Resident Evil: Damnation - Film Review

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Diehard Resident Evil fans aside, there is something here for everyone. Zombie films are not just about zombies. For those of us who appreciate the zombie genre, they are inherently political. A zombie film is not just about a flesh eating reanimated corpse apocalypse, its all about analogies and symbolic representation. However rest assured, zombie films aren't all about the serious, most are quite light hearted.

Resident Evil or Biohazard, as it is known in its native Japan, is one of the most well known contemporary zombie themed videogames turned Hollywood film franchise. Capcom, the videogame developer, has created a few CGI (computer generated imagery) or 3D films that follow a different storyline to the live action films. The CGI films are based more on the videogames while the live action films focus are more original story with elements from the videogames.



Resident Evil: Damnation is the latest Capcom RE film. It depicts events between the Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6 games. Although the film completely misses an opportunity to bring the story of RE5 to the screen it makes the story of RE6 more tolerable. RE5 was a much awaited shake up to the series as the story featured a new character and battling through an intelligent zombie (plaga) invested Africa while RE6 was just about villages of angry plaga in the Eastern European countryside.

The plaga are upper up the evolution ladder than the T-virus (normal zombies). They are fast moving, and are able to communicate with each other. Infection occurs when a plagaretrieves a plaga parasite from their mouths and force feeds it to an unaffected host. The parasite combines with their nervous system and takes control. When agitated the plaga's head breaks open to reveal a large mass of sinister tentacles.

Damnation was released 2012, however it eerily echoes the current political situation in Ukraine. Damantion begins when the Eastern Slav Republic seeks independence from Russia and the Eastern Slav government is at war with rebels. The pretext (on the world news) is that non-human bio-weapons have been cited in the fighting.

Enter Leon S. Kennedy, once a regular cop who now dedicates his life to fighting bio-organic weapons (BOWs), who immediately loses contact with the US government upon landing in the Eastern Slav Republic. Leon immediately encounters a licker (lion like mutated monster) who kills his CIA informant. Leon is then swiftly captured by a group of rebels among them the rebel leader Sasha and an elder who is somehow able to control the licker. Leon and the rebels quickly encounter several plaga.

The Eastern Slav Republic's president, Svetlana Belikova, meets with Ada Wong, who is posing as a representative of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA). BSAA is the organisation that is fighting against BOWs, specifically the ones that the Umbrella corporation creates. Ada, an agent of Umbrella corp, has one objective and that is to retrieve a sample of the plaga virus that she helped unleash in an earlier game. The love-hate between Leon and Ada is shown in their chance encounters, which prove the licker and plaga aren't the only BOWs in the Eastern Slav Republic.

Damnation features some scenes which look like a walkthrough (someone playing through a videogame) which intensifies certain scenes to full effect. Although it enables fans of the games to fully focus on the story, there is just something that makes the film not as smooth as a Pixar movie. The film offers some well done action scenes and the plot wraps up the politics in a plausible way. Akin to the other RE stories, it is about the extremes that people will go to in order to further their own agenda.

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