DVD Review – Resident Evil: Degeneration
A decade or so ago, finding anime and other Asian media used to be hard. Fans had to settle for whatever mediocre dubs made it onto television, mail order from small suppliers like AnimEigo, lurk Usenet for fansub contacts or scrounge for low-quality videotape dubs at fan conventions. Today, though, one can pick up DVDs of the new Astro Boy series or Godzilla: Final Wars at the local grocery store, and for a mere ten bucks, yet. That’s how I found the subject of this review: Resident Evil: Degeneration, an all-CGI feature film of the venerable survival horror franchise. (For that matter, not long ago I got DVDs of Dario Argento’s giallo Deep Red and Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere, Indiana, of all places!)
Resident Evil: Degeneration is the film longtime fans of the survival horror classic have been waiting for. It’s essentially a feature-length CGI cutscene, but still offers plenty of fun for fans of the franchise. Co-produced by game creator Capcom and Sony Home Entertainment (Japan), the film features two popular characters from the series, Claire Redfield and Leon S. Kennedy, and the English-language voice actors who portray them in the games. It’s also, naturally enough, much more faithful to the source material than the live-action movie series.
The film’s opening chapter feels like the lead-up to the Left4Dead game campaign that’s set in the ruins of a zombie-plagued airport. A newscast brings the viewer up to speed: It’s been seven years since the zombie outbreak portrayed in the video game Resident Evil and its sequel. Since that time, the sinister Umbrella corporation that created the “T-virus” responsible for the zombie plague has dissolved. In its wake, others – from bioterrorists to dictators to ambitious pharmaceutical corporations – have sought to learn its secrets. Meanwhile, an organization called TerraSave seeks to fight the spread of bioweapons like the T-virus.
Resident Evil series heroine Claire Redfield (Alyson Court) belongs to the latter organization. She arrives at the airport in Harvardville, where a drug company called WilPharma has recently opened a state-of-the-art research facility. Allegations of bioweapons research and a visit by the influential Senator Davis have led to demonstrations, including some pranksters wearing zombie masks.
Unfortunately, one of the shambling moaners proves to be an all-too-real zombie, and one bloody attack on the local police chief later, panic breaks out in the terminal. Of course, anyone bitten by the undead soon rises to join the horde. To make matters worse, a passenger jet that had been carrying a similarly stricken passenger crashes into the terminal and disgorges its own deadly cargo. (One particularly good shot depicts the zombies falling from the wrecked fuselage to the floor some distance below, only to get up and begin shambling around.)
Authorities – who were expecting trouble from the protestors, if not an outbreak of mutant zombies – quickly move to seal off the airport terminal and bring in a SWAT team. Troopers Angela Miller (Laura Bailey) and Greg Glenn are joined by an expert dispatched by the President – Leon S. Kennedy (Paul Mercier). Meanwhile, Claire has holed up in the airport’s VIP lounge with a couple of other survivors, including the irascible Senator Davis. (Court and Mercier supply the voices of Claire and Leon in the English-language editions of Resident Evil Code: Veronica and, in the latter case, Resident Evil 4.)
Leon and the two SWAT officers stage a rescue of Claire and her companions, then battle their way out of the infested airport. While the place is crawling with zombies, the terminal has more open space than was found in Resident Evil 2, so their escape is successful, if not without casualties. Once outside, the Senator introduces WilPharma researcher Frederic Downing and announces that the company had not been working on the T-virus but rather a vaccine for it. Right on the heels of this revelation comes the news that Angela’s brother Chris (Roger Craig Smith) – whose wife and child were killed in Raccoon City – is suspected in the airport attack.
True to the Resident Evil tradition, at this point Our Heroes go their separate ways. Leon and Angela head to Chris’ residence – which the viewer has already seen the troubled man torch – while Claire accepts an invitation to tea at the WilPharma facility from the suave Britisher Frederic. Naturally, something goes badly wrong at the lab, and Claire, Leon and Angela find themselves fighting for survival against a horde of zombies and a Tyrant reborn from the even more potent G-virus.
Naturally, the film makes a number of references to the earlier games. For example, at one point Claire looks around for a weapon in the VIP lounge, finding only an umbrella in the same red-and-white color scheme as the Umbrella Corporation logo. The scene in which she and Leon meet is also lifted from the CGI opening to Resident Evil 2: Claire is about to be attacked from behind, when Leon shouts “Get down!” and blows the menacing zombie away.
Other Resident Evil touchstones include some mediocre voice acting, treachery and betrayal, and the least surprising surprise villain ever, especially given the film’s obvious intended audience of genre fans. There’s also a cool flashback to Leon and Claire in their Resident Evil 2 costumes.
While the first several games strove to create an air of creeping dread, Resident Evil: Degeneration takes the more direct route as a full-on action/horror flick. The action is satisfying, with Leon In particular looking cool as he blasts through the zombie horde with only a pistol, eschewing heavier weapons. Claire gets a moment or two of slow-mo glory herself, of course. While simple zombie shooting could have become repetitive, the filmmakers take a cue from the games in throwing enough curves to preserve an element of suspense (as well as a squad or two of hapless soldiers for the zombies to snack on without taking Our Heroes out of the movie prematurely).
The film faithfully creates the look and feel of the recent batch of entries in the Resident Evil game series. Sets and backgrounds boast impressive detail. The computer animation is decent but not overwhelming. And anyway, a certain veneer of cheapness is one of the hallmarks of the game, going all the way back to the silly live-action bookends and terrible English-language voice acting in the first Resident Evil game. After all, the games are clearly inspired by horror movies, and one reviewer went so far as to call the original game “the bad movie you play.”
The film is presented in widescreen format with an impressive set of language options: English, Portugese, Thai, French and Spanish, with subtitles in those languages and Korean and Chinese to boot. A major disappointment, though, is the lack of the original Japanese language track for which the character’s mouth movements were obviously synched. DVD extras include a making-of featurette, character profiles (enhanced with nifty movie clips and still image galleries), voice bloopers, a “faux Interview” with Leon (actually the motion-capture actor), trailers for the movie and a variety of horror film sequels and a preview of the Resident Evil 5 video game.
Resident Evil: Degeneration isn’t destined to be on anyone’s list of best movies or even best zombie movies, but it’s still better than the high-budget live-action flicks that bear the same name (not to mention any number of bargain-basement Italian gut-munchers). It’s also custom-designed – by the folks who should know – to appeal to fans of the games. And considering how excruciatingly dull a 90-minute cutscene could be, the filmmakers deserve kudos for pulling off such a modestly entertaining flick.
Resident Evil: Degeneration
Directed by: Makoto Kamiya
Starring: Alyson Court, Paul Mercier, Laura Bailey, Roger Craig Smith
Released by: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Related links:
Resident Evil: Degeneration IMDb entry
Resident Evil: Degeneration at Amazon.com
Resident Evil: Degeneration Wikipedia entry
Official Site
Second opinion at Final Girl
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