Movie Details:
Title - Extinction
Series – Resident Evil #3
Director – Russell Mulcahy
Release – 2007
Rating – R
Time – 1hr 34min
My Thoughts:
This was my least favorite of the movies so far, and if memory serves, of the entire 6 movie franchise.
Firstly, Alice now has superpowers. Yeah, they are “psychic” powers, but it amounts to the same thing. She’s not just a kickbutt heroine any more and I really didn’t like that change. One example of this was when she meets up with the convoy and saves them all from undead crows. She uses her jedi mind powers to burn up the entire sky full of crows.
Then there is a scene near the end where some superzombies are transported to where Alice and the convoy are (Las Vegas) to kill everyone and capture Alice. It is one shipping container, but by the end of the fight scene, I counted over 50 superzombies. They kept coming out of the container like clowns out of a clown car. The numbers were simply impossible.
My final complaint is the big boss at the end. The Big Boss Fight for each of the RE movies doesn’t tend towards the long and drawn out and while I’ve been ok with that, this time I just wanted more. I don’t know why, but this Tyrant felt like he should have had more time as the Tyrant and less time building up to him becoming the Tyrant. It didn’t help that he had to share screen time with the Chairman of Umbrella Corporation.
Now, what I did like. I LOVED that almost the entire movie took place during daylight hours. I could actually see everything going on. I loved how the opening mimicked the first opening, so there was that slight sliver of “did I get the wrong movie?” feeling. It started us as viewers on the back foot and that was great. While I complained about various things above, they did provide for a lot of intense action scenes and that is what Resident Evil movies are all about.
The music was pretty good too. We got back to the hive music, which just represents Resident Evil to me.
I also watched the commentary track for the movie. It was wicked weird though. There were 3 guys talking about it, but it was obvious there were two different commentaries going on at once. Two guys were talking to each other while the other guy was simply monologuing the entire time. It was so obvious, and like I said, weird, that it really threw me out from listening to what they were actually saying. Kind of a waste of a commentary track if you ask me.
A decent addition to the franchise, but like I said at the beginning, my least favorite.
Synopsis from Wikipedia:
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A cloned Alice wakes up in a mansion, wanders through its halls, and is forced to escape several security traps. However, she is eventually killed by a bounding mine hidden on the floor. Her body is dumped into a pit filled with dozens of other Alice clones, representing the failed results of the Umbrella Corporation's ongoing Project Alice.
Five years after Umbrella's attempts to cover up the contamination of Raccoon City,[a] the T-virus has spread around the world, causing ecological destruction to all life. The real Alice wanders the wasteland and, after fighting off marauders, discovers information in an abandoned notebook referring to a supposedly uninfected area in Alaska.
Simultaneously, a convoy of survivors led by Claire Redfield and Raccoon City survivors Carlos Oliveira and L.J. Wade travels across the country in search of supplies and safe harbor. While searching a motel, L.J. is bitten by a zombie. Fearing the harsh fate that awaits him, he chooses not to tell the other survivors about the injury. The next morning, the convoy is attacked by a murderous flock of infected crows. With the team nearly overwhelmed, Alice appears and destroys the remaining crows with her newfound telekinesis, though she falls unconscious. Awaking shortly thereafter, Alice is introduced to Claire and tells her about the notebook, convincing her to take the convoy to Alaska.
Isaacs' attempts to domesticate the infected lead to creating a new zombie breed. Albert Wesker's security officer, Captain Alexander Slater, reports on Isaacs' disregard for Umbrella regulations. Wesker tasks Slater with watching Isaacs, telling him to kill the scientist if he disobeys orders again. Tracing an energy pattern sent out by Alice's telekinesis, Umbrella triangulates her location. Desperate to reclaim Alice to achieve his goals, Dr. Isaacs sends his new zombies to ambush the convoy against Wesker's specific orders. During the attack, most of the convoy is killed, and L.J. succumbs to his infection, biting Carlos before he kills him. Umbrella tries to shut Alice down remotely, but she breaks free from Umbrella's programming and continues to fight. She finds Isaacs at the scene, and he is bitten as he flees via helicopter. Alice and a girl from Claire's convoy named K-mart use Isaacs' computer to track the helicopter's flight path, leading them to Umbrella's underground facility.
As the convoy arrives at the Umbrella Facility, Carlos, dying from his bite, sets out to sacrifice himself, giving some goodbyes to the convoy, including Alice. Carlos takes a tanker truck with dynamite to destroy the zombie horde blocking the entrance to the Umbrella Facility. The dynamite explodes, killing him. Alice and Claire get everyone else onto a helicopter to get them to safety, but Alice stays behind.
Entering the underground facility, Alice meets a holograph of the Red Queen's "sister" AI, the White Queen. She informs Alice that her blood can cure the T-virus, defends the Red Queen's prior actions, and reveals what happened to Dr. Isaacs. On her way to the lab's lower levels, Alice encounters one of her clones, which awakens but appears to die from shock soon after. Alice discovers Isaacs/Tyrant, defeating him after leading him to the replica of The Hive's laser corridor featured in the film's opening. Just as Alice is about to meet the same fate, the system is deactivated by the clone, who is still alive.
Later in Tokyo, Wesker informs his fellow Umbrella executives that the North American facility has been lost. Alice appears during the meeting, declaring that she and her "friends" (the other clones) are coming for him.
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