (Milla Jovovich) is now on her own, travelling around the American west. She eventually encounters a ragtag group of survivors led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter). Claire and her charges are looking for a refuge, and Alice believes she can lead them to one. But in order to succeed they’ll have to evade both zombies and scientists working for the Umbrella Corporation, who want to capture Alice and use her unique blood as part of a deadly experiment.

CRITIQUE

I make no bones about my love of big, dumb action flicks, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to defend Resident Evil: Extinction. This movie isn’t dumb, it’s flat-out stupid. Call it a cash grab, call it a poor excuse to extend the series into a trilogy, or call it nothing more than a means for writer/producer Paul W. Anderson to keep his significant other employed (you’d think he’d look at what happened to Luc Besson and take it as a warning); doesn’t matter, because you’ll be correct whichever you choose.

At best these movies have been mindless, disposable entertainment (the first one), and at worst they’ve been pointless, callous, inept attempts to exploit a brand name for a few bucks (the second one). Now comes this bottom-of-the-barrel third (and hopefully final) entry, which actually manages to sink to a new low. I’m no fan of the works of Paul W. Anderson, but I’m also not one of his detractors. Some people think he’s second to only Uwe Boll as modern cinema’s greatest monster, but I don’t fall into that camp. Anderson is nothing more than a junk dealer, but unlike Boll, it’s obvious Anderson has actually seen a couple of movies in his day. But given what he foists on us here, I’m beginning to understand why he’s the object of so much scorn.

Anderson’s script plays like it were originally intended to be a treatment for a video game; the non-action sequences feel like cut scenes, existing simply to break up the action for a minute or two, and the set-pieces are structured like levels of a video game, with each one escalating in intensity until the final challenge must be overcome. Hell, the climactic showdown is nothing more than a meeting between the heroine and what amounts to a boss creature, and it’s an incredibly lame one at that. The boss takes the form of a mutated man, a scientist who inexplicably becomes the victim of his own twisted experiments. That’s the entire development of that particular plotline. He’s human up until the story needs to climax, at which point he, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever, becomes a monster.

Then again, Anderson wouldn’t know logical plot development if it crawled in through his ear and laid eggs in his brain. Alice now has telekinetic powers, which you’d think this would be a major development, but Anderson uses it as nothing more than an out for one scene. Alice realizes she has these powers, uses them once, and then never bothers to call on them again. Seems to me powers like that could come in handy when you’re single-handedly trying to fight off a horde of zombies, but what do I know? Why use your mind to wipe them out when you can simply shoot at them with a gun that holds less than twenty rounds?

The stuff with the satellite doesn’t make sense, just as it doesn’t make sense for the other characters not to realize one of their comrades is turning into a zombie (the pasty skin and erratic behavior are big clues, but no one seems to notice). There’s also little continuity between this movie and the first sequel. There’s no real explanation as to why Alice is on her own at the beginning, or of what happened to the people she was traveling with at the end of Apocalypse. Maybe Anderson realized everyone’s spent the last three years trying to forget that movie, which meant he could, too.  

Anderson isn’t solely to blame for the movie’s many problems. The rest of the blame rests on the shoulders of Russell Mulcahy, the movie’s director. Mulcahy is best known as the director of Highlander, a movie whose appeal I still don’t understand. Mulcahy was one of the earliest music video directors to make the transition to helming big-screen fare, but his twenty years at it hasn’t taught him anything.

He still can’t tell a story (not that he actually has one here to tell), he favors flashy camerawork and erratic kinetics over composition, and his editing style makes coherence a virtual impossibility. You’d think a brainless action flick would at least feature decent action, but that isn’t the case here. The action doesn’t make sense in any given shot, much less from shot to shot. It’s also poorly staged. You only have to see the early sequence in the radio station to realize no one behind the camera knew what they were doing.

