Prologue. The 21st century, Raccoon City is one of the many quiet urban centers in America, with nice people and pretty landscapes, an ideal city to establish the core of one of the world's largest multinational corporations, the Umbrella Corporation.
The Umbrella is a colossal commercial power in the United States; nine out of ten homes use its products. Its political and financial influence is felt everywhere. Officially, it is the largest provider of computer technology and medical and health products. However, unbeknownst to its own employees, its most substantial profits come from military technology, genetic experimentation, and biological weapons.
The Hive, their top-secret laboratory, is located at a considerable depth beneath the streets of Raccoon City. It houses over 500 employees who study, work, and live underground. Here, the "T-Virus" was born, a powerful microorganism capable of regenerating dead cells.
Protecting all of this is "The Red Queen," the pinnacle of artificial intelligence, a computer that controls everything and everyone.
The demonstration arrives when one of the test tubes containing the virus is broken, triggering its spread throughout the Hive. The Red Queen's intervention is immediate.
It seals the entire laboratory, exterminating any living being with gas because its priority is to prevent the virus from reaching the surface.
The Umbrella Corp. decides to intervene by sending a team of specialized soldiers to the disaster site. They will be the first witnesses of the effectiveness of the T-virus, as the dead will resurrect.
After a grueling battle for survival, even against time (the Hive's door has an automatic permanent closure timer), only two of them, Alice and Matt, manage to return alive, but they will be captured and placed in quarantine upon exit.
Upon waking up in a hospital, Alice finds herself in an apocalyptic scenario. The evil that had developed underground is now throughout the city.
A quick preamble: if you haven't seen the first "Resident Evil" by Paul Anderson (Alien vs. Predator) from 2002, it's pointless to watch this sequel by Alexander Witt (2004).
Witt is making his directorial debut (a judgment? Good! It could have been worse). Up until that point, he had only collaborated on films like "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" and "Daredevil."
Unlike the first film, this "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" is much more faithful to the characters (and unfortunately only to them) of the Capcom video game, exactly the third one for the Sony PlayStation 1. Here we find Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory - "Love Actually" from 2003), the S.T.A.R.S. soldiers, and the Umbrella mercenaries, ending with the most surprising and pleasant (in the game, it was not at all), the mutant monster Nemesis (remember?).
Well, at this point, the premises seemed to be all there for a worthy sequel and even better than its predecessor or at least to create the best cinematic adaptation of a video game. However, Alexander Witt chose to take a different path than expected. By almost completely abandoning the horror atmospheres (the main characteristics of both the first film and the game), he threw himself headfirst into the most frenetic action an horror film had ever had.
Very fast scenes, explosions, tons of lead flying from all directions, pure spectacle body-to-body contact that makes you exclaim: how cool and tough they are!!! In short...it seems more like a "Mission: Impossible" with a Tom Cruise escaping from the bad guys on the cars of "Fast and Furious" than a horror film, which, by the way, should adhere to the game since it is a cinematic adaptation. Thus, the presence of zombies becomes marginal. It is evidently also the director's choice to focus on the sexy appeal of Milla Jovovich and her co-star (Sienna Guillory) to support the rest of the film; it seems that the only thing he managed to transport from pixel to tape, besides the characters mentioned earlier, is the title!!!
Therefore, a film recommended especially to fans of the video game, but given the industrial quantity of action, also to the dads of said fans.
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