terabient

AND IT IS EVEN MORE TERRIBLE THAN YOU MAY HAVE IMAGINED!

there is no way i can talk about RE: Retribution coherently so ready yourself for painful tumblr speak. sorry :S

So the beginning is just a series of terrible ideas: first, the last scene of the previous movie, Afterlife, is rewound but in slow-motion and a melodramatic voice-over added and it takes forever and is hilarious

then there's like a billion minutes of exposition, as in, Alice is literally just looking into the camera and recapping the entire series in excruciating detail and GAWD THIS IS SO BORING PLZ SHUT UP AND START SHOOTIN ZAMBIES

anyway, after Exposition Hour it goes back to the Afterlife ending only this time it's played normally and I laughed and laughed and laughed because it's been like 15 minutes and all of it has been spent unnecessarily recapping shit. Alice falls into the ocean again but *this time it's different!* because we know she has to live, and then

and then

Alice wakes up in a cute little suburban house! =OOOOOOO And she's married to the guy she liked in the earlier movies, and it's pretty obvious this whole thing is probably a dream. (Amazingly, it ends up being something even dumber than that.) She also has an adorable daughter and

SUDDENLY ZOMBIES

so we get to see Alice go supermommy for a little bit, and then she falls and MAYBE SHE DIED???

oh wait no she's actually being held prisoner by Umbrella. in keeping with RE movie tradition Alice is mostly nekkid. also Jill Valentine is back, but also evil again because reasons, and there's an interrogation scene that's pretty boring and FINALLY the security system fucks up so Alice can escape and put on a catsuit-with-bondage-buckles thing. NOW WE ARE READY FOR BUSINESS!!1!

So Alice gets out of the tunnel and walks into an abandoned, obviously fake Tokyo and Alice is all 'whut?' After a few minutes of nothing SUDDENLY ZOMBIES and Alice runs into a newly opened corridor, where she fights the zombie horde one on one. Well, okay, it's more like 3-4 on one, but the important thing is, ZOMBIES GET KICKED IN THE FACE. Also this scene takes a billion years because everything is in -dramatic!- slo-mo and gratuitous 3D shots. Even so, it's still one of the only legitimately enjoyable scenes in the whole movie.

I think some more stuff happens but I wasn't really paying attention at that point so let's just say nothing happened and then Alice finds the central control room and *GASP* everyone is dead! OH NOOOOOOOOOOOO

Then the person who haxxor'd Umbrella's computers shows up and it's *DUN DUN DUN* Albert Wesker!!!!1!11 He wants Alice because idk, she's magic or whatever, and suddenly an Ada Wong appears and Alice starts asking Wesker wtf was up with that Tokyo? because the idea that it might be an artificial environment is completely beyond her. So she has this absolutely hysterical conversation with Wesker, where she says something to the effect that it couldn't have been an artificial environment because it was so real, and Wesker/Ada patiently explain that yes, it really was artificial. But not very well.

ACTUAL DIALOG FROM THE MOVIE:

ALICE: It was night!
WESKER: The ceiling is 300 feet high.

I DIED.

So after that's done, Wesker and Ada show Alice that the facility they're in is in Russia, and also under water. And ice. HOW WILL THEY EVER GET OUT? The plan boils down to 'meet up with special strike team which just so happens to have a Leon S. Kennedy and a Barry, then get to the only elevator to the surface before everything blows up.' (because of course everything must get blown up eventually.) Said plan is illustrated with a bunch of CGI building plans and it's very video game-esque. By that I mean the scene feels like a mission tutorial cutscene that you can't skip, because this is a movie and there is no start button. :(

i have lost my enthusiasm for recapping the entire movie and i haven't even gotten to the really crazy stuff yet. I BET YOU ARE TOTALLY BUMMED OUT, HYPOTHETICAL READER.

In short: there's a shitton of clones because Umbrella needs shittons of people to kill in their dastardly experiments and simulations, and Alice's DNA was a clone-template and apparently they can also share thoughts, because the whole Alice-in-suburbia dream actually happened, but to an Alice clone and...i don't even know what to say to that.

And there's a bunch of fighting and some of it is good but most of it is forgettable, Michelle Rodriguez plays like five different characters because HEY CLONES and also, why is Michelle Rodriguez not in more films? Because almost everything she has to do in this movie is stupid but somehow she makes it kind of wonderful? she should be everywhere, doing everything.

also she gets to beat up some dudes and it's a pretty cool fight, even though there is SLO-MO EVERYWHERE. I am pretty sure this movie would only be 45 minutes long if all the slow motion stuff was taken out.

tl;dr: this movie is awful and i loved every awful minute of it.

PS I haven't gotten a chance to write for the latest meme thing, but I'm hoping I'll have a decent amount of free time tomorrow for it.