Boffo Evil

It’s jaw-dropping that the Resident Evil film franchise continues to perform better than those based on games with massive worldwide fanbases (King of Fighters, Tekken, FarCry—all of which were released straight-to-DVD). Yet since Milla Jovovich's first bout with virally infected zombies in 2002, the Resident Evil flicks have routinely opened the weekend within the top two positions and made between $17-20 million. (The only film to ever take down the undead hordes on an opening weekend? Ice Age.) For better clarity, the first three have outperformed the following at the box office:

• Showtime, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Kissing Jessica Stein (2002)
• Cellular, Criminal, When Will I Be Loved (2004)
• Good Luck Chuck, Sydney White, The Jane Austen Book Club, Into The Wild, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Sea of Dreams, The Last Winter (2007)

With each release, the franchise fares better, churning out huge profits for eight weeks at a time; only 2007's Resident Evil Extinction was pulled on its sixth week, having already made $49 million (of note: none of the films were screened in advance for critics.) On the cusp of another weekend being ruled by quadrilogy maker Resident Evil: Afterlife—now in 3D!—why are these silly B-movies such a success?

First things first: let's consider the triumphant career of Paul W.S. Anderson to be a happy accident. A British director who scored a controversial hit with 1994's Shopping—whose stars would become tabloid fodder (Jude Law, Sienna Miller)—Anderson thereafter fell into the uncharted territory of video game adaptations.

The mid-'90s were a simpler time, when the Mortal Kombat fad hit an all-time high. Anderson's movie based on that bloody fighting game took cues from Enter the Dragon and Bloodsport, and featured frenetic violence the likes of which faded-out VHS covers of Fist of the North Star only taunted in promising: exploding heads, flying blood, fireballs, etc. The coin-op's sensationalism was then delivered with a cast of C-tier actors held afloat with B-film demagogues Christopher Lambert and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and ruled movie theaters for the rest of the summer 1995. Anderson turned down the instant promise of a sequel in lieu of Event Horizon and Soldier, both cult-ish successes that couldn't dominate the pre-teen market like Kombat (hell, most audiences weren't even aware the latter was a "side-quel" to Blade Runner by that film's screenwriter, David Peoples, who nicked it—like most sci-fi stories big on themselves—from Harlan Ellison). It marked another important shift in Anderson's oeuvre as his first film to play to the fanboys, with references to characters being trained with the Colonial Marines’ weapons from Aliens.

Around that time, Capcom released the first Resident Evil game, capitalizing on a newly defined "survival horror" that served as the antithesis to popular first-person shooters or adventure games in which players could beat the shit out of any creature with the right weapon. Until this point in gaming culture, companies demanded franchise characters; Nintendo had Mario, Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog and Sony was desperate to make a bandicoot be its symbol for family fun. Capcom's counter-programming (as it were) was a dark, mature game splattered with pixelated blood and implications that characters don't get out alive.

By the time the third Evil game was announced, Capcom looked to zombie-flick godfather George A. Romero himself to helm what was sure to be a hit adaptation—and whom better? After all, Romero directed the game's Japanese commercials—and yes, note the late Brad Renfro as main character Leon S. Kennedy:

But this wasn't the angry, sociopolitical Romero who made Night of the Living Dead. Romero's attempt at a film was more in the goofy vein of his Land of the Dead, faithful to the original game but with a romantic coupling between its leads. Capcom wasn't thrilled with the undead melodrama and fired Romero. Anderson was brought on in 2000 and immediately did away with key roles. As he told Shivers Magazine (not online but gloriously republished by a number of sites): "There was no point in using the Jill Valentine character from the first Resident Evil game, as the fans would know she wasn't going to be killed because she pops up in the later games. The suspense dynamic of who is going to live, who is going to die and what people's allegiances are, was only going to work with new characters."

Hence the inclusion of "Alice" (Jovovich), an original character who has never appeared or been referenced in the game's universe. Resident Evil was launched on a familiar title and a premise that only loosely followed the first game. Jovovich became an ass-kicking tentpole hero, evolving throughout the series into such an unstoppable force that it became the grand joke of Resident Evil: Extinction: all attempts to clone Alice have only resulted in piles of dead copycats who couldn't measure up to the original. Have we mentioned that, by this second sequel, she's psychic and can blow shit up with her mind because, uh... Hey, did you know the Afterlife is in 3-D? Good! Attention diverted!

To date, Anderson has written and produced all four films, but only directed the first and last; the middle entries were helmed by Alexander Witt and Russell Mulcahy, respectively. Each has only the faintest traces of the source material that you could—and should!—view as something related only in trademark. They're almost like fan-fiction with an original Mary Sue (or omnipotent) character introduced purely to interact with the game's equally deified characters, such as Alice going mano-a-mano with the hulking Nemesis in Apocalypse or Tyrant in Extinction. In the Capcom universe, these beasts are deadly bosses causing hours of thumb cramping for frustrated gamers; in Anderson's universe, they're mere cameos for Jovovich to quickly dispatch.

It's for good reason: these aren't video games nor should they be considered "video game films." Here, no one cares who Chris Redfield or Leon S. Kennedy are—they're supporting players who can be freely killed off because they're second fiddle to multiplying Milla Jovoviches. Anderson still offers some red meat for observant fans, like the game's zombie Dobermans, who have become a reoccurring icon since the first film.

But maybe this is too much analysis for what amounts to running around and blowing up zombies. Anderson must know that if he treated the story concept as a mirror of the in-game universe—which has shifted from zombies to viruses to parasites that explode into The Thing-like monsters—that it would result in an (even more) incoherent mess. Audiences demand simplicity in their headshots; just ask those who paid to see Machete. The nature of a video game is to immerse oneself into a world, building a character so as to conquer that world: experience is gained, better weapons are acquired, challenges are unlocked. For a film to function, we have to submit with no two-way interaction to a story projected in front of us. Anderson hit the nail on the head when he argued why a character from the game can’t be the focus of a film: there's no threat, no danger. We know how it will end.

That's an argument you could give any work adapted for the screen, but more important for the gamer crowd who get a chance to see their favorite 2D textures and 3D-shaded heroes emerge into flesh to blow a decaying fiend away or stop their sinister ex-partner from destroying Generic City's town hall. Anderson gets the idea of fan service right, and it just so happens his version involves his wife, a sprinkling of references from a years-old game and, now more than ever, 3D!!! Look at the bright side, it's still a hell of a lot better than Super Mario Brothers.



Posted by ahillis at September 10, 2010 9:36 AM