THE FINAL CHAPTER (207)
THE DRAGON
The franchise-ending instalment opens
with an unholy battle in the wastelands of
Washington between a Hummer-driving
Alice and Umbrella’s latest bio-weapon:
the dreaded Popokarimu...Anderson: In the inal shot of Retribution,
you see a helicopter torn from the sky over
a zombie-infested Washington and a creature
lying into the lens. Each ilm’s connected,
so Final Chapter opens with a pay-off. Alice
climbs out of a smoking bunker, clambers into
a Hummer and gets attacked by a Popokarimu
— if you’ve played Resident Evil 5, you’ll
immediately recognise it.
Jovovich: It looks like a cross between a bat,
a dragon and lea. We called that sequence
‘Hummer Vs Dragon’, because nobody could
pronounce Popokarimu.
Bolt: Final Chapter was ilmed entirely in
South Africa. This sequence was shot in the
Belhar bus station, a derelict Cape Town suburb
that had a bombed-out Beirut feel to it. Africa’s
full of giant locations: we found two miles of
abandoned freeway to play with.
Anderson: It was the very last scene we shot:
just me, Milla and a skeleton crew for two weeks.
Most directors leave the action to a second unit,
but for me action is character, so I always directthem. Hummers a usly heavy, even for
stunt drivers. The challenge was making it look
like Jason Bourne was driving it. We actually
made a Hummer powerslide...
Bolt: The look is completely different to
Retribution’s clinical, symmetrical sci-i. It’s like
cracked granite: burnt-out, blistered and dirty.
You don’t need to shoot with unwieldy 3D
cameras anymore; the conversion technology has
inally caught up, so Paul shot the ilm almost
entirely handheld.
Anderson: The inal day of ilming was very
bittersweet, but we’re going out with a substantial
bang: it’s the best ilm in the franchise. I’ve known
the truth about Alice’s identity for 15 years.
When she wakes up in the irst movie without
a memory, she has no idea who she is: is she good
or bad? It’s why she never forms relationships
in the series; how do you relate to people if you
don’t know yourself? The reveal makes sense
of the whole franchise, so it should send people
back to watch the entire series again. Alice inally
gets the answer she’s been looking for... and
might not necessarily like it.
Jovovich: Being a part of Resident Evil has
changed my life. I mean, I even have a husband
and two kids because of it. What started off
as this small European action-horror lick
snowballed into six movies and over a billion at
the box ofice. It’s The Little Engine That Could...
with zombies.RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER IS IN
CINEMAS NOW.The Final Chapter
reaches peak epic in
the ‘Hummer Vs
Dragon’ sequence.RE TRIBUTION (202)
THE SIM CITY
Opening with an avant-garde action
sequence that unspools in reverse,
Retribution traps Alice and Ada Wong
(Li Bingbing) in a series of sadistic
computer simulations. This sequence,
set in a virtual Times Square, pits them
against two hulking ‘Axemen’. Taxis
explode. Buses are scalped. It’s action
staged as an abstract nightmare...Bolt: We came up with that scene after
principal photography had wrapped. It’s
unusual for a studio to dust off the wallet
and give you extra money to shoot, but we all
felt Retribution would beneit from another
action sequence. The Axeman shower ight
was a big hit in Afterlife, so we resurrected
two of them for this.
Anderson: I do most of my writing when
I walk my dog, Cromwell [a Giant Schnauzer,
Anderson’s canine muse and a regular ixture
on his ilm sets]. Give me two hours of peace
and serenity and I tend to come up with all
sorts of great violence. The Axemen, the
virtual New York setting, the bus getting
sliced — that’s all from walking the dog.
Bolt: It was hugely stressful. We only had a
short number of days to shoot on a Toronto
sound stage. We’d already trashed three Rolls-
Royce Phantoms for Retribution’s Moscow
car chase, and went through ive yellow cabs
for this. The Axemen weren’t CG — they were
played by a boxer [Raymond Olubowale] and a
basketball player [Kevin Shand].
Jovovich: The Axemen are just so lovable,
aren’t they? We referred to them as ‘The Gay
Couple’ on set.
Anderson: There’s a 1957 book I love called
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester,
which has been ripped off by countless sci-i
movies, from Terminator to Star Trek. It’s
like Gulliver’s Travels in space. The
protagonist, Gully Foyle, keeps passing out,
then waking up somewhere horrible and new.
It’s that sense of a tumbling nightmare that
fed itself into Retribution’s dream logic.
Jovovich: Do I get weird dreams when I’m
ilming? Are you kidding? I started getting
zombie nightmares around the third one. I’d
wake up, tell Paul about them, and he’d
immediately start writing them down.
[Jovovich and Anderson married in 2009]. I’ve
always thought Alice and Ada Wong would
make a great double act for a spin-off movie.
Resident Evil is one of the few games where
the female characters are way cooler than the
guys. It’s the same with the ilms: you could
argue they’re feminist action movies.
Anderson: Look out for a little in-joke:
the name on the petrol tanker, Hartley
ALLSTAR, REX FEATURESGorenstein, is our production designer.