TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
'Resident Evil: The Final Chapter' ends franchise with 'claustrophobic horror'
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
I
n continuity with its previous film, Resident Evil: Retribution, dauntless soldier Alice (Milla Jovovich) is humanity’s last hope to survive against the zombie apocalypse and to stop the Umbrella Corporation’s scheme to annihilate the remaining survivors for the purposes of “cleansing the Earth.”
Directed by Paul WS Anderson (Pompeii, Resident Evil: Retribution), the sixth installment of the video game film franchise, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, concludes the entire film series, but this does not excuse Alice from having to confront the hellish, most absurd ordeals. Deprived of her superhuman powers, Alice teams up with old friends, played by Ali Larter, Ruby Rose, William Levy and more, to return to The Hive in Racoon City, where she battles the Umbrella Corporation and hordes of the undead, transmuted into monsters and biological weapons.
There is nothing more gratifying than a fearless, female lead for a zombie-action movie, like Alice. Yet as the plot advances from a dark to a slightly lighter course, such type of progression found in the plot does not occur to Alice. She fails to encounter a special character development that could have revealed innermost human struggles, to show a greater degree of dynamism in her emotions that the audience could connect with. From the time she fought a mutant emerging from the wrecked Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool at the start of the film, until the pivotal moment when she held the bottled cure to the zombie-spawning T-Virus, her steadfast stance remains oddly untinged by the increasingly nightmarish situation -- there is simply a lack of emotional depth to her.
(Read also: Start your year with these 10 January movies)
No criticism is intended to Jovovich’s acting, but it is toward the role that she has been playing for years: a one-dimensional, relentless heroine who acts like a stock character when she is not supposed to.
However, one gripping factor of the film is how it fills every gap with thrilling gore in Anderson’s style of “claustrophobic horror”. Every time Alice successfully kills an undead creature, there seems to always be a crafty process, though sometimes illogical, which eventually can appear to be entertaining to the audience. For instance, while being chased by a massive, flying mutant, there just happens to be ready-to-use grenades in the backseat of a truck that happens to still have gas, which just happens to be parked in the uninhabited, dystopian grounds of Washington DC. Nonetheless, since every scene were action-packed, it has a drawing power to keep eyes glued to the screen - the story, although a bit simplistic, is exciting to follow through.
Resident The Evil: Final Chapter runs for a total of 140 minutes, and is rated R for sequences of violence throughout. (mra/kes)
