Trailer for Resident Evil: Retribution

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 January

* Contains spoilers *

Oh no, what should have been the response to the first film, the audience retribution of avoiding any more of it, has become a self-fulfilling title for film no. 5!

After I had caught up with the original film, I took the trouble to hear these people (Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, and their co-stars, plus the writer, producers, set and costume designer, Marilyn Manson and his collaborator on the score, etc.) talk up what didn't need it, as I'd already got the DVD by then, and had seen the fruit of their labour**.

(But it's not a Digital Versatile Disc for nothing - why do we have to have its versatility (it makes a great frisbee, too?) hidden in the acronym DVD, when most people reasonably imagine it to stand for 'Video' anyway?: or is the the videodisc still a patented, if aged, format?)

The only truth in any of it was - although (for someone with no knowledge of the pre-existing videogame) it was fascinating to hear how they had tried to replicate its cult world in order not to disappoint the potential fan-base - when Jovovich, as some might say, cut to the chase and said how great it was, because you could watch her half-naked in a mini-dress, much of the time soaking wet, too.

She went on to stress how important it was to be able to see her legs in the action scenes, and, true enough, we did see her break the neck of one of the living dead between her naked thighs. Probably all of this and the origin in the game explain her costume, as little suitable as Lara Croft's is as a tomb-raider, but I still do not know what it was meant to be:

Boots, for sure; then the mini-dress, with a hem on the slant; and then what covers Jovovich's modesty - at least for the majority of the film - in the form of some sort of pair of shorts. But why does the shorts' purple colour have to be so at variance, such a clash, with the bright red of the dress (don't ask me about scarlet or crimson - I haven't a clue)?

What woman, after all, seeing that outfit laid out on a bed and not knowing who she is or how she got there (just that she appears to have been showering and taken a fall), would think 'Oh, perfect - I'll wear that!', rather than 'By all means revealing, but why reveal these purple shorts?'?

Still, the video-game designers, probably 11-year-olds, covertly working on the first version at home after school, and being paid peanuts for their piecework, may not have had much visual sense, or have been under the direction of somebody with some form of colour-blindness, unable to tell that the shorts and dress, which were intended to be co-ordinated, were not in the work supplied to him / her...


* The beloved term 'theatrical trailer', as if we might be mistaking it for where Jovovich has been hanging out between takes! Fatally, she is married to the director, so she might be playing this role for the rest of her natural (as Anderson is also the writer, and, having been seen enthusing at length about his creation, convinces that he could easily generate another 23 screenplays!)...


** Perhaps they believe that there is still a rental market, for those not patient enough to wait for the item to stabilize to buy at a decent price - or perhaps they honestly believe that anyone watches the extras first, which (apart from the trailer*, which they didn't watch on the DVD) nobody does - or, more likely to be near the truth still, they make these featurettes to boost morale so the crew don't instead think 'Oh, God - another day of this mindless script!'.


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