Rating of
3/4
Curb the base instincts, and we have a labor force
Topher - wrote on 11/13/07
Borrowing from the motifs of Romero's Living Dead series, (but perhaps not the spirit), director Russel Mulcahy explores the fringes of humanity in this third installment of the Resident Evil Franchise.
Milla Jovovich, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, provides the perfect visual focal point: she is not so much a character as she is an action. Something so much more than human, it is less than human. Something cinematic.
Which is not the same thing as dramatic. Her fate is as predestinated as the levels of a video game -- a particularly good one, full of nasty surprises -- but mostly linear.
Nevertheless, the film somehow manages to encapsulate the chilling economics of the digital mega-conglomerate. Alice, like the player in the video game, is too valuable to be destroyed -- and as such, she is a stand in for the movie goer. The business of both is the consumption of zombies, and the supply is endless. In fact, this seems to be her sole purpose, her only drive. The more she fights the mega-conglomerate that created her, (Umbrella/Sony), the more she consumes. And this, of course, is what they want.
Romero would smile.
