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Slow News - Not everyone hates the Resident Evil movies (at least not ALL of them)

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  • #31
    Oh I forgot about the long conversation they also have about going out clubbing in Germany and releated events. I swear that's about 15-20 minutes of the runtime. :p

    I suspect they listened to whoever said it was a better idea because most people want that who are going to listen. "Average viewers" won't listen to a commentary and bearly even check most special features, but if they like the film they will. And if you like the film enough to watch with the commentary you're likely listening to it to reinforce/learn about this film you love. You're not going to get that from a commentary where the cast spend most of the movie talking about random crap mostly not even relevant and over the top of the director and producer until they more or less quit even bothering. Thankfully I have heard worse at least, but it's definitely on the list of bad ones.

    If I was to pick one of the series to listen to the commentary on it would be Afterlife. It is, by how his film making goes, Anderson's worst film. He is lost on how to join scenes together without his graphic maps/overlays/wide aerial shots these days, and he struggled to make the middle of the film even work. And so I'd love to hear what he'd talk about via my own morbid curiosity. Of course if Milla was on the track I wouldn't get any insight into that, she'd probably spend most of the time talking about picking on Wentworth Miller for drinking Soy Milk or something.
    Last edited by Rombie; 05-16-2014, 09:22 PM.

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    • #32
      Do you mean Afterlife is the worst RE movie or the worst one Anderson directed? I believe he wrote all of them. I guess that's a big reason why Mortal Kombat is a much better movie than the REs - he didn't write that.

      Anyway, I like Afterlife and Retribution because... Well, RE1 was just a straight movie, for better or worse. Apocalypse and Extinction kinda continued the tradition only it was in the vain of something like Code Veronica ie. extremely dumb and silly but all expected to be taken very seriously.

      With Afterlife and Retribution, you can just tell Paul was like "fuck it, I know why people come to these movies now." And so he just embraced the insanity if you will and gave up all pretense of trying to tell a serious narrative and just went with whatever he thought was cool. President Wesker? Why not. Shit, that scene had tons of people talking about the movie and the next oen so obviously it worked.

      It's just that, I liked RE1 on its own, a sa kinda decent action/horror flick, and I like RE4 and 5 because they are so intentionally campy. And I like Apocalypse because of the soundtrack.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by Becky's Butt View Post
        Do you mean Afterlife is the worst RE movie or the worst one Anderson directed?
        Both.

        Fundamentally I agree with you.... he was like 'fuck it' and went completely weird in the last couple, but it wasn't like it hadn't been on that path since the second film he wrote (you are correct, he wrote them all, and MK was better for not being written by him).

        Anderson's issue by Afterlife was to write himself into a corner that was horribly difficult to top or get out of. Each of the films up till that point work on cliffhanger setup of spectacle, and that's still true of the last couple as well. In the first it's actually one of the highlights, a city wide event, but it's by the end of Extinction it was absurd. You've made the world into a dust bowl, killed off a main character/love interest, overpowered Alice's character alone to the point of absurdity (I love it when people call her a Mary-Sue, it's soooo accurate) and then gave her a pile of clones and another bad guy.

        The first 10-20 minutes of Afterlife work to try and remove almost all of these, which shows only how stupid it was to write himself into that in the first place. The next bit also has her following the already absurd Alaska thing (which in Extinction was stupid anyway, because she latches on to the idea instantly with no proof that it was even true and not the wishes of some delusional gas attendant) only for it not really to be true (big surprise) and her to have to head back south to LA, which is somehow not a desert. Not to mention how convoluted the whole plot had become anyway (I swear Alice recapping the whole thing in the 5th film is about 4-5 minutes long).

        The issue when it comes to film making, and not writing, that Anderson gets so wrong is that everything he does right in theory he then butchers. Some examples - they shot the film in a dual Phantom camera rig, top of the line at the time for digital film making, set on a Pace/Cameron setup - which had just been created and used to great effect in Avatar, then proceeds to undermine the point of doing so by using every cliche 3D gimmick in the book, especially shooting poorly framed and designed fights, and often putting in absurdly inappropriate slow motion just because Phantom's can shoot at Higher Frame Rates. He shoots massive set pieces with possibly great ideas (a Prison is a great zombie film location because it says a lot about society) but squanders them on the bad plot and/or improper scope (his Prison somehow becomes a central attacking point for everything in the city for no reason at all).

        He makes use of the changing canon from the games for his villians but fails to explain anything as to why this is (zombie faces split open for no reason and an Executioner turns up and everyone goes wha? - neither were explained until the next film, and still not particularly well). And as I mentioned, his idea for making the film go back to basics in cinema language is undercut what things he'd been using as cheats but an inability to be able to create any proper pace, scene connection, and the like means the film is clunky and badly put together. I mean, some examples - how Alice survived the plane crash especially with no powers is not explained (compare that to the Helicopter crash in the second with her t-virus powers which is well followed), or when the characters escape the prison he uses a horrible slow fade to white because there was no way to connect that escape with having to make it through a zombie filled city to the waterfront. Horrible. The problem is he can't cheat like he usually does with maps and the like, and the budget didn't allow for some city event, but he's not creative enough to come up with some other ideas.

