Written by John Scalzo  on September 11, 2004

Special: I think I woke up on the wrong side of the tiny bed this morning

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As I write this we are several days from the September 10th premiere of Resident Evil: Apocalypse. The fact that a "movie based on a video game" did well enough to warrant a sequel is almost cause enough for celebration. But with the impending sequel, it has caused me to look back on the original movie and how it was treated very unfairly in reviews, particularly by Roger Ebert.

Sometimes you just gotta vent. Even if it's not very nice, and could be considered petty by some, sometimes you gotta do it. Roger Ebert's review of Resident Evil just seemed like a hack job that was put together without even watching the movie as he gets plot points wrong, ignores details that he lambastes the movie for leaving out, and then spoils the ending. I won't reprint the whole article here, because that would be highly illegal, but through the magic of the Internet you can read it by clicking here. But a few select quotes will shamble into this review of a review from time to time.

The biggest offender is Ebert's total willingness to spoil the ending of the movie and not even apologize for it. I absolutely hate when people do that, so if you have yet to see Resident Evil, skip the quote and the next paragraph now. So here he is spoiling the end, and in a way that makes no sense.

"Eventually its tongue is nailed to the floor of a train car and it is dragged behind it on the third rail. I hate it when that happens."

This line completely baffles me. He hates it when what happens? When the mutant that is a crime against humanity is defeated and the heroes win? Because that never happens in a movie. Does he hate it when the big monster blows up in a great ball of fire? No, that happens a lot too. Maybe he hates this particular instance where the creature is burned up by being dragged behind a train. Except that's fairly unique. It's not totally original, I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere, it just seems like a strange thing to cause hatred in a reviewer.

"What I don't understand is why zombies are so graceless. They walk with the lurching shuffle of a drunk trying to skate through urped Slurpees to the men's room."

And this is just a shameless jab. Before 28 Days Later popularized the "running zombie", 99% of all zombie movies featured the undead as slow, lumbering, stiff creatures that only win because they can swarm the relative handful of human survivors. A professional film critic with Ebert's experience should (and make no mistake, he does) know that.

"The characters have no small talk. Their dialogue consists of commands, explanations, exclamations and ejaculations."

While dialogue is certainly something Ebert should have an ear for, I'm not sure if Resident Evil is the right place to be expecting it. For a movie that centers on a covert operation taking place more or less in real time creates a very focused narrative. As the zombie hordes are literally salivating at your doorstep, I don't think it's time to turn to Commando #2 and ask "Have you conquered that erectile dysfunction problem yet?"

He also gets several plot points just plain wrong or ruins other scenes. The commando unit is misidentified as a team of scientists. This leads to a rant about how a character knows the blood on the floor comes from a dead person even though the character explains exactly how he knows that. And he never claims to be a scientist. It gets worse when the movie pulls out one of Ebert's pet peeves: the digital readout. The digital readout marks how much time is left before the lab locks down completely after it had already locked down completely. Ebert makes a joke, even after it is explained that the commando team has to override the lockdown and in doing so the doors will close again in two hours. If he had been paying attention, he would have seen that part. On a final note, Ebert tells us very explicitly which characters live and which will die. Thanks for ruining any suspense the movie was trying to build.

And while it's commendable that Ebert makes a (well-deserved) joke at the expense of almost every character's lack of a name, all of his barbs come from outside sources. "According to the Internet Movie Database, Jovovich plays 'Alice/Janus Prospero/Marsha Thompson,' although I don't believe anybody ever calls her anything." This is true and the name of Milla Jovovich's character on the IMDB days after the movie was released was pretty ridiculous, but what good does wasting a paragraph on the IMDB do when you're supposed to be writing a review of Resident Evil?

I'm sure some of you are thinking "How dare this punk criticize the writing of Roger Ebert, a professional film critic for over twenty years. And besides, he's a video game writer". Well you know what, you're right. I am a punk kid. But I have a forum that allows me to share my views with the Internet community and I'm going to write what I want to write. And even though his audience is considerably bigger, Roger Ebert can do the same. That's where we're equals.

Of course, the simplest explanation is that Resident Evil was not made for people like Roger Ebert. It was made for the teenage boys and the fans of the game to drop their $8 on opening weekend and that would be the end of it. I'm not saying he can't hate it, because lets face it, beyond the video game connection and a few choice scenes, no one would call Resident Evil high art. This leads into a bigger theme that I've noticed in Ebert's reviews for the last few years. He has grown to hate almost all horror movies with a fiery, burning passion. Rather than review the movies as a whole, he takes one or two small plot points (in this case, Milla Jovovich's name and zombie blood) and rips them to shreds while giving away the ending and ignoring the other 95% of the movie. I think Roger Ebert is burned out on horror movies. He just doesn't like them anymore and it's not fair to go into a movie to review with that kind of a bias.

I really do like Roger Ebert's writing. He is probably the fairest critic out there when it comes to movies as a whole instead of deciding that only small indie movies are worthy of praise, as so many other critics do. No, Ebert will praise some movies while slamming others that deserve it, regardless of whether they are small independent movies or big studio fare. It doesn't matter to him, a good movie is a good movie but when it comes to horror, he just needs to take a breather.

Roger Ebert's review of Resident Evil doesn't affect my affection for the movie one bit. I don't like it less because he hates it and I have no intention of calling it a cinematic masterpiece. But a great man once said that we video game fans have to defend The Cause of video game movies and really...

I just wanted to vent about someone else's opinion of a movie I like. This is the Internet after all.

If anyone is interested, here is a link to Roger Ebert's review of Resident Evil: Apocalypse.