In the Lost Lands

Adapted from a very short George RR Martin story, director Paul WS Anderson's In the Lost Lands is a slight piece concerning comeuppance that find itself distended and swollen thanks to the action-packed demands of the medium it is being transposed into. Milla Jovovich's wasteland witch Gray Alys, of course, knows far more than she lets on about the expected outcomes of the magical rites this fallen future's royalty have her perform, but her wry perspective is never allowed to feed back into the finished film. Anderson and his co-screenwriter Constantin Werner jealously guard any debriefs, saving them all up for a conclusion that twists in ways that would be pleasant enough following forty-five minutes of television but end up being too little too late when playing at feature length. Very much a digital backlot film, In the Lost Lands is often handsome but desperately static. Establishing shots are packed with beatific, computer-generated rubble and straining light sources that recall similar apocalypses from video games, Zack Snyder pick-ups or even bubble-era anime but, whenever the film is in (slow) motion, Lost Lands very much fails to match the sublime notes of that latter, elasticated inspiration. Given that this is yet another Anderson and Jovovich team-up, it's hard not to let your mind wander when watching, wondering if the pair intend for this film to function as an unofficial cap on their Resident Evil entries, a series that has long since been handed off to other filmmakers. The evidence is flimsy - Jovovich plays another superhumanly capable woman named Alice who battles against awful men who have allowed greed to so completely sink into them that it has physically mutated their bodies - but it beats giving Lost Lands your full, undivided attention. 

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. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Despite an increase in budget that allows the filmmakers to make good on the rotting city glimpsed during the conclusion of the previous instalment, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a one hundred minute long fumble. Instead of a blood-splattered laboratory, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her disposable friends now have an entire city staffed with grinning mercenaries and the stuttering undead to creep through. Unfortunately, excitement-levels are not similarly bolstered. If anything the inverse is true: the more guns and wobbling, Mardi Gras titans that Apocalypse reveals, the more excruciating the viewing experience becomes. The first Resident Evil film was knowing enough not to gum its gears with this kind of consumptive sightseeing. That piece was more of a conceptual adaptation; one that took fragments of the original PlayStation game then used them to engineer sequences and situations based around the unblinking attention Paul WS Anderson paid to his leading ladies. Anderson's arrangement of bisected bodies (more than a little bit inspired by Vincenzo Natali's Cube) was even arresting enough to reinspire the developers back at Capcom. 

Lauded video game director Shinji Mikami, in a canny bit of call-and-response, translated Anderson's celebrated laser corridor set-piece back into an interactive obstacle for his own Resident Evil 4 (an encounter memorable enough to make its way into an expanded version of this year's remake). Less original by design, thanks to a fanbase that demanded fidelity when considering their polygonal adventures, Alexander Witt's Apocalypse is content to dutifully slog through the kind of material previously deemed extraneous. Witt's day job as a second-unit director for multiple Ridley Scott projects is only really detectable here in terms of a chopped-up intermittence that worms its way into the film's threadbare action sequences. Even when Apocalypse settles into a situation that should lend itself to an entertaining fracas, we are chased away from that moment by either harried cuts that explicitly take us elsewhere or a style of combat coverage best described as a spatial collapse. The only person able to portray fun under these galling circumstances is Sienna Guillory as deputy heroine Jill Valentine. Somehow the actress has managed to tune her performance into the strange frequencies and confident nonsense inherent to compact disc gaming. Her Valentine has bled off the CRT screen; every utterance clanging with the inelegance of tough talk translated from English into Japanese, then back again. 

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. 

Monster Hunter

Compared to his Resident Evil films, Paul WS Anderson's Monster Hunter - another loose adaptation of a video game developed by Capcom - wants for the unifying sense of unease the writer-director embedded in those later entries. Lacking any textual concept as strong as Retribution or The Final Chapter's satirical stab at corporate cannibalism, Monster Hunter is laid bare as a hodgepodge of disparate set pieces with each section operating at a completely different, and not always complimentary, wavelength. Monster Hunter is Anderson in channel-hopping mode; a magpie stringing together moments and movements from a variety of sources, all now swirling around Anderson's biggest gun, his wife Milla Jovovich. 

Jovovich provides a certain continuity with her fading Resident Evil franchise, not just in terms of actor deployed but also in how her new character moves and behaves. Artemis, like the self-assured Alice we saw in Final Chapter, is a leader of men; unflappable and quietly competent, her brilliance finally recognised by an intergovernmental authority then elevated to an official position of command. Naturally the grunts she oversees are quickly dispatched when their UN peacekeeping squad slips out of our world and into Capcom's. Their ballistic weapons are ineffective against the armoured hides of this realm's dragons - this explicit focus on guns as nothing more than useless (but still photogenic) mechanical movement means Monster Hunter never develops into the kind of technological slaughterhouse fans of GI Samurai or 2000 AD's Flesh might otherwise expect. 

