Blogical Conclusion

BRINGING OUT THE UNDEAD

Zombies take over the earth as our intrepid heroine tries to save it – or something like that.

OCT 19, 2007 - SOME MOVIES MAKE YOU FEEL OLD in a good way. You see Syriana or The English Patient or Babel and – whatever their pluses and minuses – you come away with a renewed appreciation for the number of years you’ve marked on this earth. All that time was needed to acquire the mindset to buy into the kind of mature themes these films were trafficking. Then there are the others, like Resident Evil: Extinction, that are based on borderline-incomprehensible video games (Extinction is the third installment) – and just the realisation that there are kids worldwide that are actually making sense of the whos, whats and whys of the goings on here is enough to make you feel about a hundred.

Some sort of virus has laid waste entire continents, and the only inhabitants of this dystopian universe appear to be either zombies or the last few human survivors. No, wait a minute. That’s not entirely true, for Alice (Milla Jovovich), while clearly no representative of the undead, is also possessing of reflexes far beyond the realm of mankind – and she lords over what is essentially one long showreel (even at barely one-and-a-half hours) of the latest in splatter technology. As the humans fight the zombies for survival, foreheads are impaled, teeth are prised loose, groins are thwacked, stomachs are hollowed out, and, in what is probably this movie’s money shot, some poor shlub’s eyes and mouth are simultaneously violated by a three-pronged tentacle.

And in the midst of all this horror, there’s humour too – the unintentional kind, such as the attempt to make us care for this girl named K-Mart because, well, she was found there. (I guess it’s a good thing that her rescuers didn’t pick her up from Abercrombie & Fitch.) Extinction borrows liberally from its predecessors – a crow-attack is right out of The Birds, and a shot of hordes of zombies milling around a desert makes you imagine the Exodus sequence of The Ten Commandments as reenacted by the cast of Night of the Living Dead – but it never throws so much as a sideward glance at the films I hoped it would draw inspiration from: the Alien series and the Terminator movies. The former’s Ripley and the latter’s Sarah Connor kicked major butt too, but they were also women in ways that mattered. Alice, in comparison, is just a hot chick with toys – which, I guess, is kinda the whole point.

Copyright ©2007 The New Indian Express