Resident Evil Apocalypse Movie Review – Back from the dead again!
Oh, hello, World Wide Web. I’m Decker Shado, the internet personality with the best hair. And welcome to week four of THE SUMMER OF MILLA JOVOVICH!!! And today, we will be continuing our look at the very unique movie series of Resident Evil with Resident Evil Apocalypse released two years after the first, Resident Evil Apocalypse is at least the first movie in the franchise where they knew what they were going for from the start. Written by Paul W.S. Anderson, he understood that this was going to be an official Resident Evil movie. The studio didn’t want it to
actually follow the story of the games, and it was going to star his wife, Milla Jovovich, as an unstoppable force of awesomeness. And because this was written as a Resident Evil movie from the get go, they could incorporate people, places and things from the games in the movie, even if not necessarily doing it very accurately. In any case, Resident Evil Apocalypse incorporates aspects of both Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis into its tale. Raccoon City has fallen and a dwindling few members of S.T.A.R.S. try to escape, both to show the world what the
evil umbrella corporation has done and to simply not die. This is a slightly harder by the fact that they are being pursued by a hulking monster, Nemesis.
last movie shit went tits up real fast. The T-virus got out, everyone turned to the zombies and only she managed to escape along with Matt. But then they got captured by umbrella hazmat dudes. “He’s mutating. I want him in the Nemesis program.” which might leave some of you wondering why this movie’s called Resident Evil Apocalypse instead of Resident Evil Nemesis. Well, the studio decided that the benefits of being associated with Resident Evil 3: Nemesis were outweighed by the risks of being associated with star Trek: Nemesis. “Take her to the Raccoon City facility and assemble the
team, we’re reopening the hive. I want to know what went on down there.” Uh, didn’t you already do that last movie? Wasn’t wasn’t the whole plot. That a team got together to open the hive and go down and find out what the hell went on. I mean, I know this movie is from the early 2000, and that was before iPhones were a thing, but cell phones still were. And the Internet Oh, well, the doors are sealed on their t virus research lab. And the two folks that got out were clearly attacked. One was mutating. No
way to know what happened unless you crack the hive open again. Oh, would you look at that? There’s t virus swarming all over the place. Also, CCTV was a thing. Radio communication. There were plenty of ways to let other people know what was going on. But we’ve got an apocalypse to happen. A resident evil apocalypse with no time to spare. Black SUV speeds through neighborhoods, collecting important umbrella personnel such as Dr. Ashford, played by Jared Harris and his daughter Angie, played by Sophie Vavasseur. For the record, the zombie outbreak hasn’t necessarily really happened yet, and
the movie never established this truck driver got bitten Resident Evil 2 truck driver style. So I’m just going to go ahead and assume that Raccoon City has the same quality of drivers as Texas, so the drivers are fucking dead, But Angie is still twitching. No time to check if she’s all right. We’ve got to move on to introducing more characters such as the perpetually badass Jill Valentine, played by Sienna Guillory, and the Comic Relief LJ, played by Mike Epps. “No, no, don’t shoot! don’t shot!” “I’m leaving town. I suggest you do the same.” Jill just
found the most cold blooded, badass way to tell everyone that her plan is to say Fuck it and leave. But back at the second secret umbrella lab in Raccoon City, Major Cain, played by Thomas Kretschmann, turns off the automatic sedatives being fed into Alice, resulting in the ending of the last movie. She wakes up. No one’s around, and when she goes out for some fresh air, she discovers that Raccoon City has been completely destroyed by a zombie apocalypse. Where is everyone? Well, they’re at the security checkpoints. Conveniently enough, Umbrella just so happened to build a
big fucking wall around the city that no one seemed to question before now. For ease of filming, we’re only to be using one of the security checkpoints. While that cuts down on sets, it does lead to some serious traffic congestion. This gets so bad they call for reinforcements. Don’t know what that’s supposed to help, but it does introduce us to Umbrella’s best buddies in uniform. Carlos, played by Oded Fehr and Nikolai, played by Zach Ward. Subjugating the public sounds fun, but they see a woman in trouble. So disobeying the direct order. Nikolai assists Carlos in
operation, literally swoop in to save the day shooting zombies left and right, all to save a random woman who was already bitten. “There’s no going back.” “No!” I understand the nihilism at that point, but you’ve got to remember you still have the T virus. All this means is you’re going to wake up as a zombie with all their limbs broken. Now, nothing to do but head back to the bridge, which is where we find Jill Valentine, meeting up with her old long time friend Peyton, played by Razaaq Adoti, who doesn’t necessarily exist in the games.
