I'm posting this after 7 straight hours of fiction writing, followed by 2 shots of Goldschlager and a fried egg on toast; eaten when I realized I hadn't had any food since midnight, and that I wouldn't sleep very well in my usual (of late) 8am-2pm slot, if my tummy were rumbling. Don't expect too much, in other words.
Fortunately, the review below was all but finished a few weeks ago, typed up shortly after I saw the movie it discusses. It sucked. (The movie, not the review. In theory.) I just added a few bits to it now, and yes, the shots and the small glass of white wine I'm now sipping to help bring me to an REM-ready state helped free my tongue (fingers) to add some appropriately critical remarks, about this rather execrable semi-film. This is the kind of thing Ebert watches to reinforce his "games aren't art" theories, even though this is a movie that's based on games. And even though the experience of playing the game would almost certainly be more art-like than this shitty CG film.
In other news, too much work and typing and writing and thinking lately.
You ever read Catch-22? Probably. If not, go back to high school and kick your English teacher square in the nuts. Even if she's a she.
At any rate, one of the crazy characters in that ultimate masterpiece of satire was obsessed with his apparent longevity. He had a theory about how time flies and our lives slip past, and his method to fight that fact was to spend as much time being as bored and unhappy as possible. So he associated with the most boring, awful people possible, and did nothing but unpleasant, time-wasting things. In this way he'd find himself counting the minutes as his life passed, and would always remember what he'd done on a given day or during a given week or year.
That sort of fractured logic is what propels Catch-22, but like most of the brilliantly insane things in the book, it sort of makes sense at the same time. Being too busy and active really does make your life seem to fly past. I'm sure my experience of that is dwarfed by that of new parents and others who have lives that are totally crammed full of activities. Raising a baby, working full time, and going to night school = you start working in August, and the next thing you know it's December 23th. Three years later.
I'm not at that stage, and I hope I never am. But for me, the past few weeks have been a blur. I've been working on website stuff, doing some freelance GMAT test prep work, and spending 4-8 hours a day on fiction, as I engage in a Herculean effort to finish a rough draft of the wine mystery novel I'm writing with my dad, before May 15th, when I'm off to Hawaii for a blessed week's vacation.
Said week was almost a lot more blessed, since the IG was going to accompany me, until she had to back out thanks to losing her main job and having issues finding a replacement. My mom/stepdad have a time share in a luxury resort there; huge suite with a master bedroom, a side bedroom, and a living room/kitchen. The IG and I were going to share a bed, and no, we're not having sex. Though I thought a week snuggling in bed and romping around white sand beaches in a bikini (her, not me) would be the next best thing. Or would at least give me plenty of insight into some sort of advanced blue balls study.
But she's not going, so now I'll just be there with family, and we'll do the same beach stuff and snorkling and hiking and all the rest. I'll just get less "rub some suntan lotion on my back and legs" time with a gorgeous young woman with a size zero booty.
In any event, I want to have a rough draft done before I leave, though that's looking unlikely the way this book is expanding in length. Like all of my writing expands in length. The fiction, especially. It's not gratuitous either; I'm sticking to the quite detailed plot outline Dad and I worked out in advance; there's just a ton of events, and I write very detailed characterizations and events, so it takes a lot of words to do it justice. In any event, the book will be finished in May, even if I've got to do the last chapter or few after I return from paradise.
My day to day experience is slipping a lot, even with just this much activity. I frequently get online in the early afternoon, thinking I'll work on website stuff until dark, and then get something to eat and hit the gym, then have a big dinner and relax a bit before doing fiction from 12-6 or so. So I start working, and the next thing I know it's 9:30pm, when I had meant to leave for the gym @ 8. And I haven't had a bite to eat all day, and I need some energy for the gym, and after PB/honey toast I end up cutting my gym time short since I want to get home and do fiction, and I start that at 2am after gorging on something in a post-gym famine, and the next thing I know it's getting light outside and I'm left wondering where the last 18 hours went.
Repeat until death. Alone.
That said, I'm going to bed now. Here's the review.
This is a review of an animated movie, but it's not anime. It's all CG, and produced for the DVD market, without a theatrical release (AFAIK). It's called
Resident Evil: Degeneration, and is a movie set in the FPS game series, which has already spawned several B-movie quality live action features, most or all of which starred Mila Joviovich.
