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Evil Friday

To finish up the week, we have a special treat for you. Earlier this week we had a review of a George Romero's Resident Evil script, click here to read it. Today, we have a review of director Paul Anderson' screenplay for the movie he recently finished shooting. Do not worry, after the weekend break we will be back with more script reviews then you can imagine...

Resident Evil Script Review

"Hollyfeld, here.

I have with me the script to Resident Evil: Ground Zero, second draft, written by director Paul Anderson, and it's not bad. Some elements of the script are genuinely well written, a few fall flat, one or two are actually scary, but most of the film is simply... not bad. Again, this is an early draft, so the final version may not only be better, but also drastically different from this one, but I will give my thoughts on where the series seems to be headed.

The very best sequence in this draft is clearly the opening - a surprisingly well-paced piece of genuine horror. Although integral to the plot, the terror that slowly evolves from an average day at the office seems completely unrelated to the average Resident Evil premise (you know... zombies). On its own, this sequence deserves no small amount of praise, and if given a talented editor could genuinely become a genre classic. Though perhaps not completely original in concept, it rips off the page. It's somewhat downhill from there, unfortunately.

The next shot reveals Alice (Milla Jovovich). Naked. And believe you me, there is nothing wrong with seeing Milla Jovovich naked, but it feels obligatory... like it was just thrown in to give the movie a little bit of. Regardless, she finds herself in a great big creepy mansion, all alone, and - get this - with amnesia. Memory loss is a clichéd plot device and plays out as such here. There are a few cute ideas resulting in the premise - everyone claiming she owes them money, a plot twist in the third act - but ultimately it just seems like she suffers from amnesia so all the other characters will feel the need to explain things to her (and thusly, the audience). This is not a horrible screenwriting sin, but it seems unnecessary when there is another character that, even WITH his memory, genuinely is out of the loop and could serve the same expository purpose.

Oh well. Said character is Matt, a security guard Alice meets on the grounds who has a secret or two of his own. Shortly thereafter, twelve heavily armed commandos join them as well, and they proceed to investigate the strange occurrences of the first scene.

Paul Anderson clearly did his homework with claustrophobic action/horror films, and all the tricks are used here. To his credit, mostly to their full effect. The typical commando banter plays off well, the action scenes tend to work, and the characters that actually live long enough to have personalities are reasonably strong, as is typical with an Anderson action film. Like his previous movies, the character development is extremely familiar (nothing wrong with that), but motivations seem thin, and not everyone gets the pay off their development seems to warrant. Ironically, the most complicated character is actually the most two-dimensional... but I won't elaborate any further than that.

Similarly, Anderson also recognized that in most great horror films, the horror comes from lack of action - waiting for the scares, not the scares themselves. In the script, however, these setups don't always seem to work - even though the payoffs almost always do. With some strong editing and cinematography, however, these scenes could end up just fine.

The first page of the screenplay rather boldly states that, "IF THE SUSPENSE DOESN'T KILL YOU SOMETHING ELSE WILL," but apart from a strong opening and, conversely, a weak ending, this draft of the script is pretty much your standard action-horror fare. It could have been improved since this draft, but judging from the storyline they have chosen to work with, I think that it will be the direction that truly makes or breaks Resident Evil: Ground Zero.

And of course, the director is Paul Anderson.

Now I myself am not a card-carrying member of the Paul Anderson Hate Club. The man is not a horrible filmmaker. His films, like a few other directors in Hollywood, are perfectly fine on the surface, but if you look anywhere beneath that you find that they tend to have no substance, no heart, and certainly no evident passion. And this is the inherent flaw in all of his films - they all behave like no one cared about them; children who received a perfectly good upbringing, but were never truly loved. They have nothing to complain about, certainly, but also not much to praise. For semi-pointless action movies like Soldier and Mortal Kombat, this is a somewhat forgivable sin. We watch them, are entertained (at least I was), and then forget that they were ever made. But for a horror movie... well, let's just say that I consider Event Horizon to be one of the worst horror movies of the 1990s. Horror films don't need great scripts. Hell, some of the greatest ones ever have genuinely BAD scripts. Horror films need great directors: people with passion and vision who love and know how to manipulate audiences. Paul Anderson has never shown himself to be the man who can effectively do that.

But that doesn't mean he can't. Judging from this draft, it is clear the man is genuinely trying to create a damn good horror film, and if given the right kind of support he could be well on his way to creating one. If Anderson manages to give Resident Evil: Ground Zero just a LITTLE bit of the passion that the rest of his oeuvre is lacking, this could be end up being his best film. (Yeah, yeah... Insert obvious joke here.) At the very least, however, we can expect business as usual from the Anderson camp: solid, glossy genre work. Not a classic, but not a waste of a matinee price, either."

Stay tuned...

That's all folks...

Jean-François Allaire is TNMC's first columnist. At only 24 years old he has become a respected entertainment journalist, with his columns appearing in such major websites as Corona's Coming Attractions and Scr(i)pt magazine. Hailing from Montreal this young writer is determined to dig up all the details on the movies before they hit your local theater. If you're part of a movie production then you really need to be talking to him.