A new addition to the Resident Evil saga is scheduled for a September release. Here’s the trailer:
I enjoy a good zombie movie as much as the next four or five people, but something is really starting to bother me. If the Umbrella Corporation’s goal is global dominance, they chose an ungainly way of doing it. Their schemes put the needlessly-complex terror plots of “24” to shame.
They are obviously not motivated by anything as mundane as profit, because nearly all of the human race–perhaps better known as customers–are either dead or bloodthirsty zombies. I am not an economist, but as far as I know dead people and zombies do not spend money on consumer products. Nor do they invest in markets. Nor do they power an economy in a way that would enable financiers to profit.
Umbrella obviously expects to gain from this somehow. Or, the whole movie franchise is just a series of excuses to showcase Milla Jovovich kicking the crap out of monsters in a hottified way. I don’t have a problem with that at all, except that sometimes I wish they would just be honest.
Another example would be Underworld: Evolution, which built on an intriguing premise of an ages-old feud between vampires and “lycans” (werewolves) in Underworld. The sequel was mostly an incoherent gore fest, with Tony Curran‘s vampire leader running around killing everything in sight for no reason, and Kate Beckinsale…
…I’m sorry, what was I saying?
>> They are obviously not motivated by anything as mundane as profit,
because nearly all of the human race–perhaps better known as
customers–are either dead or bloodthirsty zombies. I am not an
economist, but as far as I know dead people and zombies do not spend
money on consumer products. Nor do they invest in markets. Nor do they
power an economy in a way that would enable financiers to profit.
Perhaps they just want to rid the world of pesky independent thinkers so that they can repopulate with unthinking consumers/slave labor. Maybe they have some sort of long term goal like interstellar travel that requires very little innovation but lots of cooperation and labor, and they need to rid the world of dissenters (where’s the profit for me?) so that we can get down to the real business of solving the problem.
Good point. I hadn’t considered the “unthinking consumer” angle.
I could move on to wondering how they described their activities in their pre-apocalypse SEC filings, but that might be pushing the suspension of disbelief too far.
I think that if you have enough resources to carry out such a conspiracy, you’re kinda past needing other people to buy your shit. You move on to needing to use other people to harvest energy (ultimately, the only limited resource that really matters in the future) for your grand schemes (Interstellar travel, Dyson Spheres, massive harems etc).