Tag: movie

#oneaday Day 854: Resident. EEEVIL. FILM!

Today on my holidays, I rode the bus and I went to the cinema and I saw Resident Evil. It was nice and it was fun. I enjoyed the popcorn and the weird drink I had never heard of but which was quite nice.

Switching off the "seven year old writing about their holidays" mode, yes, I did indeed go to see Resident Evil at the cinema today. I had been promising myself this as something to do during my week off, and had always been intending to go while Andie was away, as I seriously doubted (correctly) that Andie would want to go and see it. I treated myself to a seat right at the front of the "nice" seats (the ones that recline!), a bucket of popcorn and a big drink. And it was a good time!

The movie itself is endearingly stupid. If I were to get analytical and critic-y about it, I would say that it is a sequence of largely unrelated vignettes featuring dialogue that primarily consists of the word "fuck", which are all quite entertaining in themselves, and which eventually build to a slightly unsatisfying conclusion. But this is not a movie intended to be taken seriously. It is a movie about spectacle, and wilfully observing that horror and comedy are, more often than not, very much adjacent to one another. It was a genuinely amusing movie — and it's clear that this was entirely intentional, too.

For the unfamiliar, the 2026 Resident Evil movie follows the misadventures of Bryan, a medical courier tasked with delivering a top-priority package to Raccoon City General Hospital. Along the way, his drive through the snowy night is interrupted by him hitting what he believes is a regular human being, but which becomes clear almost immediately is an infected person. He flees into a nearby spooky house after his "victim" causes a passing police officer to crash, and finds himself confronted with a variety of other monsters. The movie then charts his gradual journey towards his eventual destination, with a kind of half-hearted side plot about his fear of becoming a parent with his partner.

Resident Evil is not particularly "good" from a narrative perspective, then. It's largely a sequence of Things Happening, and Bryan's characterisation primarily consists of him saying "fuck" a lot and occasionally exhibiting half-arsed anguish over the fact he left his girlfriend hanging over a conversation about her apparently being pregnant.

But where it does shine is in its wilful adoption of the conventions of survival horror video games. The "everyman" protagonist who is barely competent at the things they end up forced to do as a result of the horrifying situation in which they find themselves. The inexplicable prevalence of locked doors that cannot be opened just by shooting the locks off them. The fact that incidental characters more often than not end up dead just a few minutes after they have been introduced. The gradual escalation of stakes in rough parallel with the level of firepower the protagonist has. And the way that, after not very long at all, you are almost desensitised to the sight of blood and gore, because there has just been so much of it.

In short, the film is primarily entertaining because of its overall vibes, rather than anything especially clever or noteworthy that it is doing with narrative, themes and characterisation. That's no bad thing, mind; if there's one thing Resident Evil as a video game series has never been strong on, it's narrative, themes and characterisation. The series knows that it is dumb and has always been dumb, and prides itself on its predictability in many ways — but that doesn't, in any way, stop it from being enjoyable. In fact, for many people, it is this "switch your brain off and just enjoy the absurdity" mentality that keeps them coming back for more Resident Evil games; the series is a deliberate and stark contrast to Silent Hill in this regard, and it means that the two can happily coexist, despite the original Silent Hill being initially regarded as Konami's response to Capcom's series back on its original release.

So I enjoyed the Resident Evil movie, then, and I'm glad I went to see it at the cinema. The big screen and the general environment added to the experience a great deal; the fact seeing a movie at the cinema is something you cannot help but enjoy in the moment, without external distractions (hopefully — turn your fuckin' phone off!) really helped, too.

I'm not going to be in any rush to see it again or pick it up on Blu-Ray or anything, but I am glad I went, I am glad I experienced it — and I agree with many people that, while it has many shortcomings taken as a movie on its own merits, as an adaptation of its source material and an homage to video games in general, it does a fantastic job.

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2489: Kingsglaive

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I watched the Final Fantasy XV movie Kingsglaive this evening. It was pretty spectacular, and as something to get one in the mood for Final Fantasy XV it does its job admirably. Taken by itself, it's perhaps a little heavy on the action sequences and light on the justifications that link them together, but for a Final Fantasy fan such as myself, it was fanservice heaven.

Unlike the previous Final Fantasy movie The Spirits Within, which wasn't based on an existing game and only had the loosest of thematic similarities to the venerable series, Kingsglaive very much knew who its primary audience was. As such, the whole thing was riddled with little nods and references to other games in the series.

A wide shot of the Lucian city of Insomnia had a billboard for the "Bank of Spira", a reference to Final Fantasy X's world. Water-based summon Leviathan just happened to be in a giant fishtank present at a highbrow reception. One of the enemy airships inexplicably had everyone's favourite pervy octopus Ultros inside it, though sadly without a speaking role. The "demons" that the antagonists of the piece, the Empire, bring to bear on the Lucians are a dead ringer for Final Fantasy VII's Diamond Weapon. And let's not, of course, forget the presence of Knights of the Round who, after Heavensward, have now played a starring role in two consecutive Final Fantasy works as opposed to being a "secret" summon for the truly dedicated player to uncover.

The movie did a great job of setting the scene and introducing some of the lore that is clearly going to be central to Final Fantasy XV as a whole. It's nice to see that the game is incorporating elements of both classic Final Fantasy — crystals being of paramount importance to the world's magic being the main one — and the more recent titles with modern-to-futuristic technology being in evidence.

I'm a big fan of settings that combine technology and magic, and I think it's traditionally been a rather underexplored variant on fantasy. Sure, the idea of magic combined with the modern world has been popularised by the Harry Potter series in recent years, but it's something that is always interesting to explore, I think. There's a quote from horror game Outlast that stuck with me and that I will now probably butcher for you now: "show a man from the past technology and he will think it is magic; show a man from the present magic and he will think it is technology." This is the core of what's interesting about it, I think: if you have magic, why do you need technology, and vice versa?

This is something I also found interesting about Shadowrun Hong Kong, which I finished earlier today. Shadowrun actually almost plays down its fantastic elements outside of some occasional references to "The Awakening", mages occasionally being among the foes that stand in your way and the fact that orks, elves and dwarves are happily wandering around in a traditionally human-only world. By de-emphasising the fantastic elements, they simply felt natural and "normal" even though they're far from reality.

Final Fantasy has always played up its more fantastic elements, by contrast, and Kingsglaive was no exception to this rule, with a spectacular and lengthy final battle raging between the protagonist and the antagonist, set to a backdrop of gigantic summoned titans and demons smacking the shit out of each other, the foreground and background conflicts taking turns to mirror one another.

I absolutely love this particular breed of overblown insanity and always have done. It's so fantastic and unbelievable that it becomes perfect escapism: something that literally cannot be done in reality, so becomes all the more appealing to be a part of, even if it's only as a passive observer.

If the main game of Final Fantasy XV is half as spectacular as Kingsglaive was, I'll be very happy indeed. But since it's the centrepoint of an incredibly ambitious transmedia campaign encompassing a computer-generated move, an anime series, mobile games and then finally the damn game itself when it comes out at the end of this month, I'm anticipating something even more joyfully exuberant.

I don't doubt the game will have its haters, as its predecessors also have. (I've given up arguing with people who can't see the good in the FFXIII series, it's just not worth the stress.) But I for one cannot wait to step into Noctis' lovingly-rendered boots and start exploring this fantastic new world, and watching Kingsglaive this evening has made the wait just a smidge more agonising.