I thought it would most likely be a new movie, but when I saw Paul W.S. Anderson's original Resident Evil from 2002 streaming on Stan, I thought it would make a good time to revisit it. After all, yesterday was also the release date of Zach Cregger's new version, which I may watch sometime this weekend.
Besides, although I did not particularly like this movie, there were some deaths in it that had a big impression on me at the time.
You may remember the scene. If not, spoiler alert.
The paramilitary strike force trying to infiltrate "The Hive" gets trapped in a hallway by the Red Queen, the AI that controls the whole testing facility that's been infected with a virus and overrun by zombies. The Queen shuts off all the exits and then goes about eliminating the four soldier in the room with a laser beam that cuts from one end of the hallway to the other.
On its first pass, it takes care of one woman by getting her in the neck. She has a thousand-yard stare as her head slowly slides off her neck hole. A man next to her is screaming because he's lost the tops of four fingers, leaving stumps of different lengths as his hand was at an angle to the laser at the time.
The second pass gets one guy in the midsection, halving him. I can't remember what happens to the screaming guy, but I'm pretty sure this one gets him too.
That leaves only the team leader, who's just made a gymnastic move involving a beam on the ceiling to improbably avoid the most recent laser. He's got another laser coming that doesn't seem to present too much difficulty, until it shifts into a cross-hatching pattern that is impossible to avoid. He utters one last expletive before resigning himself to being diced into a hundred pieces.
This, I thought, was the innovation of Resident Evil. The zombie stuff? Booo-ring.
Yet on this viewing, I slept through it.
Now you have to understand my situation regarding sleep in movies. I touch on it regularly so you probably already know some of this stuff.
If I feel a slumber coming on that is impossible to deny, I will pause the movie. I will either sleep for a short time (sometimes I set a 10-minute timer, and then snooze it or reset it) or for like three hours, at which point I give up on the viewing and go to bed. But this is almost always a proactive gesture.
If I nod off during the movie, I usually catch myself and wake back up after only a second or two. I think it might have been longer, but then I go back and I see that I missed about one line of dialogue. It's the amount of time you nod off when you're driving. A lot less dangerous, but I snap awake as though the stakes were the same.
I never fall asleep for 20 minutes in a movie without catching myself, but that's what happened during Resident Evil. With having seen the movie already, I guess maybe the pressure was off?
But it was funny to awaken, not really sure how long I'd been asleep but assuming it was only one of those nod-offs, but then being totally disoriented within the movie. And noticing that none of that strike team were still with the living characters.
Did I sleep through the only scene that caused me to want to watch this movie again?
Apparently I had. And it hadn't been just five minutes before where I was. It was like 15 minutes before. At least.
Well I wasn't going to waste the viewing by just going on from there. I had to see that strike team sliced and diced by lasers. So I did go back and watch it again through from there, even though that meant watching the same five minutes again twice, and added on to my bedtime. (On nights like this I don't usually go to bed until after 1. But at least I've already slept some before then.)
I did enjoy, and feel discomfited, by the slicing and dicing once again. Good on ya, Paul W.S. Anderson.
The rest of it? Pretty mediocre, and by the end I was already sleeping again, small amounts, through some of the end-stage scenes. I did not go back to rewatch those.
I don't think the new Resident Evil is anything like an exact remake of this movie. For one, there's no Milla Jovovich character, that I can tell, as the movie stars the suddenly hot Austin Abrams. But just generally, a guy like Zach Cregger doesn't want to make a movie set in a high-tech facility with an AI that's trying to kill everyone. There are plenty of hacks who can make that movie, and Cregger is horror's newest visionary.
So my takeaway of the viewing is that I need to develop a new level of alert regarding my sleep tendencies during a movie. It is possible for me to sleep unbidden through large chunks of a movie, so I have to become ever more vigilant if I feel the dreaded sleep monster coming on.
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