        The middle in the prison itself lags as it tries to continue his trend of repetition but no growth. I'm yet to understand if its referential to the usual "underground lab" in the earlier games or just lazy script (Hive in 1, walled in city in 2, underground desert lab in 3, prison in 4, the whole underground complex in 5). But the prison, it's events, and pace is the slowest and worst of the lot and the action scenes are so hideous in a franchise that already has some absurd events in it... I remember sitting there going, it's gotten this bad? How did we even get to four films?

        Somehow the 5th actually fixed that. You know what too... the 5th was almost a redemption on it. Yeah he owned the absurdness, but didn't fuck up the technical, especially when back to cheating with overlays. The action was much better shot, choreographed, and overall thought-out even if the plot is still nonsense. It honestly might be an actual guilty pleasure possibly. I mean it's still mediocre/absurd for a film in general, but at least it him running at full steam. I guess once he'd gotten the issues out of the way from the 3rd film in the 4th he could try and rope it back in a bit. And when I say a bit I mean, not really.... but it's Anderson so yeah.

        The 5th is batshit wacky. Like when Umbrella's plan is to sell BOW to everyone and not be surprised when the world is screwed over... but completely undermines the earlier films, because clearly the Raccoon incident didn't do all this, and even more hilariously - Umbrella has the ability to make a massive underground facility and blank perfect clones on mass production added just so Anderson could bring back earlier cast members (that also begs the question was the team sent in the first film actually not really already clones?) but fails to notice bigger events like the clones or underground facilities probably had better profitable means than uncontrollable BOW. It's certainly a Paul W.S. Anderson script with those sorts of things in it.
        Last edited by Rombie; 05-17-2014, 03:22 AM.

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        • #34
          The absurdity and inefficiency of BOWS is an RE tradition though. Umbrella would make a ton more money with just the T-Virus and its amazing applications as a weapon of terror. It surely beats how impractical it was to spend all that time and effort and cost on creating Tyrants or whatever else when a few glorified SWAT officers and civilians can take them out with basic weaponry.


          Frankly Extinction is always going to be the movie I hate most. I agree with that the slow mo abuse was horrendous in Afterlife but nothing - NOTHING - in all the writing of the movies pisses me off as the beginning of Extinction. Not only does it TOTALLY ignore the cliffhanger ending of Apocalypse, the whole "let's make this Mad Max" thing irritates the hell out of me. I get the T-Virus spreading and destroying the world. That's cool and is honestly the most probable scenario of a T-Virus outbreak given modern transportation. But "the water dried up"? Excuse me? It's like, how do you even save Earth and the human race at that point without flying off to a new planet?

          Retribution was good but I think i liked Afterlife slightly more because you can tell that Anderson REALLY likes Aliens.
          Apocalypse: Angela is Newt.
          Extinction: K-Mart is Newt
          Retribution: The little deaf girl is Newt-est of them all.

          1 and 4 really lack that whole shoehorned motherly instinct thing and I like it.

          Also Jumbo Lickers who are apparently weightless given how easily the car hit them. (CGI and all that. I don't care if CGI looks good or bad....it just isn't realistic when you hit something that massive and it's like you were tearing through paper)

          I'm honestly no film expert or even vaguely technically informed. I just watch movies and decide if I enjoyed myself or not. I still find RE1 enjoyable. Does that movie have huge technical failings too?

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          • #35
            On a technical level, I think the first film is actually good. It made good use of practical sets that existed in the real world, for it's budget it's effects were fine, and ignoring the blatant rips/homage to Aliens and Cube among others, it's an okay action movie. For a zombie movie it lacks much zombie action in some ways, the killable cast drop off a bit to quickly for a film of it's type, but it was an okay idea I guess. I mean in hindsight anyway. When it was released, most people disliked it... now for most people if they had to pick one that was "good" it's usually the first. It's funny too because I remember people thinking Milla running up the wall and kicking the dog in the face was OTT and ripoff in 2002... and look where the franchise went from there! Hindsight huh?

            I guess there is a difference between the absurd level of BOW in the games to the way Anderson draws his concept in the fifth film though, simply because - well at least until RE6 - Umbrella hadn't been screwing major sections of the planet - and the concept in the games seems possibly sustainable business/terrorism in the case of the game universe, till the most recent one. In the films it's seemingly about profit (if you believe Wesker) and yet the plan to sell each other the same weapons to fight is clearly not providing any future for which that continued profit line to ever exist (Umbrella is forced underground, literally, in order to fix the problem). Unlike clones. Maybe I should give Anderson credit for the absurdity of RE6 then? ;)

            Don't get me wrong, Extinction is terrible. As you would note from above I mentioned most of the setup problems Afterlife deals with come entirely from that script. But the thing that elevate it for me above Afterlife is simply that Afterlife is made as a film with surprisingly little technical ability with a horribly crap plot. Extinction at least was a workable action title. As was Apocalypse. Russell Mulcahy and Alexander Witt can both actually shoot legible action scenes, and did so better than Anderson could at that point so both got a better pass to me (the pacing for Extinction isn't much better, but that's probably Anderson's scripting again). Yeah, there is a major disconnect between 2 and 3 and the dirt bowl thing makes zero sense. But to me that still is more palatable than Afterlife's plot which, I might add, if you removed the entire prison sequence from the series would make no change in the story at all.

            Shit what are we doing? We know these films all suck in general, so why does it matter? haha
            Last edited by Rombie; 05-17-2014, 05:27 AM.

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