He’s he’s kind of written as a new character, but in the role of an established character, he’s sort of the stand in for Brad Vickers. So spoiler alert, I guess as a zombie bites, Peyton and Major Cain makes the command decision to seal Raccoon City off from the outside world. Now to just let the crowd know that if they don’t leave now, they’re going to fucking shoot em. “Do it.” “The use of live ammunition has been authorized.” And to really hear the point home, they handed the mic to the guy with a voice. Live ammunition
has been authorized. Prepare to have your assholes perforated so they must run away from the gunfire and towards the zombies. end of the gunfire as Carlos and Nikolai are there fighting the undead horde. for now, as Cain orders a full retreat of all umbrella groups operating within the city. But the evacuation hits a snag when Dr. Ashford says he will not leave without his daughter. They’re like, Dude, she’s probably dead, but he will not give up hope. With that, they let him stay behind. But when he attempts to log into [email protected], his authorization has been
revoked. Now, well, that’s nothing that [email protected]\hackerman can’t fix which he uses to log into his own account. Really not worried about leaving a digital trail here. And he thinks through the city’s camera feeds the segways nicely over to Alice walking into a convenient gun and clothing store. sadly not Kendo’s and suiting up before collapsing. That’s because, as it turns out, she has been given the T virus in a flashback. “Up the dosage. Just do it.” A lot of the T virus sucks, man. She spent all last movie avoiding getting bitten only for it to just
get injected to her off screen. As Ashford continues to search, though, we move over to the church where Jill and Peyton are limping along, along with a stranger. The reporter Terri, played by Sandrine Holt, heading inside to find cover. They immediately meet Mackenzie, played by Geoffrey Pounsett. He’s a bit on edge, but they calm him down fast enough. But weird noises are about so going to investigate. Jill discovers there a zombie in the back tied up and being fed. by the priest played by Sean Austin-Olsen. “Just leave us alone.” Though, in the extended cut, they
first meet the priest when they just walk into the church and he comes out talking about the end times fire and brimstone and all that. And then they hear the weird noise and Peyton takes them off and Jill goes to investigate. And then the priest teleports into the back. Anyway, hearing the gunfire, Terri decides to say Fuck it and leave. But they are surrounded by zombies. The power of Christ locks the door, but they soon realize that they are not safe inside either as there are lickers about. So Mackenzie runs off! Oh, gee. Miscellaneous character
is all alone, surrounded by monsters. I wonder what’s going to happen to him. He winds up with only slightly more screen time than the priest. Oh well, free gun! Now that the miscellaneous characters are all fucking dead, Jill can return to the pews with the important group. Her friends and, of course, the three Lickers. Yeah. Still regular lickers. Despite what they said in the last movie. “Now that it has fed on fresh DNA, it will mutate.” It’s kind of weird. I’m not used to monsters in sequels actually ending up with less powers, but it’s still
more than enough to take these three out. Peyton has no ammo and Jill can take on all three. But you know who can. Milla Jovovich launching her motorcycle at them. She backflips off it and shoots the gas tank, killing one licker and wasting a perfectly good motorcycle, blasting away with her dual fully automatic submachine guns. She somehow managed to get out of a civilian gun shop. She smashes another with a cross, and then it’s time for the shotgun coup de gras. What’s that, Jill? I got blood on you. Sorry. While you were standing there dumbfounded,
