Resident Evil: Extinction arrived in September 2007 as the third film in a series loosely based on Capcom’s survival horror games. Russell Mulcahy directed. Paul W. S. Anderson wrote it. Milla Jovovich returns as Alice, and the movie sends her across the Mojave desert toward Alaska with a convoy of survivors.
It grossed $147.7 million worldwide against a $45 million budget. The reviews were generally negative, as they were for the two films before it. Extinction is not a good film, in this paper’s view. It is, however, a clear one — and clarity is worth something in a franchise that, to our eye, has never been sure what it wants to be.
Trailer, via Michael Corvin.
Alice Wakes in a Mansion
The film opens with a cloned Alice waking in a mansion and walking its halls. Security traps force her to run. A bounding mine hidden in the floor kills her. Her body drops into a pit filled with dozens of other Alice clones — the failed results of Umbrella’s Project Alice.
That is the whole thesis of Extinction in four minutes. Umbrella is not just evil. It is wasteful. It burns through copies of a person the way a factory burns through parts.
Five years after Umbrella tried to cover up the contamination of Raccoon City, the T-virus has spread worldwide. It has wrecked the ecology. Not just killed people — destroyed the conditions for life. The real Alice wanders the wasteland, fights off marauders, and finds a notebook pointing to a supposedly uninfected area in Alaska.
A Convoy Led by Claire Redfield
Meanwhile, a convoy crosses the country. Claire Redfield leads it. Carlos Oliveira and L.J. Wade, both Raccoon City survivors, ride along. They are looking for supplies and safe harbor.
While searching a motel, L.J. is bitten by a zombie. He chooses not to tell the others. He knows what happens to the bitten, and he does not want it.
The next morning, infected crows attack the convoy. The team nearly falls apart. Alice appears and wipes out the remaining crows with telekinesis. Then she passes out.
She wakes, meets Claire, and tells her about the notebook. The convoy turns toward Alaska.
Dr. Isaacs Builds a Worse Zombie
Dr. Isaacs runs Umbrella’s North American facility. He is trying to domesticate the infected. Instead he creates a new breed of zombie.
Wesker’s security officer, Captain Alexander Slater, files a report on Isaacs ignoring Umbrella regulations. Wesker tells Slater to watch the scientist and kill him if he disobeys orders again.
Alice’s telekinesis sends out an energy pattern. Umbrella triangulates her location from it. The company’s own tracking system is the thing that puts it back on her trail. That is not a plot hole. That is the movie’s best idea, and it barely gets used.
The Cast, and What It Is Working With
- Milla Jovovich as Alice, an ex-Umbrella security officer who turned against the company
- Ali Larter as Claire Redfield, who leads the convoy across Nevada
- Oded Fehr as Carlos Oliveira, a former U.B.C.S. mercenary gone rogue
- Iain Glen as Dr. Isaacs, head scientist at Umbrella’s North American facility
- Ashanti as Nurse Betty, a tough young woman who is a nurse in Claire’s convoy
- Mike Epps as L.J., a former Raccoon City resident
- Spencer Locke as K-Mart, a teenager found hiding in a K-Mart store before the outbreak
- Jason O’Mara as Albert Wesker, chairman of Umbrella
- Christopher Egan as Mikey, who drives the convoy’s computer station
- Matthew Marsden as Slater, part of Wesker’s crew
- Linden Ashby as Chase, a cowboy and ex-cop
- Joe Hursley as Otto, who drives a school bus in the convoy
A Desert That Reads as Western
Extinction sets its big action in Death Valley. The post-apocalyptic Las Vegas sequences play out in broad daylight, not in the dark. The film draws on Westerns and post-apocalyptic movies, the Mad Max series among them.
The borrowed pieces are visible. Oil is short. Supplies are short. A convoy crosses a desert. The desert is taking back land that people used to hold.
Anderson said the story is original and unfolds in a world game fans recognize. “It’s all part of trying to deliver a movie-going experience that satisfies the fans of the game but also provides a fun cinematic experience for a broader audience that has never played a Resident Evil game,” he said.
In our reading, Extinction branches away from the games more completely than the first two films did. Resident Evil 4 had already moved the game series to a setting six years after Resident Evil 2, in a world not yet overrun by zombies. The movie goes its own way.
The Road to This Film
Screen Gems picked up rights to a third installment in November 2005, then gave it the subtitle Extinction. Anderson came back to write. Filming happened in Mexico.
Jovovich was announced to return as Alice on June 12, 2005. Mike Epps confirmed his return as L.J. in a September 2005 interview with BlackFilm.com, and he was blunt about what that role usually means.
“Black people die in these movies and [Anderson] was like, ‘Well Mike, I kinda like you,'” Epps said. “So then I asked him, ‘Are you setting me up to die because if there’s a fourth movie, I’m as good as dead.'”
He read the room correctly. Sienna Guillory was set to return as Jill Valentine but passed, citing commitments to Eragon. Oded Fehr, Iain Glen, Spencer Locke and Ashanti were confirmed in May 2006. Rumors about Debra Marshall as Cindy Lennox, Charlie Clausen as Chris Redfield and Jensen Ackles as Leon S. Kennedy went nowhere.
The Problem Is the Middle
Here is the trouble, as this paper sees it. Extinction has a strong opening, a strong premise, and a middle that stalls.
The convoy is a good engine for a movie. A moving group, low on fuel, low on water, one member hiding a bite. That is tension you do not have to manufacture. In our view, the film keeps interrupting it with Umbrella lab material and a scientist subplot that never connects to the people in the sand.
The crows are the high point. A flock of infected birds is a genuinely different threat from a crowd of zombies, and the sequence gives Alice a reason to use telekinesis that costs her something. She saves the convoy and drops. That is a trade. The film rarely makes another one.
The Vegas sequence is the other set piece worth naming. Daylight, a dead city, a convoy threading through it. To our eye it is the reason the film has any visual identity at all.
What the Money Says
Extinction got generally negative reviews, like the two films before it. It also made $147.7 million worldwide on a $45 million budget. A fourth film, Resident Evil: Afterlife, followed in 2010.
That pattern is the story of this franchise, and it is not complicated: the films kept drawing an audience that critics never moved. That is our read, not a figure the source provides.
In our view, Extinction is the installment where the series stopped pretending to adapt anything and started being a road movie with zombies in it. That is a real choice, and we find it more interesting than Apocalypse. The film has one idea — a convoy, a desert, a group running low — and it keeps leaving that idea to check on a lab.
Score: 4.1/10 (Metacritic 41/100)
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