In the Shadow of the Valley Uncanny

Sometimes, Resident Evil confuses me.

I don't mean the story, of course. The story of any of the Resident Evil games is pretty simple, really. We are talking about a series of games based on George Romero's zombie movies (famously begun in Night of the Living Dead). There's not much plot to speak of. It's more of a premise, and the story is about the attempts of the various characters to survive (or not) given that premise. Not exactly fine art, you know? Not quite avant garde.

Yet somehow this series of games that is so clearly based inspired by, and full of homages to, Romero's body of work manages to make for some pretty awful movies.

I'll confess that I never saw more than the opening few minutes (not more than a half-hour, I'm sure) of the first American-made Resident Evil, but I didn't feel I needed to. It defied both the basic story (excuse me, "premise") of the games, and also the general feel of them. I stopped watching after that first half-hour because this seemed to have nothing to do with the games at all, aside from the name and the presence of zombies. Making a decent movie that was faithful to the spirit of the original games ought to have been easy, given its lineage, but apparently it wasn't easy enough.

So I haven't paid any attention to the movie series, and I certainly don't feel as though my life has been any poorer for it.

Then one day I saw a DVD on the shelf at Wal-Mart. Resident Evil: Degeneration. It looked like a CGI movie, and it had Leon Kennedy as the main character. Sure, it also had Claire Redfield from Resident Evil 2, but Leon was the one I was interested in. Not because he's a particularly deep or multi-layered character. He's not. But he is the hero of what is easily my favorite game in the series: Resident Evil 4. So I thought about it for a while, and I finally broke down and bought it last night. I felt the need for some mental junk food, and it was cheap. I figured, why not?

I have no real problem with bloodshed and violence. I don't really get into it the way I did when I was 13, and the best way to make anything better was to spill gallons of blood and have lots of explosions. It doesn't bother me, really, it just doesn't interest me much, either. So normally, I don't care much for horror movies.

Which is good, I guess, because Resident Evil: Degeneration isn't one.

What it is, then, gets sort of difficult to define. It's basically a generic ation movie, but with zombies. In that sense, it's faithful to the spirit of one of the games, at least: Resident Evil 4. Yes, I know Resident Evil 4 lacked zombies. Shut up.

There's no real horror in Degeneration, no real suspense. When the heroes walk down a corridor, guns at the ready, and all is quiet, you know that some zombies will be appearing shortly. It doesn't require you to have a good working knowledge of zombie movie structure. It's just logic. When the good guys have guns and are walking through dark, quiet hallways, something for them to shoot with those guns will be appearing presently.

But Degeneration goes further than this. It actively pulls the rug out from under the suspense early on, when Leon tells his comrades that the only way to kill the zombies is to shoot them in the head. Well, thanks, Leon. Now you've robbed us of that classic moment where people start shooting the zombies in the chest and limbs, and the zombies shrug it off and keep right on coming.

Maybe I should mention the plot, before we go too far.

The movie starts by explaining how Umbrella Corporation developed and accidentally released a virus that turned people into zombies, which caused an enormous scandal and required the U.S. Government to take care of the outbreak by launching a nuclear missile at Racoon City, where the outbreak occurred. Umbrella's stock bottomed out, the company collapsed, etc. Then a new company, called WilPharma, began working on the same viruses that Umbrella accidentally leaked. When WilPharma opens a new branch in Harvardville (not far from Racoon City, apparently), there is naturally protest. WilPharma's research into the T-virus (which is what causes the zombies) is also opposed by the organization TerraSave, which has been responsible for disseminating photos and footage of zombie outbreaks in India, where one of WilPharma's research centers is located.

One of TerraSave's members is Claire Redfield. She comes to Harvardville in advance of a Senator who is one of WilPharma's primary stockholders, and a spokesman for the company. For the remainder of this writing, I'll be referring to him as Senator Scumbag, because that's an apt description of his character, and also because I can't remember his name.

Anyway, the zombie outbreak begins early in the movie, at the airport not long after Senator Scumbag arrives. She, Scumbag and a handful of others are trapped in a room at the airport while the zombies run rampant. Eventually, the police S.R.T. (which stands for Special Response Team, or something similar) puts up a perimeter around the airport, and gets word that the White House is sending an operative.

The operative is Leon Kennedy, looking virtually unchanged from his appearance in Resident Evil 4. The only real differences are that he now wears a black jacket, and he looks more pissed off than he was before. He takes two S.R.T. members with him on his rescue mission into the airport, and escapes with a shocking minimum of casualties.

All the while, the zombies aren't so much menacing as they are gun fodder. They exist to be shot down and make the heroes look cool in the shooting. Then the plot thickens.

There was a moment about halfway through the movie that got my hopes up. After Leon rescues the airport crew (including Senator Scumbag, alas), WilPharma sends in a fleet of trucks with T-virus vaccines to administer to the victims, along with one of their ranking executives, named Frederick. Claire chews him out for a moment, demanding to know why WilPharma didn't send the vaccine in advance if they had it all this time, and Frederick calmly fires back that if not for TerraSave putting WilPharma in an adversarial position and screwing up their operations, they would have been able to send it in advance. Leon, with information straight from the White House, confirms this story.

For a moment, I thought this might be interesting after all. I couldn't think of a movie I'd ever seen that featured a generally benevolent corporation whose humanitarian efforts were hindered by a rabid protest organization. That might have been genuinely clever.

But no. That's not actually how it works out in the end with Degeneration, but I'll spare what few details remain. Suffice it to say that there is a typically Resident Evil unkillable monstrosity that menaces the characters at the end which must be beaten in an unorthodox way. There follows a series of escapes and some last-minute parkour by Leon (which was actually sort of fun to watch), and then it's more or less back to business as usual for the people of Harvardville, though of course there is a dark twist of the story at the very end (which is also very typical).

This entire movie looks like it was made with an Xbox 360: good, but still not terribly real. And it suffers from an ailment that afflicts many Japanese video game cutscenes, which is over-gesturing. Perhaps it's because the directors of these things fear (more or less rightly) that their CG doesn't have the necessary power to carry off all the communication that goes on by way of facial expression and natural body language, but there are several times characters make overly pronounced gesticulations in order to get the point across.

I think of this as Power Ranger Syndrome, because that's what the Power Rangers did when they were in uniform and talking (because their faces were obscured, you see). It sort of kills the immersion, because you realize pretty quickly that people do not make the sorts of gestures that some of the characters in this show make. Maybe Japanese people make that little arm-waving "whatever" gesture that the police captain makes toward the beginning, but nobody in America does that. And considering that this movie (like the games it is based on) is set in the American Midwest (the presence of mountains notwithstanding), you would think that the original makers would take things like that into consideration.

I'd like to take a minute to complain about the dialogue, also. It's pretty generic stuff, really, barely worth mentioning. Which is sort of the problem. The games got their reputation partly because of awful dialogue. The "Jill sandwich" and "Master of unlocking" lines have been a part of game-geek culture for a good long while now. I came into this expecting bad dialogue full of corny one-liners and stilted acting, and instead got dialogue built on a rock-solid foundation of generic mediocrity.

But what am I saying? This is Resident Evil, after all. Good, natural dialogue? Geographical accuracy? Cultural accuracy? Whatever am I going on about?

This is a movie about people shooting zombies and looking (more or less) cool doing it. It encourages you to turn your brain off. Practically requires it, really. And if you can manage that, you will be vaguely entertained. But it strikes me as an awfully low mark to shoot for, to be vaguely entertaining, and even then only to those who are actively trying not to think.