If you’ve read my reviews of Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse, you know that I'm not a huge fan of the series. In fact, I find them to be pretty terrible. At best, they’re mediocre shoot-‘em-ups with some decent effects work. Most of the time, their weak grasp of filmmaking craft and lackluster storytelling techniques make them pretty painful to sit through. So I was not looking forward to Resident Evil: Extinction, the third installment in the film series based on the popular series of video games about a zombie infestation.
The plot takes place a few years after the previous installment, and finds Earth in a state that pretty much meets the definition of “post-apocalyptic” to the letter. The entire country is now a desert wasteland. It seems the vast majority of human beings have become ravenous zombies, and the remaining survivors have banded together into groups of outlaws and scavengers. Ass-kicking heroine Alice (Milla Jovovich) has gone into exile, convinced her status as a fugitive from the Umbrella Corporation will put others at risk. Also, as hinted at in the second film, she’s now a fully-formed Jedi warrior with telekinetic powers. Don’t ask questions, just go along with it!
Meanwhile, Umbrella scientist Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) is holed away in a secret underground lab – without one of which it wouldn’t be a Resident Evil film – attempting to synthesize a cure for the virus using clones of Alice that he created from samples of her blood. And by “cure,” I mean it will turn them into docile simpletons that Umbrella can use as slave labor. Oh, those evil corporations, always looking at the bottom line, even when the world’s gone to hell. How cunning and sinister! Somehow his efforts lead to the creation of crimson-headed Super Zombies that are even more aggressive than before. With results like that, I think somebody needs to go back to mad scientist school.