I was kicking ass. Elsewhere, Carlos’ squad is still pinned down. But what’s this? Yuri, played by Stefen Hayes, has been bitten by zombie Ben Moody. And it’s bad, but it doesn’t mean he’s going to be left behind by Carlos or his best bud, Nikolai. They don’t care if he’s been bitten. They don’t think that’s a reason to shoot them. Unlike Alice over here was like, Hey, Peyton couldn’t help but notice that limp It’d be better to put you down now before we get too attatched. Jill, however, refuses to allow this. “If it comes to that,
I’ll take care of it myself.” Yeah. After Alice showed up, we got to give her something to do in this movie. Otherwise, she’s going to be standing around there like, Wow, Alice, that was really amazing. I wish I could do awesome things like you. Alice They’re like, Oh, of course you can, Jill You can like and subscribe that helps a lot more than people think. It’s a good thing they came to an agreement here in any case, because suddenly zombies come up from the graveyard how fucking how they’re literally avoiding the virus by being underground
and in sealed coffins and being far too long dead to reanimate. Whatever. They run from the long dead. While elsewhere, Major Cain capitalizes on this crisis to activate the Nemesis program, which he seems to have done after a completely forgetting about his orders for the umbrella troops to evacuate. As that is what Carlos, Yuri and Nikolai have been attempting following an umbrella helicopter, expecting a ride home, but instead finding big damn empty weapon cases. “We don’t need weapons. We need evacuation.” “These weren’t meant for us.” How do you know that? Maybe this is your evacuation
plan. Get that big damn wall around the city. Rocket, jump over it. But Yuri bites Carlos, so they have to put him down, Much like the Texas Ranger up here is dropping zombies from the comfort of the roof of the building. This is also where LJ has wound up after wandering around Raccoon City. “Shit! Maybe I was safer outside.” God damn, those police reflexes be kicking in. This is just the cop’s way of saying hi. They do offer him a weapon, but he’s got that covered. But before long, Nemesis arrives and we find out just
what kind of a threat he is. Shrugging off bullets like nothing and blowing their sniper the fuck up. Major Cain orders Nemesis to eliminate all the S.T.A.R.S. officers. And so he does, blowing everyone away with a minigun. Except, of course, for the comic relief, as he wasn’t a specified target. So what kind of a threat is Nemesis? He’s pretty much the Terminator meets Predator. But what is Alice? Jill wonders, as Alice is clearly so much more bad ass then Jill is. Alice explains. That Umbrella did something to her in their secret labs but oh, darn
it, the phones keep ringing. Unable to avoid the noise any longer, they answer and find out that it’s none other than Dr. Ashford doing his best to keep this plot moving. He can offer them a way out if they save his daughter also in case they don’t feel like it. Maybe the fact that the city is going to be nuked at sunrise will put some pep in their step. “Bullshit! No fucking way Would they get away with that! It’d be all over the fucking news.” “Cover up.” “Cover up’s already prepared. Meltdown at the nuclear power
plant.” And nuclear meltdowns are clearly not the same thing as nuclear weapons, though, when as a clear violation of well known facts ever stopped a movie or a news story. So they head out at once, perhaps a bit too quickly as Peyton is gunned down by Nemesis, knowing her squishy piddly ass Jill Valentine is Alice tells her to run and Alice moves to distract the monster confusing resident evil for her Super Mario. She super jumps away from his rockets fleeing into a building and slipping down the garbage chute, causing Nemesis to lose track of her.
