Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.
I’d love to say lots of nice things about Resident Evil: Extinction, but that’s not the world that we live in. As much as I am personally and oddly fascinated by the career of Paul W.S. Anderson and as much as I will apologize for a lot of his films, I can’t bring myself to say a lot nice about this film, which was written and produced by him. There is a sense to this film that the story isn’t really that important, and even the franchise doesn’t matter much. Instead, the entire point of the film is about spectacle for its own sake.
I promise I’m going to go into some detail on this, but I want to set a sort of general idea of what I’m talking about first. Resident Evil: Extinction is a collection of scenes that are connected to each other, and there is a semblance of plot here, but very little sense of the larger story or the reality of the world that the film wants to exist in. It’s an odd little snapshot that exists for its own sake without a sense of anything larger. Things happen because they would “look cool” on screen. Stupid decisions are made for the sake of spectacle with no sense of reality, even the reality projected by the film series.
