Think what you’d like about the Resident Evil franchise (I think it’s magically poopalicious), but the trailers have a smug way of toying with the audience. Instead of delivering the standard "When the dead rise, humanity falls" cliche, we’ve been treated to their warm and cozy "Oh-la-la, it’s sexy time", only to be cold-cocked with "Nuh-uh-uh! It’s zombie time!"
If you didn’t see the new trailer for Resident Evil: Extinction pre-Ghost Rider and don’t haunt all things Quicktime, it’s out and ready for consumption, continuing the "zombie-surprise" trend and even not-so-subtly showing the Vegas strip for the gaudy pastiche of mimicry that it’s become. Double cocked!
Once the gimmick of surprise is up, however, it’s back to the more traditional and fast-clipped shots of Alice kickin’ zombie tail with big boots, rent nylons and a couple rusty butter knives.
Some may rightly complain the trailer CGI looks like it was forged in a mix of the cooperative bowels of the same software used to create Gunstars in the 80s and the sprouting palm trees of 2001’s The Mummy Returns. Some may point out the obvious turn toward Mad Max versus the metaphorical Eyeballs of the Hills. Still, there’s just something about the replacement of night-time/dark alley cinematography (ala the first two) with a bright and washed out apocolyptic desert that’s refreshingly cool looking.
A disclaimer, if I may: I’m currently in the middle of Max Brooks’ fantastic novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, so my perception may be a little skewed by its rosy glow– which makes all things zombies look rad.
Judge for yourselves here.