Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a 2004 action horror film[10] directed by Alexander Witt and written by Paul W. S. Anderson. A direct sequel to Resident Evil (2002), it is the second installment in the Resident Evil film series, which is loosely based on the video game series of the same name. The film marks Witt's feature directorial debut; Anderson, the director of the first film, turned down the job due to other commitments, though stayed on as one of its producers. Milla Jovovich reprises her role as Alice, and is joined by Sienna Guillory as Jill Valentine and Oded Fehr as Carlos Olivera.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
- Jeremy Bolt
- Paul W. S. Anderson
- Don Carmody
- Christian Sebaldt
- Derek Rogers
Eddie Hamilton
- Constantin Film Verleih (Germany)[3]
- Metropolitan Filmexport (France)[4]
- Alliance Atlantis (Canada)[5]
- Sony Pictures Releasing (United States)[1]
93 minutes[6]
English
$45 million[9]
$129.3 million[9]
Resident Evil: Apocalypse is set directly after the events of the first film, where Alice escaped from an underground facility overrun by zombies. She now bands together with other survivors to escape the zombie outbreak which has spread to the nearby Raccoon City. The film borrows elements from several games in the Resident Evil series, such as the characters Valentine and Olivera and the villain Nemesis. Filming took place in Toronto at locations including Toronto City Hall and Prince Edward Viaduct.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse received "generally unfavorable reviews" on Metacritic, and became the lowest-rated film in the Resident Evil series on Rotten Tomatoes, with a rating of 19%. Despite this, it earned $129.3 million worldwide on a $45 million budget, surpassing the box office gross of the original film. It was followed by Resident Evil: Extinction in 2007.
Plot[edit]
In the previous film, former security operative Alice and environmental activist Matt Addison fought to escape an underground genetic research facility called the Hive, the source of a zombie outbreak. The pair were part of an attempt to expose illegal experiments being performed there by the pharmaceutical company Umbrella Corporation. The film ended as Alice and Addison were taken into custody by Umbrella and separated.
A team sent by Umbrella to investigate the Hive are overrun by zombies who quickly spread to the nearby Raccoon City. Umbrella reacts by quarantining the city and evacuating vital personnel from it. Angela Ashford, the daughter of Umbrella researcher Dr. Charles Ashford, goes missing after her security car is involved in a collision during the evacuation. Meanwhile, disgraced Raccoon City Police Department Special Tactics And Rescue Squad (STARS) operative Jill Valentine returns to her former precinct to encourage her fellow officers to evacuate. Alice awakens in a deserted hospital and wanders the city in search of supplies, while Umbrella uses the only bridge out of the area to evacuate civilians. At the bridge, Valentine meets with her former partner, Sgt. Payton Wells. A civilian turns into a zombie, biting and infecting Wells. In response to the virus reaching the bridge, Major Timothy Cain, leader of the Umbrella forces in Raccoon City, seals the exit and forces the residents to return to the city.
After being abandoned by their employer following a failed attempt to rescue a civilian, Umbrella soldiers Carlos Olivera and Nicholai Ginovaef team up with the surviving STARS operatives to repel zombie attacks. Their position is overrun, and Olivera is bitten and infected. At a separate location, Valentine, Wells, and news reporter Terri Morales are about to be overrun, though are saved by Alice. Umbrella deploys a heavily mutated experimental supersoldier, Nemesis, who kills the remaining STARS members before searching for Alice. Dr. Ashford hacks into the city's CCTV system and uses it to contact Alice and the other survivors, offering to arrange their evacuation from the city in exchange for rescuing his daughter. He makes an identical offer to Olivera and Ginovaef, explaining that Umbrella intends to rid Raccoon City of the zombie infection by destroying it with a nuclear warhead.