I downloaded it out of curiosity, and watched it with some high hopes. I didn't expect a masterpiece, but I thought it would at least have some good zombie blasting/battling action, nice action pieces, and maybe some scary scenes with monsters lurching out of the darkness as the heroes ran for their lives. You know, the same crap every action/horror movie offers. I expected the special effects and visuals to be good, since it's a fully 3D, CG movie. It's animation, so the normal limitations of special effects, makeup, numbers of extras, etc, don't apply. They can turn zombies inside out, have 5000 of them running up at once, put the camera's POV inside the barrel of a gun as it spits forth zombie death, etc.
Sadly, none of this was done. This is a really depressing film, since it's so lacking in imagination, intelligence, or ingenuity. There's nothing here that couldn't be in a crappy direct to video movie with live actors and action. Even the "special effects" weren't very good. I'm quite firm in my opinions on this one, and while I'll point you to the
4/5 star average (From 110 reviews!) on Amazon.com, I can't explain it. This movie sucks, it's very poorly made, and it squanders a great opportunity to use the technology to further the craft. Anyone who would give this piece of shit a 5 star review has either never seen a decent movie in their lives, thought they were voting on a 10 star scale, or made massive allowances for the shit-quality acting, directing, dialogue, action, and plot since it was animated.
To my somewhat disgusted scores:
Resident Evil: Degeneration, 2008
Script/Story: 2
Acting/Casting: 1
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 4
Fun Factor: 3
Replayability: 3
Overall: 2.5
I'm scoring this one like a real movie, rather than giving allowances for the fact that it's animation. After all, animation is just a tool or a means of presentation, like B&W or 3D; it's not a genre or style. That's especially true in this film, since it's exactly like any other bad action/horror film. A bit worse than most, but there's nothing that actually takes advantage of the fact that it's animation.
It's a weird approach. If you somehow didn't know that this was animation, and thought it was film of actual human beings, there's nothing that would seem unusual or out of the ordinary, compared to any other B-quality action movie. You wouldn't even think it had especially good special effects. The awful acting and leaden dialogue and cliché-filled script is impossible to miss, but there's nothing about the story or presentation that couldn't have been done with live actors, and some amount of post production CGI. Humans mutating into huge zombie things, a few big explosions and a plane crash, a building self-destructing... all fairly standard action movie fare.
The overall low quality of the story, horrible dialogue, and unimaginative plot and events makes me wonder about the creation and writing process. I can understand and sort of sympathize with bad movies, especially bad action movies, that cut corners. Explosions and special effects and huge sets and lots of extras cost money, and films often have to skimp on those elements for economic reasons. The same goes for good actors, which is why most action films have wrestlers or rappers or body builders or models; people who look the part, and whose acting ability is an afterthought.
Most action movies have really lame dialogue and flat, two-dimensional (or one-dimensional) characters. They don't change during the film, they tend to be types, etc. Some element of that has to be that the films play to the audience's expectation. There are genre staples of horror movies, after all. And of zombie movies, and action movies. And this one is all three.
So it's not totally an indictment of the film that every character is stamped out of some "generic action movie character" cookie sheet. There's the frightened female victim panicking as monsters come in. There's the hot-headed Rambo idiot cop. There's the corrupt and scheming politician. There's a deceitful mad scientist. There's a little girl in danger who must be rescued. There's the mysterious and cool special ops guy who comes to save the day, and the tough female cop he bonds with during the course of the action. And that's literally... every single character in the movie. Everyone with a speaking role is a total stereotype. Instantly reminiscent of some other movie (generally a bad one).
The dialogue and acting and plot is much the same, but it's actually maddening. I spent most of the first 30 minutes of this movie cursing aloud and wishing the "heroes" would die, since they were all, continually, constantly, repeatedly, so stupid. It was impossible to root for them, since they did nothing that wasn't dumb and predictable. I think (hope) it was written that way on purpose, as a sort of genre obligation. Of course the heroes have to freak out and stand in stunned horror when they see the zombies stumbling towards them. Of course the small group of survivors has to move through the heart of the monster infestation instead of just staying in the safety of the back hallways. Of course the dumb macho cop has to ignore all the orders he's given and get himself killed. Of course the female hero has to throw herself into danger to save a little girl she doesn't even know. Etc.
