Just in case someone has opened up this review without having seen the first film- these films are about zombies. There's a limited amount of room for films with zombies because they all end up being action films in one way or another but think of this series as Aeon Flux meets 28 days later. If you don't know what Aeon Flux is then go and watch it so that you understand the reference. These films made Milla Jovovich and there are six science fiction Resident Evil films (I have seen in this order, 4, 1 and 2) and they are all scheduled for this year so let's try and make these reviews more interesting than die hard or MI reviews.
The Fifth Element is the only film of hers that I have seen so I can safely say that this series made her name and I want to take a look at why that is. When this film hit UK cinemas it was 2004 and there was the likes of Harry Potter, The Bourne Supremacy, Van Helsing, Kill Bill 2, I Robot, Million Dollar Baby, AVP, The Day After Tomorrow, Hellboy, The Butterfly effect, Troy, Saw and The Chronicles of Riddick that all would have been competing for money and the top box office spot that cinematic year so it really is no surprise that this film didn't do as well as the first film did. There were a lot of things that were similar or would attract the same audience. This made her name because even though Ian Glenn features sporadically until the end of the film she really was the character in the movie. Not the main character- she was but the cast was so small in terms of main characters that she was the sole focus for most of the film. Milla Jovovich has an Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider feel to her. She looks great when she is holding the gun and I don't mean her face or body- she looks serious, she looks like she knows what she is doing and you would back her in a gun fight.
Men are often preferred to women in action films as the main character because they are physically of a stronger build and have always been associated with the military or lifting weights and working out because for a woman, to have massive shoulders or a lot of muscle in the same way that men can is not attractive and wouldn't make for an attractive film but then Tomb Raider came along and just changed all of that. Suddenly the world kicked off with finding a woman to take the lead but for some reason, of all the films that they made with leading woman she is the strongest to Jolie. She doesn't say much but she doesn't need to- the character isn't a talkative character- she's intelligent and understands what she needs to do in order to survive. If she were a man she would be Wesley Snipes- this is the female version of Blade.
This film was criticised because of its plot or slight lack of strong plot but she stuck with it, they all have and they have made another four films because of it so I don't think that it can continually be flopping, meaning that this film wasn't enough to put them off making more and they didn't financially need to drop the series after the next film meaning that she isn't rubbish in those films, meaning that I can write a positive review about the next film and hopefully have more characters to focus on.
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