No one will ever accuse these movies of being original. The first one borrowed heavily from George Romero’s Dead series (among other things), and Apocalypse was essentially a retread of the original with some bits from Escape from New York thrown in for good measure. Here Anderson swipes heavily from the Mad Max series. There are so many cribs from George Miller’s magnum opus it’s ridiculous. The story opens with lone warrior Alice roaming the desert wasteland in search of fuel. She eventually meets a band of survivors, who tool around in a convoy that includes a school bus (driven by a guy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bruce Spence) and a semi fitted out with a cowcatcher and flamethrower. Sound familiar? Wait, it gets better.

Next, Alice has discovered an old journal that points the way to a paradise untouched by the virus. And the plan to reach said paradise involves the commandeering of an aircraft just big enough to carry the final number of survivors (who disappear from the movie without a trace). Shameless, huh? But Anderson doesn’t stop there. He also borrows heavily from Alien Resurrection (four movies in that franchise and he decides to steal from the worst one).

Furthermore, there’s a whole subplot that involves attempts by Umbrella scientists to clone Alice in hopes of using her DNA to create a zombie fighting force. Anderson never really bothers to take this anywhere, instead using it to pad out the plot and offer up a deus ex machina ending. This plotline isn’t totally a wash, though, as it does provide the movie with its single memorable image. The climax features a shot of row upon row of Alice clones, each one suspended naked in an incubation bubble. That many naked Milla’s certainly isn’t a bad thing, and could provide the starting point for an excellent third sequel, but only if Anderson makes them out to be nymphomaniacs and has them form a kick squad.

THE VIDEO

The 2.40:1/1080p transfer is marred by a somewhat soft appearance, which is likely a consequence of the original photography. Contrast has been jacked up a bit, and colors have been bleached in order to give the setting a bleak, blown-out look, and this tends to slightly curtail the level of depth and detail in the image. Colors are almost always muted, but this is another stylistic choice. Black levels are very strong; in fact, the darker scenes, which received the least post-production tweaking, often come off best.

THE AUDIO

Sony continues to mix up its preferred audio choices by supplying this disc with a lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track (available in both English and French). The sound mix is incredibly aggressive. The surrounds are put to near-constant use, and the bass pushes very deep. The audio is also incredibly loud, which leads me to my one complaint.

As is sometimes the case with movies like this, there’s a disparity between the volume of the action sequences and the rest of the movie. There were a couple of times I had to crank it down whenever the action kicked in. I’m sure this was the filmmakers’ intent, but I still find the practice annoying (as do the people who live next to me).

Portuguese and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks are also included. English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The commentary by director Russell Mulcahy, writer Paul W. Anderson, and producer Jeremy Bolt largely covers the technical side of the shoot and the filmmakers’ desire to set this movie apart from its predecessors. Given that I found the movie to be a failure on pretty much every level, I didn’t find it the least bit interesting.  

Nine deleted scenes (10 minutes) are also included. As you can tell by the aggregate running time, there’s not much here. But there are a couple more shots of Ali Larter from a very flattering angle, and that’s better than nothing. 

Beyond Raccoon City: Unearthing Resident Evil: Extinction (30 minutes) is a four-part making-of doc (you can also watch the four chapters as individual featurettes). Topics covered include preproduction, the actual shoot, the make-up effects for the zombies, and the miniature effects used in the Las Vegas sequences.   

Under The Umbrella: Picture-in-Picture is similar to the In-Movie Experience option pioneered by Warner, or the U-Control feature found on some Universal HD discs. It runs concurrently with the movie, with material such as interviews, storyboards, and behind-the-scenes footage appearing in a smaller window. Some of the footage has been recycled from the above making-of doc, and much of the material is pretty useless. This is the first such PiP material to appear on a Sony disc, so perhaps they’re still working the kinks out of it. (Be aware you’ll need a Profile 1.1 compatible Blu-ray player--such as a PS3--in order to view this material.)

FINAL THOUGHT