#34 - Resident Evil (2002)
(dir. Paul W.S. Anderson)
At a top-secret research lab, a dangerous virus escapes into the air supply and kills everyone in the building. Meanwhile, Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up in a large mansion with severe amnesia. A group of soldiers storm in and inform her that she and they both work for the Umbrella Corporation, a mega-corp with a giant secret facility called "the Hive" located under the nearby Raccoon City. The soldiers lead Alice down into the Hive, where they must disable the rogue AI that is locking it down.
This is a good video game adaptation because, for better or worse, it feels like a game, down to the goofy CGI map that reminds us where the characters are within the facility. I'm sure this bears very little resemblance to the source material, but most game plots (especially of the era) are dumb as hell, so that doesn't matter much to me. The story doesn't always make sense and the characters are shallow, but it looks cool (in a very early-2000s kind of way) and there is a lot of fun action. This gif sums it up pretty well (for the full effect, imagine Marilyn Manson playing over it):
Resident Evil has a ton of problems and I hesitate to call it "good", but it's shooting for "dumb fun" and it succeeds in that.
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