“Anyone with hair that long doesn’t have a life worth living.”
Watched Resident Evil: Degeneration. It’s a film full of slow-motion bullet tracking, stuff blowing up, needlessly dramatic emotional scenes and characters being unharmed after being punched across the room. Is it any surprise my dad considered it one of the best video game movie he’s seen so far?
Like any good Resident Evil story, my interpretation of it was like so: A load of convoluted balls. There’s like three corporations involved and there’s talk of spreading viruses and vaccines and all kinds of waffle, but personally, the only plot point I needed to comprehend was “that British guy is soooo evil. Like, seriously, just listen to him. How much more evil can he be? He could order a tray of scones and he’d sound like he’s sentencing a litter of puppies to death.” Aside from that, there’s zombies and people shoot them. Some people get killed by them in stupid manners. Then the zombies are forgotten about for the second half so it can rehash the final boss of Resident Evil 2 as the main threat. If you were expecting a sensible summary of the story, sorry folks! I’m only familiar with the story of the first game, and only because there’s no way you can possibly make it any dumber.
So, just like any video game, I don’t give a toss about the story. What I did care about was the atmosphere and the action, and man, discounting how comparatively mellow is it to a typical campaign of Left 4 Dead, I’d dare say it captures “video game” in movie format down to a T. It’s hard to accurately pinpoint and explain, no thanks to video games having numbed my ability to explain things efficiently to my internet audience (if any), but it’s really bleeding obvious when you sit down and watch it, even by the first ten minutes. It’s also a relief for a CGI film to actually be quite comfortable to watch – the likes of Beowulf and its freaky motion-captured shenanigans were seriously off-putting, and my latest escapades in Dead Rising have only reminded me of how wonky and drawn-out a lot of those movie scenes are.
On that subject, I was really expecting Frank West to just show up out of nowhere. I know they’re meant to be separate continuities, but seeing the dude in proper film-quality CGI would just be awesome, especially with his giant schnozz, and he’d certainly make a more intriguing protagonist than Leon, who’s been stripped of all his snarky dorkiness from Resident Evil 4 and turned into a boring superhero. For that matter, I know there’s some kind of Dead Rising media (is it a movie? Is it a series?), but I think a movie in the same style as Degeneration would rock pretty hard if done right. A mixture of following the story and Frank just goofing off. Heck, they could just rip off the by-the-numbers plot from the Land of the Lost movie, apply it to a zombie-apocalypse-in-a-mall scenario with the scientist replaced with a journalist and tada~!
Today’s doodle is a pelvic thrusting flamboyant robot drawn on request. I’ll leave it at that.
Today’s observation: I haven’t seen it in years, but I’ve just realised that Ms. Doubtfire actually had a story, and wasn’t just about Robin Williams wearing a dress and using a urinal. Took me long enough to realise.
