Film Friday: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

I enjoyed Resident Evil. It was unoriginal, but it was a competent mix of action and horror. Resident Evil: Apocalypse, not so much. Resident Evil: Extinction stank. Now we have Resident Evil: Afterplot. This turd is so bad I wasn’t even going to review it, except I feel I’m entitled to a little payback and I want to highlight what's wrong with modern Hollywood bad guys.

** spoiler alert **

Resident Evil: Afterplot was incompetently directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Anderson is so bland and lifeless as a director that he makes Michael Bay look like Fellini by comparison. In fact, looking over his resume reveals a list of films I truly wanted to like but whose pointlessness and sheer direct-by-numbers blandness was so high I left cursing Anderson’s name: Mortal Combat, Death Race, Alien v. Predator, Pandorum. This guy could ruin a birthday cake. Retire Paul.

Resident Evil: Afterlife is no different. Everything about it is bad:

● There is no plot. The film is a series of fight scenes held together with travel montages between the fights.

● The fight scenes are shamelessly ripped off from The Matrix. And I don’t mean a piece here and there, I mean all of it. Even the costumes are stolen.

● The fight scenes are done in annoying slow motion to highlight how close the actors come to getting a CGI knife or CGI bullet in the face. It's CGI Paul! We're not stupid and we're not impressed.

● The wire fighting is beyond ridiculous. Apparently, if you clap your hands together like an idiot, these characters can fly like Tinkerbell. And they can survive a ten story fall by rolling onto a knee when they hit.

● The music is stolen from various metal bands.

● It’s a given that heroes and heroines will still look well-kempt in Hollywood land despite an apocalypse. But it’s never this glaring. Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter and Spencer Locke apparently found the only beauty salon to survive the apocalypse and spend most of their days there. Indeed, commercials for hair and makeup products don’t have models this highly made up and coiffed. This is beyond the point of just noticeable and reaches the level of distracting.

● The evil Hollywood producer character is such a tired and unrealistic stereotype he’s insulting, but not as insulting as the racist stereotype that is his gay Asian houseboy. I guess you can still hate Asians in Hollywood?

● Why fly over the ruined Hollywood sign? So the retarded audience will recognize the city? Keep clapping people, this plane needs more pixie dust to stay aloft!

● There are a million practical questions too, like where does Jovovich get the fuel for an around the world flight? Why are the oceans and trees back when the planet turned to dust in the last film? Where do they get all the ammo? They fire more bullets than the A-Team, yet never run out of bullets except when it’s time for a dramatic slow motion weapon change. They don’t even seem to be carrying extra ammo. Why are a million dead trying to get into the prison in which they are hiding, but once the gate is down only small groups actually enter? Is there a hidden turnstile? Do they need tickets? Why does the speed with which the dead move keep change depending on the needs of the scene? Why the hell is everybody whispering?

But what really kills me is the bad guy. In fact, he’s a classic example of everything that’s wrong with modern Hollywood villains.

For starters, his motivation makes no sense. Corporations seek profits. There is no profit in making the world end. There just isn’t. And at one point, we’re told the bad guys are continuing research into the T-virus to make it more effective. Why? What purpose could that serve? Who do they think is going to buy this new weapon?

Eventually, the main bad guy does get a motivation that makes sense. He becomes infected, so he wants to capture humans to drink their DNA. BUT why would the corporation support him in that? He’s got teams of security personnel running around kidnapping and killing the humans that are left, but what security guy in his right mind would follow these orders? “Gee, the boss says to kill everyone, I guess I should do that?” This is ridiculous.

What’s more, during the opening in Japan, he does the clichiést of clichéy things and shoots his second in command when the man warns that blowing up the base will kill the loyal troops still defending the base. And nobody blinks. Give me a break. Even cultists aren’t going to follow this reckless, bloodthirsty monster -- and these guys aren’t cultists, they’re just corporate employees. "Well, I don't like his shoot the employees policy, but he did promise that 5% raise?!"

Further, this guy is all kinds of lame masquerading as cool. He whispers everything and spends his days sitting in a chair in a white room with nothing to do. . . live the high life! His dialog is pointless, bizarre and substance free. He says things like “you’ve become a real inconvenience to me” which makes no sense except that it sounds like something a bad guy might say. He has super powers but doesn’t use them to kill his enemies -- only to play with them and act smug. Indeed, he's ultra-smug, just so the audience hates him. But his smugness makes no sense. He's not smug about winning his fights, indeed, he loses all his fights, usually gets killed and always ends up having his base blown up. Yet, he acts all smug as we see him escape. Why would that make him act smug? “Ha ha! I showed you. . . I’m not-permanently-vincible!” Good grief.