My God, Alice has been an AI this whole time. Well, just straighten that out. No one will notice. Jill’s not doing much better trying to hotwire a car, but these tasks are so difficult for her, it’s made even harder when Zombie Peyton attacks, and she has to kill him. On the bright side, this opens up a spot in her friend circle that LJ is more than happy to fill. Thus, when they reach Angie’s school, “We’re going to have to split up to search this place.” Jill decides she’s going to get another one of them killed
to see if she can make another friend real fast, handing Terri a gun and telling her to just wing it. She heads upstairs in search of Angie Ashford, but when she does find a little girl in the school, it turns out to be a little girl zombie who summons a whole crap ton of other child zombies that just popped out of nowhere surrounding Terri and killing her, turning her demise into a found footage horror film, a fate worse than death. Hearing her cries of pain, Jill heads in to see if she’s all right. It seems
all the zombie kids have conveniently left the movie, leaving behind a convenient Angie. And yes, this is the same room as Jill grabs the camcorder while she’s at it. On their way out. They try to cut through the cafeteria, but it’s full of zombies, Jill says that’s no problem, but it’s full of zombie dogs. Things look bad until Nikolai swoops in to save the day. Seems he and Carlos got a call from Angie’s father as well. will he be Jill’s new friend? “At your service.” “Come on!” “Wait, Angie!” “Save the girl! I’ve got this bitch.”
No, but through it all, Nikolai has a heart of gold and will sacrifice himself so that Jill can bring Angie to safety. The biggest joke in this whole review, for those of you out there unfamiliar with the games, Nikolai was not a good guy. Here, his final good deed is making sure the dogs are fed, which means the dogs are still after Jill and Angie. Not to worry. Jill has a plan. They’re in the kitchen so she can turn off all the gas stoves. And when they run for their lives, she can light them ablaze.
But oh, darn it, Her match went out not to worry for Alice is here flicking a convenient cigaret super cool style and grabbing an emergency thermal blanket, blowing the dogs up and keeping the others from getting so much singed hair that out of the way they can hammer home a few plot points. Hey, Angie’s infected with the t-virus also. So is Alice. But the movie specific way it works for them is it means they kind of psychically know this about each other. Angie’s lunchbox is chock full of antidote. Convenient as Carlos is here too and
he did just so happen to get bit earlier. “Should have told me. You got bit. motherfucker. I’m hanging with you and shit.” I’m sorry. Nikolai was a self-sacrificing hero. Carlos is the asshole in zombie apocalypse who keeps it secret that he’s been bitten. Point is, they got the kid. So Doctor Astrid tells them how to escape. A handy-dandy helicopter, though the helicopter crew isn’t expecting them, so they might need a little negotiation to get on board. However, Dr. Ashford’s control is cut because Major Cain knew what he was doing the entire time. “You really thought
I didn’t know?” Hacking into his own account made it kind of easy to figure out. But if you knew, that means you were letting him. So why? I mean, we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise, but it would help to have a little motivation. Either way, they’ve got a helicopter waiting for them. So knocking out a sniper and grabbing a cable, Alice runs the fuck down the building and beats the crap out of everyone below. But before they can hijack the helicopter, Major Cain hijacks the scene, capturing Carlos, Jill, LJ, Dr. Ashford, Angie and giving Alice
an ultimatum. You see, she’s a lot more like a nemesis than you think. He’s built for brute strength, and she’s more of a lean agility and intelligence. Cain would like to know which one is better. So orders Alice to fight Nemesis to the death, or he will kill one of these innocent people. “What makes you think I care?” Really? Shoot Dr. Ashford, the one who is the most valuable to the Umbrella corporation and the least important to Alice. I mean you could have shot literally anyone else and would’ve been better for you and worse for
her. But maybe that’s the keep the thought of him doing that as an incentive to get her to do battle with Nemesis. and it’s been true this whole time, but I really need to bring it up here. The action in this movie, well, the editing ain’t all that great. It’s got a lot of quick cuts which aren’t terrible for long range encounters. But in melee combat, it’s a massive jumbled mess as we could see coming. While Nemesis is a formidable opponent, Alice is Milla Jovovich and manages to beat him in combat. But realizing that inside
