Milla Jovovich Movie:

		List Price: $19.94		Label: Sony Pictures Salesrank: 6644 Released: September 4, 2007
		Our Price: $9.39
		Used Price: $4.50
		MPAA Rating: R (Restricted) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:

Resident Evil: Something rotten is brewing beneath the industrial mecca known as Raccoon City. Unknown to its millions of residents, a huge underground bioengineering facility known as The Hive has accidentally unleashed the deadly and mutating T-virus, killing all of its employees. To contain the leak, the governing supercomputer, Red Queen, has sealed all entrances and exits. Now a team of highly-trained super commandos including Rain (Michelle Rodriguez - The Fast and the Furious, Girlfight), Alice (Milla Jovovich - The Fifth Element) and Matt (Eric Mabius - Cruel Intentions) must race to penetrate The Hive in order to isolate the T-virus before it overwhelms humanity. To do so, they must get past the Red Queen's deadly defenses, face the flesh-eating undead employees, fight killer mutant dogs and battle The Licker, a genetically mutated savage beast whose strength increases with each of its slain victims.

Resident Evil Apocalypse : After narrowly escaping the horrors of the underground Hive facility, Alice (Milla Jovovich) is quickly thrust back into a war raging above ground between the living and the Undead. As the city is locked down under quarantine, Alice joins a small band of elite soldiers, led by Valentine (Sienna Guillory, Love, Actually) and Carlos (Oded Fehr, The Mummy Returns), enlisted to rescue the missing daughter of Dr. Ashford, the creator of the mutating T-virus. It’s a heart-pounding race against time as the group faces off against hordes of blood- thirsty zombies, stealthy Lickers, mutant canines and the most sinister foe yet. Written and produced by the visionary director of Resident Evil, Paul W. S. Anderson (Alien Vs. Predator) and directed by Alexander Witt, Resident Evil Apocalypse is a superior sci-fi suspense sequel.

Resident Evil / Resident Evil: Apocalypse Reviews:
Mila Jojovich
2008-12-03 - If you like Mila Jojovich then these are a great set of movies. She kicks butt and is good to look at. Zombie movies with Mila kick.

Love both movies
2008-10-19 - I have wanted to get these for quite awhile and decided that getting both at the same time was a bargain.

A Great Deal On The Modern Day Zombie Franchise Of Resident Evil.
2008-09-03 - For those who haven't seen probably the most successful adaptation of a video game to live-action film franchise, you might get a kick out of Resident Evil. Starring Milla Jovovich as Alice, a chief security officer for Raccoon City's Umbrella Corporation. Within Umbrella's secret lab called The Hive, a deadly T-Virus accidently gets released, turning most living things into blood-thirsty zombies. Alice, with strange implanted memories haunting her as well, must find a way to stop the virus with a group of various similarly heroic characters, ending up with one last battle with a very large super mutant in end's way.

Sound like a video game? Well both the first and second chapter here at times plays out like one, even though minus a few established characters, the storyline here veers off the original plot laid out by Capcom's original playable ones. But to the moderate, and even the more dedicated ones like myself, Resident Evil is a decent addition into Zombiedom. Of course it's not going to surpass original works like 80's Italian fare or George Romero's original trilogy (even though he was rumored to direct/write the first installment, only to be turned away), but there has been worse Zombie films and Jovovich does do a good job playing the lead.

As for this new re-release combo of the first two films, I was expecting the cheap way out with maybe the original '02 release one discer of the first movie packaged with the Disc One of the sequel. But surprisingly that's not the case. The discs in this set are a brand new piece, with Disc One having BOTH movies on the same DVD-9 single sided, dual layer disc. This was very cool, with a brand new menu with one movie per layer, with only two audio tracks (5.1 English/French). You'd expect that the bitrate would be very low for these movies, but since this was re-encoded in 2007, both movie's rate seem very high, and picture looking superb for SD. As for the second disc, it's a mixed bag. If you were expecting all the bonus features from the 2 Disc individual releases, forget it. Since this release was made just to promote the theatrical release of the third film, '07's somewhat disapointing Extinction, they mostly deal with sneak peeks of it. However, there are a few extras outside of Number Three, but they all deal with Apocalypse, so no behind-the-scenes of the original, not to mention the films themselves are missing their commentaries from those as well. There is a neat trivia game on Disc Two with some pretty hardcore questions on Apocalypse, but they could have easily given us more than what they did.

