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: 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. 

Mortal Kombat

Paul WS Anderson's Mortal Kombat is a plastic, knowingly absurd take on Enter the Dragon that trades opium ring smashing for texture free CG and lopsided pacts with treacherous, intergalactic sorcerers. Kevin Droney's screenplay is undercooked, its characters a shallow procession with simplistic, one-dimensional objectives. Exciting trials - some of which have an obvious, dynamic connection to the Midway Games arcade series that the film is based on - are introduced then tossed off, usually in dialogue. The tournament structure that underpins Mortal Kombat is rendered nonsensical too, quickly dissolving into a series of braggadocios challenges that track neither winner nor loser. Anderson and Cinematographer John R Leonetti's film is consistently handsome though, particularly the smoky, visually dense arenas that trap the various ninja fights. 

As is often the case with Anderson's work, Mortal Kombat features one scene that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the film. In this instance it's a delirious reshoot sequence: a fight between Robin Shou's Liu Kang and Keith Cooke's Reptile, levered in after test screenings called attention to the lack of punch-ups. The brawl that has been slotted in here proceeds with the same demented energy as Resident Evil: Afterlife's Axeman interlude. Indeed both of these confrontations seem to be happening just outside of the respective films they inhabit; twin digressions that magnify then explode the established language of their parent pieces. In Mortal Kombat this translates to a tighter and meaner approach to Anderson's twirling take on martial arts. The shorter, more impactful chains between Cooke and D&B Films veteran Shou becoming an animated, physical extension of the pounding Traci Lords and Juno Reactor techno track that accompanies this brawl. Camerawork throughout the fight is looser as well, our perspective frequently becoming a punch-drunk participant. Cooke is even permitted to place his hands on top of the screen, using his weight to angle our viewpoint down, towards his incoming knees. 

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. 

Soldier

Soldier makes an awful first impression. The audience is immediately assaulted with disconnected gun sounds: cannon reports so stock and overused that they instantly register as redundant rather than foreboding or exciting. The opening credits font goes one better, with a Stencil type on loan from television's The A-Team. Desperate to position itself as Blade Runner adjacent - mainly via winking data read-outs - Soldier fumbles its own intrigue with a graceless presentation and an initial editing dynamic utterly at odds with the esoteric end of speculative science fiction. Eventually though, Paul WS Anderson's film develops a steady but intense rhythm, one largely thanks to the choices Kurt Russell makes describing his lonely mamluk.

Dumped on top of an intergalactic refuse heap after an unsuccessful run-in with his replacement (Jason Scott Lee's genetically engineered infantryman, Caine), Russell's square, toyetic Sergeant Todd is rescued by the inhabitants of this junk planet. These scrounger Samaritans nurse Todd back to health, attempting to integrate this displaced muscle monster into their bric-a-brac society. The soldier struggles to connect with these nuclear families though. Raised from birth to win and kill, Todd cannot seem to grasp anything else. Anderson, Russell, and screenwriter David Webb Peoples balance their film on this premise, reducing the majority of Todd's arc to sweeping action rather than stuttering insight. We don't see emotional walls come tumbling down then, Todd taking very little from his new community other than it meets the criteria of an objective. One that he now wants to protect from the kitbash drop ships, bearing down.

Although Soldier obviously terminates in extreme conflict, the film does, fleetingly, entertain themes of arrested emotional development. Connie Nielsen's Sandra would, in a lesser piece, be eager to assume the role of love interest for the very strong and very silent Sergeant Todd. Here his sexless fascination with the contents of her hemp sweater seems closer to a child's innate yearning for maternal, skin-to-skin connection. Sandra's husband, Sean Pertwee's Mace, is never subordinated or positioned as physically weak either. On the contrary, Mace is closer to a patient step-father, one trying to puzzle out the bad-wiring in his new charge's head. Similarly, there's no hate in the climactic head-to-head battle between Todd and Caine. The fight's assembly even features a couple of incredulous glances between the two, as if both men recognise some deeper, unspoken connection that they are unable to interpret. Possessed of a real sadness, Soldier is, essentially, The Remains of the Day for cheery meat heads.

AVP: Alien vs Predator

AVP: Alien vs Predator's finest quality is that co-writer-director Paul WS Anderson has understood that one of the Alien series' key tensions is that women, no matter how accomplished they are, end up routinely ignored by their male colleagues. Like Ripley before her, Sanaa Lathan's Alexa Woods is the smartest, most capable person in the room and, just like Ripley, the men who buzz around her interpret her informed, credible guidance as dreary micromanagement designed to ruin their fun. Of course then Woods goes on to be the last human standing, surviving long after everybody else.