Anderson's film instead beats a similar path to the character action games that briefly propose unlimited power before battering the player back to zero, burdening them with a different skill tree to grind away at. General Dynamics miniguns and shoulder mounted rocket launchers revoked, Artemis shuffles around a series of rocky safe areas, tending to her wounds and quietly plotting her next move. She is soon joined by Tony Jaa's expert archer, the two burning calories with pointless tit-for-tat before the comfort of human contact in a world of scuttling belligerents wins out. While Monster Hunter slowly pivots towards a computer generated, sequel teasing, mega-battle, it's this Hell in the Pacific (or Enemy Mine if we're ticking off big screen, played-to-death-on-television, Robinsonade) act that really shines. The section allows Jovovich and Jaa tens of minutes to approximate an organic détente with nothing but their abundant physical charm. Indeed there's nothing in the light show finale as entertaining as Jaa's instinctive revulsion at the butyric whiffs emanating from Jovovich's smashed-up Hershey's chocolate. 

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter posits a conclusion, using the customary Friday the 13th style recap to prepare its audience for a secret history related to Milla Jovovich's hitherto rootless Alice. Final Chapter therefore swerves Resident Evil: Retribution's tease of an apocalyptic revelation centred around The White House - with a Commander-in-Chief who is literally toxic, no less - to put Alice on the road, cruising along endless highways while pursued by a CEO-turned-religious zealot, his killdozer and an army of ravenous corpses. Jovovich's amnesiac super-soldier battles across the ruins of America, on a mission to save mankind by reaching what's left of a Midwestern city before a computated deadline expires.

Final Chapter allows writer-director Paul WS Anderson the opportunity to tackle several distinct flavours of post-fall science fiction, from 2000 AD style mutant convoys to the feudal barbarism of Italian Escape from New York knock-offs. A medieval siege centred around a gutted skyscraper is particularly entertaining, mixing Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings with the massing rot of World War Z. Alice is promoted to the role of director for this set-piece, prowling the battlements and ordering subordinates (including fellow models-turned-actresses Ruby Rose and Rola) to unleash flaming torrents on the seething undead. The resulting fire storm is spectacular: thousands upon thousands of computer generated zombies sprinting heedlessly into a swirling, beautifully composed annihilation. 

Despite also being released in 3D, Final Chapter is formally distinct from Anderson's preceding two entries. The film has clearly not been designed with the format in mind. This post-processed sequel exchanging the crawling, stereoscopic admiration of Resident Evil: Afterlife and Retribution for a more typical, rapidly edited assembly. Although a lot of the film's confrontations are communicated through action movie montage, editor Doobie White (who cut Gamer back in 2009) conjures up a genuine sense of straining agitation, reporting escalation in gasping, but always intuitive, bursts. Jovovich is key to this tactic, providing a consistently readable, physical performance that directs the audience into Alice's shotgun shell-fumbling predicament. 

Final Chapter finds Anderson in a self-referential mood too, happy to combine and reconceive beats from his previous work, massaging them towards a more adrenalised outcome. A return to the original film's Hive location offers the director the chance to not only revisit the industrial butchery suggested in 1997's Event Horizon but also permits Anderson another shot at stalking, computer generated musculature. Final Chapter's skeletal obstacle is a significant improvement on Resident Evil's arthritic Licker monster too: the Bloodshot is a flayed orc straight out of Visual 80 and Studio Kikan's The Guyver: Bio Booster Armour video cassette series, sprinting and snapping at Alice's heels. Brief but effective, this only real flaw in this sequence is a short shot of an Umbrella branded chainsaw that, somehow, goes unused. Anderson's film unfortunately resisting any temptation to swerve into full-on splatter. 

So what has Anderson cooked-up in lieu of a 3D Battle of Armageddon? The much copied Alice discovers her place within the warring dynasties behind the evil Umbrella corporation and the ways in which her photostat identity threatens their pharmaceutical hegemony. Final Chapter's concluding act then represents Anderson the writer at his best, weaving the acerbic flavour of Pat Mills comics into the bones of this video game cash-in series. An argument between Iain Glen's Dr Issacs and the elderly Alicia Marcus is particularly well observed, illustrating the pure sociopathy of rich, self-appointed saviours. With the fate of all mankind on the line, these masters of the universe bicker over controlling interests and boardroom decorum. 

Anderson's film concludes in the company of duelling facsimiles, each with grotesque, clashing perspectives on how to ensure civilisation's survival. The male clones, represented by twin Glens, attack and belittle each other; both copies eager to be recognised as the definitive mint of a man who has already faced many deaths. The female contingent - made up of Alice, the milk-eyed woman she was copied from and a treacherous computer programme that attempted to freeze a child's identity in a specific moment - have a much healthier perspective, working together to establish one complete, well-rounded human being. 

