Resident Evil Extinction
Third movie in the series, second (and last) to not have Paul W.S. Anderson in the director's chair. Where Apocalypse saw an inexperienced Alexander Witt take that position, Extinction is directed by Russell Mulcahy, director of Highlander, among others, a much more experienced craftsman which, with all due respect to Witt, shows. Extinction also marks the point where the RE film series clearly divorces itself from the video game series.
At this point in time the games themselves started a stylistic pivot, leaving behind the survival horror of the first 3 games and starting to transistion into a period of action oriented over the shoulder shooters that lasted for 3 (numbered) games. The movies, meanwhile, had their own change of direction.
Extinction is where the RE film series went postapocalyptic. The zombie virus has reached, to quote Albert Wesker's video game self, complete global saturation. Society has collapsed, and so has the environment. The remnants of the Umbrella Corporation, its managers, scientists and enforcers, continue their scheming from the safety of deep underground bunkers, preparing for the day they'll inherit the earth. Up on the surface, the last of humanity is struggling for survival.
Extinction leaves behind the previous two movies stylistic influences from the likes of Carpenter and Cameron to embrace an aesthethic primarily inspired by George Miller's Road Warrior, along with some unexpected but welcome nods to to the kind of southern fried, sun bleached exploitation cinema that the video games would eventually pay tribute to in their own way with RE7.
Alice find herself travelling the wasteland, pursued by Umbrella goons under the leadership of of megalomaniacal scientist Dr. Isaac's and the film universes version of Albert Wesker, both of them up to all sorts of sinister plans, one of which involves clones of Alice, another one of which evolves reversing the effects of the zombie virus just enough to use the undead as slave labour.
Stylistically and thematically, this is where this series starts to find its feet. The fact that it uses its zombie apocalypse as a thinly veiled metaphor for environmental collapse (It's kind of quaint how it never makes an effort to explain how a zombie virus caused world wide desertification, it happens so that the metaphor works) where most of humanity is either dead or fighting for survival, while safety is only afforded to the industrial complex responsible for it in the first place seems unusually forward thinking for an action blockbuster of the mid 00's.
Meanwhile, Mulcahy successfully manages to find a plethora of strong iconography in this new, Mad Max inspired setup. Alice, travelling the desert on a motorbike in a brown dustcoat and slaying monsters both living and (un) dead with a pair of Kukris is, frankly, exactly my aesthethic. And hey, the action also looks good again. Where Witt's action sequences suffered from poor camera work and editing, Mulcahy manages to make his the most impressive in the series yet. One early on, involving a flock of mutated crows, another one later in a ruined Las Vegas and yet another one dealing with the climactic assault on an Umbrella facility are extremely well executed.
The plot, as it is, deals with Alice helping a Caravan (headed by Claire Redfield, who serves as this movies deutagonist) get to a safe haven in Alaska and evading Umbrella's troops. It moves forward very incremently, which would probably annoy, if I were actually watching those movies in the theatre, with years of time between them, rather than pretty much treating them as a television series, which they lend themselves to, on account of their fairly short runtimes.
Extinction is the first movie in the series I would genuinely call good. It expands the series scope, liberates it from its source material, fleshes out what it actually brings to the table on its own and, most importantly, looks pretty good doing it. The inclusion of video game characters still feels like a token, and wholly unnecessary, gesture and the final encounter is brought down by some spotty CGI but I still got a lot of enjoyment out of it. The start of the second third of this sextology presents a fairly major step up in quality.
Look at the other horses right at that moment and the scene after.