AVP stammers elsewhere. Anderson and accomplice Shane Salerno write everything shorthand, meaning character and detail are delivered in scenes that pivot on one-upmanship and zings. It's a shame the lower rating certificate that AVP aims for doesn't really support the profanity required to make these scenes bearable. For the most part, people in AVP are simply cogs in an efficient, genre literate machine that has a pressing need for victims. Hence everyone is deliberately underwritten in case we get too attached to them. The effect of this choice is a film full of aggressively disinteresting drones marching towards their evisceration.

Anderson and Salerno have a little fun with their cast's disposability, casting aside a half-dozen eligible men (and one woman) to anoint an adolescent Predator as the closest thing to a love interest for Alexa. The seven-foot tall big-game hunter even goes so far as to bashfully reveal his monstrous face to his new best friend. This moment would probably sing if the mask Amalgamated Dynamics delivered was lit and photographed to conceal its stuttering motors and waxy, synthetic hide. Likewise, suit actor Ian Whyte conveys very little of the elegant, androgynous determination that Kevin Peter Hall brought to Predator and Predator 2.

AVP's Predators are lumps, their cinched waists and barrel chests explicitly recalling the kind of simplistic, easily reproducible shapes you see in cheap supermarket action figures. The Aliens don't fair much better. Following on from their work on Alien: Resurrection, Amalgamated Dynamics once again render the title creature with elongated, insectile limbs and a rabid, bestial gait. The added screentime required to churn through actual fights scenes doesn't help, we're either stuck with ugly CG pouncing or prolonged glimpses that utterly expose the weightless, jittery rubber required to create the Alien's back-piping. We're a long way from Giger using repurposed medical grade bones and Rolls-Royce cooling tubes to arrive at something genuinely nightmarish.

Death Race

If you browsed print criticism of Paul W S Anderson's Death Race, you'll have noted repeated assurances from critics that the film's aesthetic resembled that of a video game. Does it though? In some corners, likening a motion picture to a video game has become lazy shorthand for stressing that a shallow artificiality has been detected in the piece. Death Race fits that bill: it's a film thrash-cut to a point were geography and the spatial relationships of characters are unintelligible. Anderson's remake is superficial, mindless and designed to elicit maximum gratification from a pubescent, predominantly male audience, hence it resembles a 'lower' art. Comparing a film to a video game is seen as the absolute lowest kind of slight. The filmmakers are so inept that they've accidentally made something subterranean. There's an arts class system in place, with video games right at the absolute bottom of the heap.

Perhaps you wonder why this is the case? Is it the medium's (relative) newness that offends? Or is it that games are exclusively written on computers in an office setting? This carpeted crucible apparently antithetical to many people's idea of what art is. These sort of people, it must be said, are those who seem to believe that films and music are simply wished into being by magical 'creatives' rather than toiled over in locked, industrialised settings. Video games are then a horrifying example of incomprehensible modernity: they're mass-produced, and largely premised on the ability to express the violent urges that most responsible adults would deem embarrassing. They're artless simulation, basically. Even with all of this in mind, Death Race does not resemble any kind of video game I've ever played. More specifically, Death Race does not resemble a racing game. 

Video games are about play. They're about feedback led choices in scenarios with hardwired rules. The accurate feedback required to make second-by-second decisions means the player requires a static viewpoint. Death Race is nothing like this. The film's action viewed from hundreds of brief, contrary vantages. In video games based around racing vehicles there is a choice - you are usually either explicitly the driver (inhabiting an increasingly realistic cockpit), a third-person perspective that resembles that of a child playing with their toy or, literally, the vehicle itself. You are never anything as passive as an audience. Anderson's Death Race is constructed out of tiny disconnected impressions, but, in the main, it represents the crowd's impression of events. There is no overall sequence. This is the problem, if you can't understand what is going on, you can't play. 

Interactive viewpoints for racing games have long been patterned after Claude Lelouch's 1976 short film C'etait un rendez-vous. This exhilarating piece is one unbroken eight-minute take, shot through the eyes of a speeding car. This sustained perspective paying dividends in immersion. You're there for the duration of the hair-raising drive, rather than just a jumble of carefully selected highlights. Comparatively, Death Race is about a simulated kind of excitement, and perhaps this is were these critics falter. Presumably, nothing genuinely spectacular was captured on film during the making of Death Race or, perhaps, nothing spectacular enough. Anderson's rolling cameras captured no sequences so arresting that whoever directed the film's moment-to-moment assembly then felt emboldened enough to hold on a particular shot, and allow the audience to really take in an overall sense of space. Instead the film is viewed in fragments, the perspective repeatedly juggled in the hopes of suggesting chaos. There is no sense of speed in Anderson's Death Race. Rapidly cutting on fast moving cars kills any sensation of speed. There is no propulsion. Cars move by the same barely dressed warehouse set again and again. They may as well be trapped in amber. Death Race resembles nothing at all.