Resident Evil

Time has been kind to the films of Paul WS Anderson, particularly those he made in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The writer-director's preference for expansive, often maze-like sets and dwindling human resources no longer registers as a shorthand cribbed from James Cameron and John Carpenter simply because no-one, not even those namechecked directors, are making films like that anymore. Compared to the digital costumes and endless computer-generated vistas on display today, Resident Evil is surprisingly tactile. David Johnson's camera is a member of the crowd, jostled by the leads and experiencing the strange, claustrophobic intimacy of a packed lift. These sweaty anxieties, of course, couldn't be further away from the polygonal purgatories found in the Capcom video game series that Anderson is adapting. There the player is very much alone; silence and isolation indicative of a win state that they have fought hard to achieve. 

That which was deemed undercooked or second-hand when this big screen blow-up was released is now easier to celebrate, in large part, because of how Anderson has woven a constant sense of physical (even chemical) vulnerability into the piece. Dramatically and stylistically, Resident Evil is built around hangovers; specifically the inconvenient memories that bubble up out of particularly oppressive narcotic funks. Visually though, Resident Evil is a film preoccupied with faces: Anderson and cinematographer Johnson shoot Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez in ways that are intimate and adoring, focusing on the soft hairs on their necks as much as their tousled fringes or pouting lips. In Resident Evil the halting rhythm of this male gaze is also a tool that tracks fatigue and the transformations creeping inside the film's more photogenic subjects, with Rodriguez the victim of the most drastic metamorphosis. Repeatedly chewed-on by grasping, yuppie zombies, her character eventually succumbs to the same snarling hungers. The pink mouth that the film previously lingered on is now presented as cracked and pale; peeled back to expose yellowed, snapping teeth.