This guy is the model for what is wrong with modern Hollywood villains: all style, zero substance. His motivations make no sense. His mental problems would make it impossible for him to ever rise to control a corporate empire. No henchmen would follow him. To the contrary, they'd shoot him long before things got out of hand. He spews clichéd nonsense just because it sounds hip. He dresses like a gay rock star. And he's comically unlikeable. Compared to him, cartoon villains like Snidely Whiplash and Wylie E. Coyote are paragons of depth, sanity and wisdom.

You have to be an idiot to accept villains like this guy as being even the slightest bit real. And I don’t like being treated like an idiot. That's why I don’t like this film and why I'm really at the end of my rope with Hollywood's lifeless villains. Ug.

So who's your favorite villain of the past? And where are you getting your hair done after the apocalypse?

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Film Friday: The Fifth Element (1997)

In the 1950s, science fiction was forward looking but silly. In the 1960s, science fiction became humorless and introspective about man’s place in the universe. Then science fiction became darkly dystopian -- we suck and it’s all going down the drain. It is against this backdrop of Blade Runner knock-offs and dark, leather clad aliens roaming ruined planets, that we find Luc Besson’s richly-textured view of the future in The Fifth Element. Besson (La Femme Nikita, Leon) presents a movie that is both ambitious and daring, and which, consequently, stands unique among science fiction films today.

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

The Fifth Element is the story of the battle between good and evil. Representing good, we have (1) a religious order that protects a secret weapon placed on the earth by an alien species (Mondoshawans), (2) retired-soldier turned cabdriver Corbin Dallas (Bruce Willis), and (3) the universe’s supreme being -- a genetically perfect woman named Leeloo (Milla Jovovich). Representing evil, we have a powerful force hidden within a molten ball of rock and fire. Assisting evil is industrialist Zorg (Gary Oldman) and a group of mercenary aliens known as Mangalores. The story revolves around the need for the good guys to gather four stones and return them to an ancient Egyptian temple in time to allow the secret weapon to stop the evil force from returning to Earth. But it is beyond the basic story where The Fifth Element really becomes special.

Besson’s Daring Film

What separates The Fifth Element from other science fiction movies are the daring and interesting choices Besson makes as a director. Indeed, Besson violates several “rules” of the science fiction genre:

1. The Hero Must Defeat The Villain In The Big Showdown: Amazingly, Corbin Dallas, the hero, never meets with or communicates with either the evil force or Zorg at any point in the film. Corbin never even learns who Zorg is. At one point, Zorg does briefly shoot at Leeloo, but like Corbin, she has no idea who Zorg is and they never speak. Yet, the audience never feels deprived of the big show down.

2. Everyone Speaks English: Several of the aliens speak languages other than English, and they are not subtitled. More significantly, Leeloo, the heroine, does not speak a recognizable word of English until near the end of the film. Yet, it works. Not only does Besson find alternative means for making her understood, but it lends her character a reality that is lost in other movies when the strangest of aliens start speaking perfect English.

3. Always Tie Your Move To The Present: To draw the audience into the film, science fiction directors always tie the movie into the present. This can be as blatant as including scenes from the present day to as “subtle” as having the characters pontificate about “the twentieth century” . . . looking at you Star Trek. Besson does it differently. The film begins with an opening sequence that takes place in 1913, and then immediately shifts to 2263 (jumping over us entirely). And unlike Star Trek, there is no mention of our time. Yet, the audience never feels distant from the film because the film shows us a future that feels like a natural outgrowth of our own times.

4. The Sounds of Minimalism: Science fiction soundtracks have increasingly trended toward minimalist or surreal music (like Phillip Glass). Besson takes a completely different approach. Besson uses a combination of techno music that is heavily influenced by Arabic music, Paris street musicians, and Opera. Indeed, one of the most interesting moments in the film involves the opera performance by the Diva Plavalaguna, a sort of techno opera.