there somewhere is still Matt from the last movie, she refuses to kill him. This means when Cain decides to clean up the rest of the characters with an order to Nemesis, Surprise! Nemesis kills Cain’s men instead. That’s right kids, Nemesis is a surprise good guy. The rest of the characters break out of their binds and begin kicking umbrella ass. They don’t give up so easy, though. And when they bring in the big guns, the final heroic act of Nemesis, powered by love and friendship, is to sacrifice himself to save the people. And it likely goes
without saying. But for those of you unfamiliar with the video game, Nemesis was not a good guy. Very not a good guy. Anyway, the heroes get to the chopper. Major Cain gets tossed back into Raccoon City and zombie Ashford takes a bite out of him, and the heroes run as fast as they can from the biggest explosion they can. Still cutting it close as the helicopter crashes into the mountains, but when Umbrella goes to investigate, only one body is found. Alice’s body. Well, the point is they got the footage to the world so everyone knows
how evil umbrella really is. Except for one problem. “New evidence now, which discredits earlier reports” – “Is nothing more than a sick joke” “Fake videotape now totally discredited” – “Nothing more than an elaborate hoax playing on the very real tragedy which overwhelmed Raccoon City earlier this week.” It seems despite the mountains of verifiable video evidence, everyone has and can see the news just says it’s all fake. It’s a bunch of hooey. You don’t have to worry your pretty little heads over that. Nothing to see here. And they did something like that in the movie. Oh,
after that, we’re going to need something to cheer us up. How about a butt-ass naked Milla Jovovich! Looky here. Alice is back, cloned or healed in a pod. I’m not sure which, but whatever it is, she’s got serious memory problems. “My name is Alice. And I remember everything.” Scratch that, make it past tense. So she beata the crap out of the science types and escapes only to be held up by mountains of umbrella goons. But what’s this? Carlos, Jill and L.J. have all shown up posing as umbrella operatives. Not a big stretch for Carlos to
officially handle the Alice situation. However, there’s still the security checkpoint on the way out. “Let them go.” But they actually want her to escape and just let her beat the crap out of a bunch of their men just to keep up appearances. Because now she is the Predeterminator and umbrella has control ish. I’d think maybe. Well, whatever the fuck it is, the end. After about eight endings in a row, I hope one of them worked out for you anyway, that was Resident Evil Apocalypse. Are we sure they knew what they were doing before they started
this one? On the one hand, it’s much more clear that this was intended as a resident Evil movie from the start, with several characters from the games that find themselves in similar situations. On the other, there’s more than a little artistic license at work here, filling the shoes of established characters with brand new faces and turning characters established as pure evil into self-sacrificing heroes. On the plus side, the Lickers are just regular Lickers again, and they didn’t mess with the monster lore too badly. Having the T virus give Alice super powers is odd, but hell
Milla was going to be doing backflips and snapping the necks of hordes of monsters anyway, at least they gave an in movie excuse for it. As far as the movie handled Jill, it was all right. Sienna did a phenomenal job on the performance and looked great in the role. Looking like Resident Evil 3 Jill Valentine more than the Resident Evil 3 remake did. She does have a tendency to get overshadowed by Alice, though, which isn’t great for fans of the video game series and speaking of which, as a fan of the games, I have to
say that the way they handled Nemesis was weird, turning him into a cross between the Terminator and a Predator and oh yeah, not having him transform into a bigger monster in Act three when that is actually part of the power set in the games while the acting was fine. And I did appreciate the practical effects. the shots were they didn’t add moisture to the suit, really made it come off looking like an incredibly elaborate Halloween costume. At the end of the day, Resident Evil Apocalypse is a decent follow up to the original film. It’s more
resident evil than the first, while also being less. But at the very least, it’s a lot of fun to watch coming in at Three explosions out of five. Though it was also the last one I bothered to see in theaters. Thank you all for watching. I have been Decker Shado And remember, if your battle hardened friend leads you to a zombie horde and then tells you that you need to split up, they were never your friend. “GTA, motherfucker! Haha! Oh, yeah. Ten points!” Okay, I have to have reviewed something else related to video games. Detective
Pikachu. Yes, I did, actually review that it’s right there. Or you can check out whatever random crap YouTube recommends which might actually be more related to resident evil. Now that I think about it.