On their way to Angela's location, Alice and the others are ambushed by Nemesis. Valentine kills Wells after he turns into a zombie. Alice engages Nemesis but is wounded and forced to retreat, luring Nemesis away from the rest of the group. Valentine and Morales continue, picking up stranded civilian L.J. en route. Valentine meets Olivera, and they find and rescue Angela, although Morales and Ginovaef are both killed. Angela reveals that the zombie outbreak is the result of the T-virus, created by her father to treat a terminal genetic condition she has, and must take an anti-virus serum to prevent turning into a zombie. Alice uses some of the anti-virus to cure Olivera. Dr. Ashford gives Alice the location of an extraction point where a helicopter awaits. The group makes it to the rendezvous point, but are ambushed by Umbrella forces. Major Cain kills Dr. Ashford and forces Alice, whom he reveals was given superhuman strength by the T-virus, to fight Nemesis. Alice gains the upper hand over the supersoldier, though she ceases fighting after realizing that he is Matt Addison, mutated by Umbrella's experiments.
Nemesis turns on Major Cain and attacks the Umbrella troops, but is killed protecting Alice. The rest of the survivors seize the helicopter; they eject Major Cain from it and he is killed by the zombies, including a zombified Dr. Ashford. As the survivors escape, a nuclear warhead detonates over the city, and the resulting blast wave causes the helicopter to crash. Alice sacrifices herself to save Angela and is impaled on a metal pole. T.V. footage attributes the blast to a meltdown of the city's nuclear power plant, covering up Umbrella's involvement.
Alice wakes up in an Umbrella research facility and escapes with help from Olivera, Valentine, L.J., and Angela, also displaying psionic abilities by telekinetically killing a security guard. As they are escaping, Dr. Alexander Isaacs, a top-ranking Umbrella employee, reveals that Alice's escape is part of Umbrella's plan for her.
Themes[edit]
Media studies scholar Stephen Harper said that both Apocalypse and the first Resident Evil film present "highly ambiguous" perspectives on the themes of corporate power, race, gender and sexuality. Describing them both as postmodern and postfeminist texts, Harper argued that, despite containing some progressive elements including feminist themes that undermine patriarchal power, the films also played into several stereotypes. He said the relationship between Alice and Valentine differs from interactions between male characters in action films as seen by a lack of camaraderie and co-operation between the two and, unlike male characters in Apocalypse, both Valentine and Alice are separately shown being "protective and nurturing" of the young Angela; Harper stated even violent action heroines are often portrayed with such characteristics. Harper also criticized how their revealing clothing and camera angles objectified Alice and Valentine throughout the film, and noted that through the African-American character L.J. Apocalypse showed an "ironic awareness" of racist stereotypes, though "it stops short of challenging them and, indeed, often deploys them".[11]
Douglas Kellner from the University of California in Los Angeles argued the film's ending played "on fears of out of control nuclear technology and government cover-ups". A news segment shown in the film, which claimed that reports of corporate wrongdoing were false and that people should instead be thanking the Umbrella Corporation, was "a barely disguised allegory of lying by corporations and the state during the Bush-Cheney era".[12]
Release[edit]
Marketing and box office[edit]
Marcus Nispel was hired to create a teaser trailer, titled Regenerate. It purports to be advertising a skin rejuvenation product created by the Umbrella Corporation, before the woman in the commercial turns into a zombie. By May 2004, the teaser had been downloaded 8.5 million times from the film's official website.[33] Part of the teaser was shown in the film briefly on a television in the background and a part of it also appears in a mid-credits scene.[15] The film's theatrical trailer was released on Yahoo! Movies in July 2004.[34] A novelization of the film written by Keith DeCandido was published by Simon & Schuster the following month.[35] Screen Gems created a faux newspaper, The Raccoon City Times, to promote the film.[36]
Apocalypse opened at number one in the United States on September 10, 2004, where it grossed over $23 million on its opening weekend.[9] The film also opened at number one in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Mexico, and performed well in Japan, France and Brazil, though the horror film Saw overshadowed it at the box office in the United Kingdom, and it received a lackluster reception in Sweden,[37][38] where it grossed $473,550.[39] Earning over $6 million in Canada, Resident Evil: Apocalypse was the highest grossing, domestically produced Canadian film in 2004.[40] Apocalypse went on to earn $129,394,835 worldwide against a budget of $45 million,[9] surpassing the earnings of the first film which generated $102,984,862.[41]
