Saturday night at the movies

We watched two movies last night that most people have probably seen years ago.

First one was Resident Evil – the zombie movie based on the Japanese survival horror game with the same name. It starred Milla Jovovich (who I really like, but I’m slightly biased) as Alice, who wakes up with amnesia and ends up kicking some serious zombie-ass. I haven’t played the game, of course, but I have watched enough Japanese games to immediately recognise the look and feel of the movie. I’m also not a big fan of horror movies as such, but this one was ok – it had enough of action and sci-fi-like elements to keep me entertained, and the plot was fairly original (apparently following the plot of the game pretty faithfully). Action sequences were good: Milla did a good job – I find that often small girls in action films are totally unbelievable when it comes to the action scenes, but she did well. (Of course that depends on the fight choreography, but lots of choreographers don’t care about the realism as much as looking cool.)

Overall, it was a good action movie, probably better than average since it avoided the worst pitfalls of it’s genre by having a decent plot, and no force-fed romances between the main characters (there were some emotional attachments, but they were not exclusively boy-girl ones). And I see Resident Evil 2 is just around the corner.

The second movie was a Finnish movie called Raid – a DVD which I got as a birthday present from my friends last July. For some reason we haven’t got around watching it until now although we really really loved the TV-series this movie is based on. Story is about assassin Raid who comes back to Helsinki after two years of absence to find his old girlfriend dead. I had been told beforehand that this movie – although good – wasn’t as good as the TV series, so my expectations were not too high. But it turns out that my friends were right, it was a good movie. The writing was faithful to the original characters, the pacing wasn’t too hurried (which would have spoiled everything) and the story was well written – the background plot was one of those stories where you don’t really have a chance of figuring it out until they tell you what it’s all about.

Although it was really good to see all the old characters from the TV series, I felt that not all of the characters were really needed, and were probably there just for sentimental reasons. Ratsumies was useful in the beginning, but his presence in the end scenes was unnecessary and not explained. Maradona didn’t have any purpose at all, and Perse-Arska – although not completely useless – was as a character concept getting a bit tired. On the other hand, the few new characters introduced were good – Huusko’s girlfriend, the Estonian hooker Venla was good and so was Sundman’s friend Mehtonen.

What I enjoy most in Raid is the unashamed bashing of privatisation of public services that the writers continue doing. For example the contrast between the public free services in the hospital where people are sitting in the corridors when they have run out of beds, and the “special fee category” Jansson’s father is in where corridors are empty and private rooms large and well equipped is quite scary. It’s trying to serve as an example, but I’m afraid most people will just find it funny – downsides of privatisation are not immediately seen as for example railways can be neglected for 10 years before bad accidents start to happen, as people in this country are painfully aware of.

All in all, two very different movies, good experiences both.

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