5. Avoid Unusual Film Techniques: Most science fiction directors play it fairly straight, probably out of fear that they are already out on a limb with their story lines. Besson, on the other hand, does something amazing. Besson uses incredibly precise cuts to give the movie a fast paced feel despite its 127 minute run time. Moreover, Besson uses these cuts to mix different scenes involving different characters in such a way that we almost feel they are speaking to each other. This allows Besson to give us information from multiple perspectives simultaneously and it dramatically cuts down on the amount of dialog and number of scenes needed to convey necessary information to the audience. In the hands of a lesser director such cuts could easily have seemed gimmicky or confused (see Smoking Aces), but in Besson’s hands, these cuts are so well done it is difficult to conceive of this movie being filmed without them.

Besson’s Ambitious World

Beyond his daring, Besson gives the viewer another treat unlike anything in modern science fiction: he gives us an immersive world. It is the rare science fiction film that can resist showing their view of the future. But when they do, it usually takes the form of some quick narrative at the beginning of the film, followed by a handful of plot-irrelevant moments where the audience is asked to focus on an idea or two about how we will live in the future. These moments are almost always accompanied by some comment along the lines of “I can’t image how they used to. . .” and are quickly abandoned once the plot begins moving again. Consequently, these moments typically offer little more than a distraction. Not so Besson.

Besson never once makes his ideas about future conveniences into the focal point of a scene. Instead, he weaves them seamlessly into the background of each scene. For example, we see Leeloo and Zorg’s secretary applying make up, we see Corbin’s bedsheets automatically folded and his bathroom automatically washed, we see food rehydrated and a 23rd Century version of a cigarette machine, but these things happen in the background of scenes. Besson never stops the film to highlight them.

Moreover, Besson’s characters are real people with real lives. Corbin’s apartment is dirty and cluttered. His mother nags him. He has an ex-wife, who ran off with his lawyer. Several characters have pets. Each of the characters has a unique wardrobe -- no generic civilization-wide jumpsuits here. We see how they entertain themselves. We hear their music, we see their television ads, and we meet Ruby Rod (Chris Tucker), a truly believable 23rd Century evolution of Howard Stern.

But most importantly, we get to see the entire range of human endeavor. Almost without exception, science fiction films limit their characters to a few chosen “important” professions. Beyond the individuals directly involved in the plot, you rarely see more than soldiers, scientists, industrialists and government types. Besson shows us these, but then goes so much further. You meet religious figures (from multiple religions), cabbies, secretaries, commercial pilots, stewardesses, garbage men, dock workers, cops, McDonald’s employees, and many more. And each of these characters has a speaking part. Unlike the sterile, lonely future that is commonly presented, this is a real future where we can truly believe that billions of people live and work.

And in that regard, we are given something else that is not common in science fiction films: livable space. While most science fiction tells us that our great grand children will live in dark, dank warehouses or sterile, plastic apartments, Besson’s characters live and work in bright, ergonomic, livable (and lived in) spaces. This is the world as humanity would really make it, not a world designed to increase audience tension. Seriously, would any human really go into space aboard the Event Horizon?

Lastly, Besson does something truly unusual -- he gives his aliens a full range of personalities. Indeed, the Mangalores, the main bad guys (right), are some of the most emotive aliens ever to come along. They run the gambit from joy to frustration to anger to dismay to simple puzzlement. They are stupid and foolish. They play around. They scratch their heads when they are confused. They are unlike any other aliens seen on film, and that makes them compelling.

Science fiction could learn a lot from Besson about how to create a layered, interesting view of the future.

The Message

Finally, we come to the message of the film. This is the one area where Besson fails. Despite crafting such an interesting and many faceted world, when it comes to the film’s message, Besson punts. Admittedly, he does tack a standard liberal “gee ain’t we bad” message onto the end of the film, but this seems to be used solely for the purpose of getting Dallas to admit his love for Leeloo. Indeed, earlier in the film Leeloo is seen enjoying Kung Fu movies of the type that now supposedly cause her to see nothing good in the human race. Moreover, once Dallas admits his love, this “oh rotten humans” message gets utterly discarded and the new message becomes that one person’s love can redeem the rest of the human race. And while this could be seen as religious symbolism, there is no follow up or depth to support such a message.

Earlier in the film, Besson makes several attempts to give us a message through Father Cornelius (Ian Holm). Each time someone tells him they do not have sufficient time for something, he replies: “time does not matter, only life.” But this message is meaningless. Indeed, even if Besson had something specific in mind for this message, there is no moment where we see the pay off. Thus, we are left without a message to be gleaned. . . although, maybe that's not such a bad thing?

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