Critical response[edit]
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 19% of 134 critic reviews are positive, which makes this film the lowest-rated entry in the series.[42] The site's critics consensus reads: "Resident Evil: Apocalypse has lots of action, but not much in terms of plot or creativity."[43] According to Metacritic, which sampled 26 reviews and calculated a score of 36 out of 100 based on 26 reviews, the film received "generally unfavorable reviews".[44] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade B on a scale of A to F.[45]
Leonard Maltin rated the film a "bomb" in his book Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide and called it a "tiresome" sequel that ended up playing more like a remake.[46] Roger Ebert gave the film a score of half a star out of four, calling it "an utterly meaningless waste of time" that lacked any wit or imagination and also failed to provide entertaining violence or special effects. He subsequently named the film the eighth worst film of 2004.[47][48] Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer gave the film one star out of four, concluding that even for people interested in the biological horror genre, Apocalypse was "pretty generic stuff".[49]
Dave Kehr of The New York Times gave the film a positive review, praising Anderson's screenplay and describing Witt's direction as "fast, funny, smart and highly satisfying in terms of visceral impact".[24] M. E. Russell of The Oregonian said, "The bad news? The movie is monumentally stupid. The good news? It's a fun kind of stupid".[50] The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin said that it progressed too slowly to be considered a good film, "but when Jovovich finally starts kicking zombified ass, it becomes good enough".[51] Ben Kenigsberg of The Village Voice said the film is "not without its moments of elemental dread" though he complained there was too much action and padding and not enough irony.[52]
Gregory Kirschling of Entertainment Weekly, who gave the film a 'D−' rating, praised Jovovich but felt that "the rest of the cast was strictly straight-to-DVD";[53] Cinefantastique, on the other hand, commented that Jovovich looked bored and that Guillory's portrayal of Jill Valentine was the film's "saving grace".[54]
Legacy[edit]
In 2009, Time ranked the film as one of the top ten worst video game films. While criticizing all three films released in the Resident Evil series at the time, they concluded that Apocalypse deserved their vote "Because, like any sequel, it’s an enabler ... sequels to bad movies just enable further sequels to be considered".[55] In 2016, separate journalists from Bloody Disgusting ranked it as both the best and worst film in the series.[56][57] In 2017, Michael Nordine of TheWrap ranked it as the worst film in the series, saying its only redeeming features were the fact it expanded the series and the "awesomely stupid" fight between Alice and Nemesis.[58]
Accolades[edit]
Resident Evil: Apocalypse won Best Sound Editing and the Golden Reel Award at the 25th Genie Awards,[59][60] and was also nominated for Best Overall Sound. It was nominated for Best Sound Editing in a feature film by the Directors Guild of Canada, and for Best Make-Up at the 31st Saturn Awards.[61] For composing the film's score, Jeff Danna was awarded the SOCAN International Film Music Award in 2007 and 2009.[62]
Home media[edit]
The film was released on DVD and VHS in North America on December 28, 2004. The DVD release included three audio commentaries, 20 deleted scenes, several featurettes and a blooper reel. DVD Talk awarded the film 3½ stars out of five for both video quality and special features.[63] Releases on UMD and Blu-ray Disc formats followed in 2005 and 2007, respectively.[64][65] High-Def Digest gave the Blu-ray release three stars out of five for video quality and 3½ stars for special features.[66]
Special "Resurrection Editions" of both Resident Evil (2002) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse were released in a two-disc set on September 4, 2007. An exclusive scene for the then upcoming sequel Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) was included, along with several other bonus features.[67][68] Trilogy sets containing the first three films were released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2008.[69][70] "The Resident Evil Collection" consisting of the first four films was released in September 2012 on DVD and Blu-ray,[71] a version containing the first five films was released on DVD and Blu-ray in December 2012,[72] and "Resident Evil The Complete Collection" containing all six films was released on Blu-ray in May 2017.[73]