The most annoying thing with this one is that everyone, repeatedly, constantly, sees danger coming and stands there watching it. Civilians when the zombies first appear, sure. But the trained experts who have fought these zombies in the past? Why are they surprised? Why aren't they running like a bunnies to get to defensible terrain? Why do they go into combat with a single handgun when they know there are hundreds of zombies in the area? Why don't they wear any sort of armor when the zombies are slow and weak and only capable of hurting you/spreading the zombie infection by biting?
It's literally impossible to watch this film and not spend the first hour rewriting the "plot" as you watch it, since every scene is so predictable and cliched, and every character is so dumb and slow to react, and every police/army action is so hare-brained and inept.
And that's where my confusion comes from. That's all sort of expected of a live action movie, since they have budget concerns and bad actor and are in a time crunch, etc. But a lot of that doesn't apply to this film, since it's all animated. The voice actors were pretty bad, especially the weird, overly sincere and emoting voice of the main male hero special ops guy, but it wouldn't have mattered since their dialogue was all so dumb. On top of that, the events are all ripped off from other movies, the hero characters are perpetually so stupid and annoying that you actively hope they'll die. So were there no writers for this film? Did they just give the game programmers a week to come up with a hundred minute cut scene and go into the laborious animation process without considering how lame the story was?
I dunno. I found it very disappointing and very stupid, since it could so easily have been a pretty good movie. After all, having the full freedom of animation should be awesome with zombies and action scenes. The heroes can be like super Jackie Chans in their nimble mobility, the monsters can be totally bizarre and grotesque and inhuman, rather than just a guy in a rubber suit, or some obviously green screen CGI thing. Moreover, the cinematic technique are where animation can really come to life, since scenes can be shown from any angle, any direction, etc. This movie does a few slow motion shots with bullets moving, but they don't even rise to the level established in The Matrix, more than 10 years ago. Perhaps for technical reasons, the vast majority of shots are done with a stationary camera, while the principles run around in front of it. Good anime imitates good cinema, with the "camera" view moving behind the actors, the "camera" view shaking up and down to simulate explosions and motion, zooming in and out for excitement, etc.
Resident Evil: Degeneration does none of that, and I have to put that on unimaginative, unskilled directors and producers and writers.
For the sake of comparison, check out the scene in
The Incredibles when the missiles hit the plane with ElastiGirl and the 2 kids inside. The camera moves in with them, pops outside of the plane, goes from the missiles' PoV, cuts from the cockpit to the kids in the back, etc. After the missiles hit the camera is falling with the Incredibles as the plane blows up above them, turning side to side, etc. All things no real camera could do in a live action movie, (at least not without enormous amounts of special effects) and all to great effect. Nothing like that ever happens in RE:D, and there are plenty of times it could. People fall, things blow up, monsters attack, and throughout most of it the camera just stands back at a distance and watches, like a freshman shooting his first student film in the quad one afternoon.
In a weird sort of (bad) way, this film might be a kind of breakthrough. It shows just how exactly an animated action/horror movie an imitate and emulate all the lamest things that real action/horror movies do. Almost as if it's bridged the gulf between live action and animation, but in the least inspiring way possible. Way to do absolutely nothing to take advantage of your technical opportunities, guys.
Other than that... oh what the hell. It's a shitty zombie movie with predictable double crossing mad scientists and corporate greed. Though I've never played them, I'm sure all of the games in the series have 10x the intelligence and plot twists of this "movie." It's just a misbegotten, untalented, waste of money all around. Ugly, stupid, unexciting, and not fun. Frankly, my scores might be a bit too high, as much barrel bottom as this one scrapes and as many opportunities as it squanders.
I don't recommend it, but if you're curious,
here's a link to download it in very high quality. You need to get all 3 parts and join them with HJ Split, and that will yield you a 1.5meg avi, which you'll get about 10 minutes into before you start wondering why the hell you wasted all afternoon downloading this piece of shit in the first place. And don't you come crying to me.
Labels: animation, movie review
