Weekly Roundup for 26 October 2014
October 26, 2014
This week saw more than a little Netflix viewing. I’ll have a review up later for Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, but these three didn’t do enough for me to warrant more than a paragraph. Still, they weren’t bad so much as they were medicore or just not good.
 Event Horizon: I was itching to watch a far-future, space-faring sci-fi, and this is what came up on Netflix. I only watched about 30 minutes of it before moving on. It just didn’t hold my interest. It tried really hard to replicate the slow burn of Alien, but the story isn’t as strong and Paul W. S. Anderson isn’t Ridley Scott. I’ve seen this movie before, and it’s a passable sci-fi horror, but this isn’t anything great.
 Resident Evil: Extinction: This is an above-average actioner mixing post-apocalyptic imagery with zombies. Yes, zombies generally represent an apocalypse at some level, but the desert imagery and abandoned civilization of RE:E was much more in line with the Road Warrior than the Walking Dead – it even had a convoy of vehicles! I had seen the first of the series some time ago and found it enjoyable, and this one entertained, which is all you can really expect from this kind of action-fest.
 Resident Evil: Afterlife: A continuation from RE:E. Like it, this was a passable actioner with zombies. This one had a lot of the mythology of the RE movie series, much more than I noticed in the preceding. This movie, to me, seemed like a Syfy TV movie. It seemed kind of low budget. I am wondering if that were not because they used as cutting-edge CGI as they could afford at the time, but that has become much less cutting edge now. Still a fun watch if you have time to burn and don’t want to use your brain.