Overall, this is a great way to get the first two films at a good price if all you're really looking for is the movies and a morsel of extras. As I write this, it's been a year since this was released and I doubt it will be in print for much longer due to Extinction now old news on DVD. But if you don't own the first two films and have interest in modern-day Zombies I'd suggest picking it up cheap, then if you really, really like the films, spend the extra buck and buy the extensive 2 Disc versions and with Extinction, or wait for a possible complete boxset in the future.
(RedSabbath Rating:8.0/10)

hoppediz
2008-06-23 - Milla Jovovich proves once more that she is not only beautiful but also a great actress. Both films are creating lots of suspense and at times one is terrified by horror. A Must for all friends of movies of this kind. It's fast and full of action, no boring moments. Great entertainment! Good that the third part is already available on DVD which I can highly recommend as well.

An extra star for offering buyers a first-rate bargain
2008-04-19 - I have on many occasions docked a set a star for absurd pricing. For instance, most of the STAR TREK sets are subject to this -- though I must add that as I write this review all of the STAR TREK boxes have had their prices dropped down to prices that are actually affordable (if the prices were permanent instead of merely for a month or two, I would probably start collecting some of my favorite series) -- but this is the first time that I can recall giving a disc a star for bargain pricing. If you have any interest at all in RESIDENT EVIL, they've priced this as a level where you can hardly refuse buying it.

If you want to get at the heart of what keeps all three films in the RESIDENT EVIL series from being very good it is this: the assumption that surface is everything. The mark of good movies is the number of subtexts that they generate, but with the RESIDENT EVIL franchise, there is a powerful resistance to subtext. For instance, even if you want to do an analysis of the tropes that attach to the main character of Alice, you will find resistance at every point. Why? Because the film itself has lingered in every frame on surface alone, completely resisting imbuing the film with more than just a succession of glittering images. There are entire visual sequences that have no function whatsoever but to merely paint a pretty picture. As a result, human elements are left entirely aside.

This obsession with surface and spectacle is unfortunate because Alice is potentially a fascinating character. Very occasionally the films in the series almost begin to toy with character development, but always pull back immediately after toying with it for a brief second. At the hand of more gifted filmmakers, Alice could have had the potential to become a poor man or woman's Ripley or Buffy or Max Guevera. At the hands of only moderately gifted filmmakers, we get little or no sense of her character, no real idea of what makes her tick, utterly no hint of what she wants, and very, very little about how she feels about things. Milla Jovovich is so gorgeous that she manages to make us forget how poorly drawn her character is. But the weak writing and poor direction never allows the films to ascend above slick spectacle.

These first two movies tell the first two parts of Alice's descension into her own nightmare land. The Alice in Wonderland imagery is reinforced at several points, not least in the original by naming the Hive's computer The Red Queen. And in the third movie in the sequence, EXTINCTION, a version of "White Rabbit" by Collide plays over the closing credits. During these films Alice, who initially suffers from amnesia, first learns from physical memory that she is a surreally gifted martial artist and weapons user, then recalls that she was head of security at the Hive, and later learns that her blood bonds to the virus that is killing everyone else, enhancing her strength, reflexes, and senses to absurd levels. What keeps the series from being very good is that the films continually focus on what these powers mean for what she can do to the bad guys, never on how it is affecting her. Contrast this to the way that this would have been done by any of a number of men (and why is it always men -- why haven't women helmed movies or TV shows with female heroes?) like James Cameron, Joss Whedon, Luc Besson, Ridley Scott, or Ron Moore. Under any of these there would have been as much or more about what all of this was doing to Alice. But then, all of these writers/directors/producers are more (or at least as much) concerned with the inner as the outer.

In short, these are extraordinarily superficial films. All surface, no depth, no interesting characters (mainly because of no character development). Having said that, the film does present superior surface. Once you accept that the films have nothing to offer but sheer surface, you can moderate your expectations and just go with that. Once I realized that these films would not/could not be more than a succession of spectacles, I surrendered and moderately enjoyed them. Was I ever truly entertained? Of course not. Was I bored? Not really.

I will add one last observation. The three films that make up the RESIDENT EVIL trilogy (soon to be a quartet, with the addition of RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION) easily comprise the most interesting films ever made based on video games. That would be a more impression achievement if there had been some really good movies based on that source, but it is unlikely for some time that another game will produce such a film franchise.