I’ve got to admit that Apocalypse is probably the one I think of the least and is the most forgettable. There’s a few reasons for that, but it’s not to say the entire thing is bad or anything. In fact, there’s a few things that I consider really good in comparison to the first film.

First, lets start with some of the best things in this movie. First of all, Mila Jovovich has finally embraced her character as Alice. In the first movie, she was more or less a Jason Bourne-type character who was unraveling a mystery about herself, the Umbrella Corporation, and all that. In this film, you find out more about who she is and what she can do, which is apparently a lot. She’s basically a superhero with all of these different abilities that are kind of crazy, and throughout this film, you realize that we’re not even a fraction of the way closer to understanding her full potential. She still has all these mysteries to unlock and abilities to uncover. If nothing else, that’s one thing you’ll have a hard time ignoring in this movie, that the series as a whole is definitely going to be about Alice and what she can do. So, anytime she’s on screen, this movie shines. She kicks butt, and I’m going to get a little premonition here and say it only gets better for Alice from here on out.

Next, I definitely appreciated the bigger playground. There was something that worked for the Hive in the first movie, too, since such a small area can give the viewer a feeling of claustrophobia while watching. That being said, when you take things outside and expand the area where things could potentially go wrong, then...if they do it right, stakes will be raised, and I would say they were mostly raised here. I’d even say as a general rule, I appreciated how this film introduced a few video game characters, including Jill Valentine, which is a major player in the video game series. She’s essentially the Alice of the video games, which as a general rule, is pretty cool that she got to be in this movie.

That being said...it went a little too hard a little too fast and immediately got convoluted. There’s too much happening all at once, and they should have just stuck to one story. That is, get the girl, escape the city. But because they wanted to introduce even more characters, like Nemesis, like Carlos, like the token black guy with a sense of humor, the film got unnecessarily confusing. All of these things on their own were fine. I liked Jill, I liked L.J., I liked Carlos and Nemesis, but they shouldn’t have all been in the same movie. They really shouldn’t have. And yeah, I like Jill, but having her in the movie kind of diluted Alice’s role. Sometimes, I feel like this is a good Resident Evil movie with Alice in the lead, and with certain scenes, I felt like Jill was the primary focus, and that kind of flip flopping annoyed me. Again, I get it, she’s a video game character, she even _acts_ like a video game character in this movie, but there was just too much all at once.

Another problem this film had was purely technical, and that was the edits. Whenever you have high-action-oriented films like this, you need to have fairly decent editing where the audience can always tell what’s physically happening on screen, and you can’t really tell what’s happening with much of the hand-to-hand combat stuff. There’s unfortunately really close-up shots of the fighting with unbelievably quick edits, I’m sure to set-in-stone the high-octane atmosphere the film already had, but by doing that, like audience legitimately cannot see anything. Not a darn thing. They get the gist of what’s happening, but that’s not enough. I feel like later films in the series got a better handle on these action scenes, though.

Anyways, that’s about it. Let’s talk about the final score for a second. From a technical, unbiased perspective, I’ll just say this...the movie was fair. It definitely had an upgrade in certain visuals, especially with makeup and CGI, which helped it out a little. It had a better eye for costume design as well as kicking the action up. The voice of the film was a little sillier than the first movie, but I actually appreciated that a bit more, as the franchise seems to be coming more into its own, something later films will really showcase. But at the same time, it was convoluted. It was messy, there were too many characters, and when they did that, they couldn’t individually have their own stories to tell. They were diverse, but they still somewhat blended in together because they didn’t individually have enough screen time. So that unbiased score is 64%. My biased score is a little bit higher at 72% because in general, I think it’s a decent movie that has its moments, but definitely not my go-to film in the franchise. Averaging the two scores together, we come to the final rating of 68%, 68 out of 100 possible stars, or a D letter grade.