Resident Evil: Retribution

Batter through the treacly violence and it becomes obvious that Resident Evil: Afterlife was a love letter to Milla Jovovich. Writer-director-husband Paul WS Anderson wore his affection proudly, disrupting a mundane action assembly to gaze longingly at his bride. Slow motion was relentlessly deployed in the film, freezing and cataloguing Jovovich's countenance at a scale that could be projected onto the side of a building. Resident Evil: Retribution goes one further, subsuming this adulation into the language of the film's storytelling. Close-ups of Jovovich's face are used throughout as an axis, the wide-eyed constant by which the film levers itself, departing from sleep and a place of safety into extreme, high-score chasing mania. 

Set in an extremely flexible biological warfare simulation, Retribution is a series of resets and reiterations for Jovovich's Alice. Her consciousness and sense of place are repeatedly interrupted then diverted towards new scenarios that demand a fluent response. This jet-lagged quality seems to bring a biographical dimension to Retribution, Anderson elevating a continent skipping lifestyle from a behind-the-scenes calculation to a full-on narrative conundrum. The ever-changing directorial demands placed upon an actress, or model for that matter, are transformed into an explicit dilemma for this Alice. Retribution demonstrating that psychological flexibility is not only vital for an assailed clone but is, in fact, a crucial aspect of female identity in general. 

These interruptions aren't always immediately deadly either. After tumbling off a flaming oil tanker, Alice awakens in a pastel coloured suburbia. The super soldier quickly changes tact, relaxing into the role of a mother, cooking breakfast and doting on her brand new daughter in a sequence reminiscent of an early episode in Zack Snyder's take on Dawn of the Dead. Naturally, everything goes terribly wrong, prompting Alice to trade in her boot-cut jeans for towering heels and Kevlar corsets. Retribution's set-pieces, while not as sprawling as Afterlife's stereoscopic clangers, are still centred around a graceful depiction of human pulverisation. Umbrella's capital city dioramas - as well as apportioning some sense to the game series' The Mercenaries bonus mode - allow Anderson a lateral logic when staging atypical clashes, resulting in towering Axemen butchering their way through a New York traffic jam and, best of all, Alice luring the mutated pedestrians of the Shibuya Crossing into a withering, white kill corridor. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Writer-director Paul WS Anderson's Resident Evil: Afterlife is designed, first and foremost, as visual spectacle: a 3D circus attraction that prioritises figures in (slow) motion over the lumbering contrivances of your typical third sequel. These attempts at awe supersede not just every aspect of the story mechanisms driving the film but also the specific language used to communicate Anderson's extravaganza. Characters have absolutely no depth what-so-ever, operating, simply, as imperilled meat. The ensemble - made up of special forces refugees and victims - are depicted as likeable numbskulls, never asked to be anything more than attractive placeholders who don't so much emote as pose for an end of times editorial. 

Anderson's film is given over to sequences then, with plot bowing out to centre elaborate fantasies involving the director's favourite action figure (and by now wife) Milla Jovovich. Afterlife's elasticated structure allows these newlyweds the opportunity to plunder beats and beat downs from the Matrix series as well as imagery and situations from the anime that informed both The Wachowskis and, quite apparently, Anderson. Jovovich's stereoscopic Alice gets to play Carrie-Anne Moss' human missile, crashing through a gleaming tech facility, before becoming a graceful but expendable counterpoint to the cloned Agent Smith. A moment of extreme peril for one ponytailed facsimile awakens the kind of concrete crumbling psychic powers seen in umpteen Manga Video releases, while a dastardly escape directly hijacks an apocalyptic explosion from Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. 

This is not to say that Afterlife exceeds or even equals the pieces it lifts from. Martial arts action registers as stiff and under-drilled while the film's gun fights are robotic, more about affecting a strong silhouette than stressing the power or danger of firearms. The film's special effects confrontations - usually revolving around Shawn Roberts' Wesker - are particularly weak with the villain's darting movements rendered as a series of stuttering smudges. What lingers though are the ways in which Anderson subordinates even basic tension to arrive at a crawling, hyper-detailed visual design. The screen frequently exploding with impromptu but glaring light sources. A shower room fight between Ali Larter's Claire Redfield and Ray Olubowale's towering Axeman is told at a snail's pace, every colliding element trapped in a temporal bubble, attempting to blast away from each other. The sequence is audacious in the sense that Anderson has completely abandoned all filmmaking decorum to describe, at length, the protracted beauty of unyielding forces hammering into extremely movable objects.