RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION
**1/2
As much as the Resident Evil films have been a guilty pleasure of mine since that great elevator death in the original, I’d never played the games and had no idea until tonight how little those films had to do with their source material. At tonight’s premiere of Resident Evil: Degeneration, the crowd (most of whom had been invited by Capcom) cheered as characters Claire and Leon stepped into frame - at last, their beloved game had come to life.
An animated Japanese production that will receive the straight-to-video treatment in the US - it will be available on DVD and Blu-ray on December 30th - Resident Evil: Degeneration is an entertaining and surprisingly inventive entry in a growing list of video game adaptations, making up for what it lacks in characterization and pacing with some of the most striking visuals I’ve seen in recent animation. It’s amazing how far that art form has come, not just in technology but in artistic ingenuity - this film doesn’t try to dazzle by creating vast worlds to boggle the imagination, but rather by presenting with painstaking detail our own world in animated form. Most of the action takes place in an airport, and it’s a testament to its craft that before the zombies make their entrance and the action starts, I was already marveling at the incredibly realized airplanes, the familiar line of taxis waiting outside, the shine of the freshly polished airport floor, the sound of the speakers overhead announcing an arrival. Such realism is always a tremendous asset when all hell breaks loose - when the mind is committed, it can ask itself questions like, what the hell would I do if zombies took over LAX?
This tremendous animation unfortunately leads me to my biggest criticism - with all the liberty and possibility that animation provides, why the hell wasn’t this movie gorier? It’s a zombie film after all - imagine the possibilities. One could come up with - and get away with - quite a wad of colorful carnage in anime. Sadly, Resident Evil: Degeneration mysteriously shies away from such violence. My first guess? - this must be PG-13. But nope, its IMDB page shows an R rating. Choosing to otherwise linger on the languid faces of its stoic heroes or sweep majestically around impressive sets such as the aforementioned airport and climactic multi-level science lab, the film constantly cuts away from the violence, showing nothing more than a zombie advancing on a victim before the familiar “blood spray on the floor below” cut, or the “witnesses shrieking in terror” cut. Towards the end, when a horrific zombie ubermonster takes on a whole SWAT team, victims are hurled to and fro without so much as a close-up on a severed limb or sound of the crunching of teeth on bone - this could have been a fantastic bloodbath. I felt the film forgot that it’s a zombie film as well as a video game adaptation. And I’m one who appreciates an obscene amount of gore in his zombie films. Lost opportunity here, when animation could have provided inventive levels of gore that even the classics of Fulci couldn’t touch.
Like most zombie movies, there is a great deal of familiarity here - a group of people, some innocent and some not-so-innocent, get stuck together in an enclosed setting as hordes of flesh-hungry undead invade. The zombies even make their first appearance in a scene recalling Nightmare City, perhaps the greatest unsung zombie flick. Credit Resident Evil: Degeneration for rising above the cliches of its genre by providing a good plot, some clever twists, a fair amount of humor, and just enough of the fear all corporations! sociopolitical chatter to keep things interesting without getting too preachy.
One doesn’t go to a film based on a video game expecting The Bicycle Thief - movies like this are for shoveling down popcorn with the occasional rousing cheer. Resident Evil: Degeneration achieves what it sets out to do nicely, and should be a cult hit amongst gamer and anime crowds alike. It may have found itself embraced by horror junkies as well, if again not for its surprisingly tame moments of violence.
One Comment on “RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION”
Comment:
November 19th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I really enjoyed it, and found great humor in their added moments of pathos/bathos. I am not quite sure that’s what they intended, but what the Hell. Overall, I had a great time watching and even jumped a few times. I don’t even take issue with the lack of gore, though I see your point! My complaints are few: There were a couple of scenes that they could have edited out; who needed a full minute of that one girl’s hair waving in the wind badly? Particularly when the rest of the animation is SO DAMNED GOOD?!?!? And, why did the little Indian girl speak with an Hispanic accent all of a sudden? Hmm. And, finally, would it have KILLED them to synch the speech to mouth movements? I mean….they put in TIME AND MONEY to get that all to look at fantastic as it did. Why leave out that wee detail? Still….I’m very glad I saw this beauty on the big screen!!