orkers in the high-tech, supersecret Umbrella Corp. are about to end their business day in the Hive. But someone has broken into a top-secret lab and smashed a vial of blue liquid, unleashing an unknown threat into the air.
Someone else is watching everything on the corporation's computerized security cameras. And that someone has taken steps to make sure that whatever has been unleashed doesn't make it out of the Hive. Elevators filled with workers suddenly stop mid-shaft. Alarms sound. Glassed-in laboratories suddenly lock down. Water begins to fill rooms, with no escape. Workers scream in a panic as a deadly gas hisses from ceiling vents. Then, just as suddenly, everything is quiet.
Alice (Jovovich) awakes with a start on the floor of a marble bathroom. Her memory has been wiped clean. Dressing, she finds herself in an ornate mansion. A note greets her: "Today all your dreams come true." It's not her handwriting. A photo shows Alice with a man at a wedding. Her husband?
Before she can recall who she is, black-clad commandos burst through windows, securing Alice and another man, Matt (Mabius), who claims to be a police officer. The commandos include Rain (Rodriguez), a tough-as-nails ex-SEAL. The commandos explain that Alice is a security operative who was assigned to guard the mansion, which is the entrance to the underground Hive. Something has happened, which resulted in her memory loss. And the commandos believe that the Hive's supercomputer, the Red Queen, has attempted to murder everyone in it. Their mission: to enter the Hive and shut down the Red Queen.
Underground, aboard the train to the Hive, the commandos find another civilian: Spence (James Purefoy), the man from Alice's photograph. He also has no memory of what has happened.
Once in the Hive, the commandos discover that everything is quiet—and everyone appears to be dead or missing. A disastrous attempt to access the Red Queen's central core results in the horrific deaths of some of the commando team. But once the Red Queen has been shut down, the team realizes that they are in even bigger trouble: the dead, it seems, are not resting quietly in the Hive.
A game but deadly diversion
Based on the hugely popular Capcom video game series of the same name, Resident Evil aims to give veteran gamers and neophytes alike a taste of the game's signature chills while offering an original story of its own, designed as a prequel to the first game. Gamers will recognize elements from the games, including the mansion, the zombie dogs and the hideous Licker from Resident Evil 2.
But the movie stands on its own, though it unearths zombie-movie tropes and resurrects a trapped-in-a-box plot overly familiar to viewers of movies from Aliens to Cube. The film is most effective in the beginning, when writer/director Anderson unfolds his mystery with taut suspense and stylish images. There are echoes of Hitchcock's Psycho in a shot in which Alice awakes, naked, in a shower. There are allusions to Lewis Carroll: The main computer is called the Red Queen; the commandos access the underground Hive through a door behind a mirror; the scientists have been testing something on white rabbits. Anderson has also achieved some originality in the look and feel of things, and the Hive—shot in and under the city of Berlin—is as creepy a setting for bad science as the colony on LV-426.
Such cleverness, however, goes only so far. Once the main story kicks in, the movie devolves into a series of haunted-house cliches, machine-gun fusillades against phalanxes of the undead and narrow escapes through dingy passageways. Given the armies of the dead roaming the hallways, why do characters in these kinds of movies always wander off on their own?
Resident Evil doesn't take itself too seriously, though, offering a few good jokes, a few nice scares and buckets of theatrically unpleasant gore. But characterizations are minimal to non-existent, and it's difficult until the end to distinguish among the various commandos or their civilian charges, with the exception of the charismatic Rodriguez. Jovovich is winsome and fetching in her red miniskirt, but wholly implausible as a seasoned assassin. There's also a plot involving memory loss, sabotage and betrayals, but it is of little consequence once the zombies begin chomping on the visitors.
