Resident Evil: Extinction

While Milla Jovovich's commitment to catwalk cataclysm has never wavered, each of the Resident Evil films has tackled the concept of video game adaptation in remarkably different ways. The first instalment, directed by Paul WS Anderson, was premised on the ways in which the root survival horror games revealed themselves, both spatially and visually. So as well as investigating the big business malevolence (literally) lurking beneath old money estates, Anderson's film also lifted the locked perspectives of the game's fixed camera angles. Only now the omniscient point-of-view was not that of the players steering these characters through the rotting dangers but that of the impassive computer intelligence calculating how to exterminate this biological infestation. In its best moments - particularly an opening sequence where offices packed with corporate climbers are ruthlessly liquidated - Anderson's film plays like a covert adaptation of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream; the pillar on which all tales of seething, mechanical hatred are balanced. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse, obsessed as it was with lionising the minutiae of Capcom's work, seemed to be more of an attempt at big screen veneration for this already successful brand. Despite its ambition, Alexander Witt's workmanlike idolatry proved to be less exciting than that managed by George A Romero (originally in the frame to direct his own big screen Resident Evil) with his 30 second long television ad for the second game in the series, Biohazard 2. The approach taken by Russell Mulcahy's consistently good-looking Resident Evil: Extinction differs again, marked by a willingness to translate the grammatical experience of video games rather than just broad events or fan-pleasing iconography. Extinction cross-contaminates bleached glimpses of an infernal, post-apocalyptic desert with pastel make-up interiors and creative inflections lifted from Japanese, post-humanist animation. Dramatically, Extinction revolves around dangerous encounters with various undead hordes, all visited on the film's dwindling collection of human survivors. These enemies all originate from an unclear or flimsy source, as if spawning in thanks to some unseen trigger. In the case of a setpiece that takes place in a Las Vegas that has been reclaimed by the desert, sprinting horrors issue ceaselessly from a shipping container that couldn't possibly contain this many creatures.