Resident Evil: Extinction is supposedly written by Paul Anderson, but he mainly just ripped off Day of the Dead and Mad Max 2, a mix that actually sounded pretty cool, but ended up being quite a mess. You may not have seen Day of the Dead, but the following is taken directly from that movie: A scientist living in an underground, military base is going to be fired, if he doesn’t start getting results. He is trying to domesticate the undead, to use them as a peaceful working force. Just like in Day of the Dead, a zombie is shown operating commonly used objects, and later a superior officer complains that he is losing men when retrieving specimen for the scientist. Also the entrance to the facility is crowded with zombies. The Mad Max 2 part, which is more forgiving since it’s a somewhat common theme, is about the caravan lead by Claire Redfield (the red-head from Resident Evil 2), they even have a school bus, just like Mad Max. Alice is just like Max, she rides around in the desert, looking for gasoline. Another similarity is when the caravan decides to go to “the promised land”, in Mad Max 2 it’s some beach resort, in Resident Evil, it’s Alaska… The infection spread from America, to Europe and even Asia, so why the hell would Alaska be unaffected? Never mind.
Naturally Alice runs into the caravan, apparently one of the caravan soldiers is also in the sequel, because he and Alice know each other. Alice have been running from the Umbrella Corp., but the underground facility just happens to be nearby and it picks up a signal when Alice uses her psionic powers, she’s a total jedi, moving objects with her mind and stuff. The scientist wants Alice’s blood, he’s been experimenting with clones of her, putting them through various tests, but they all died, now he wants the real deal, because Alice’s blood is apparently the cure to domesticating the zombies. No, I have no idea how that makes sense. Anyway, he sends zombies after the caravan, they’re fought off, Alice finds the facility, goes inside and kills the now mutated scientist (he injected himself with what I assume was an experimental sample of the cure).
In the end there’s no real resolution, we don’t get to know what happened to the people going to Alaska and we didn’t find out if Alice’s blood cured anything, but why would it? The movie ends with Alice getting ready to take down the Umbrella organization for good, but, they’re the only ones trying to create a cure, so wouldn’t that be kind of stupid?
Resident Evil: Extinction – 4/10.
Bonus: Stupid use of creative license: The hidden elevator to the secret, underground facility, appears if you step near it’s hideaway. Awesome security, no wonder Umbrella never succeeds.
