Degeneration features two characters seen in previous RE games, Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy, and takes place about seven years after the destruction of Raccoon City. For those unfamiliar with the Resident Evil mythos, Raccoon City is where the secret Umbrella Corporation lab was held that developed a virus that caused the dead to rise. This outbreak eventually led to the nuclear destruction of the town in order to stop the spread of the T-Virus.
By the time the movie starts off, the Umbrella Corporation has folded and the company's biggest competitor, WilPharma, is working hard to find a counter-agent to the T-Virus. Meanwhile, reports of animal and human testing in third-world countries has created a new cause for protesters, and among them is Claire. When a plane crashes into an airport she is in and a ton of zombies come creeping out, she has to not only escape, but also help some of the people with her get out.
Actually, the airport of zombies is only the first event of the movie. A bulk of the action actually takes place in the WilPharma labs where Clair, Leon (who was called in during the airport scene because of his unique knowledge) and a few special forces personnel find themselves trapped with a person being mutated by the G-Virus (a derivative of the T). Oddly enough, there are very few actual zombies in the movie. It starts off with a good number in the airport, but once the action changes scenes, it's mostly the big guy with the eyeball on his shoulder that they have to worry about.
Special features are kind of disappointing. The best tidbit is the picture-in-picture popup feature that allows you to get more information about animatics, motion capture and storyboards as the film progresses. But the other features like "Generation of Degeneration" could definitely be better. Actually, what makes that particular featurette a pain is that it isn't dubbed, so while the content (they talk about the motion capture and CG development of the movie) is interesting, I found my attention split in too many directions to really enjoy it since I had to read subtitles (that I actually had to turn on manually myself). The other feature worth mentioning is the bloopers scenes. Now, with CG movies, it's hard to do bloopers. Typically, the ones shown are completely planned or they are issues that occurred while rendering the movie. Here though, the video is just like in the movie, but the audio has been re-dubbed with new dialogue that is supposedly funny. Quite frankly, not only did I not find it funny, but the utter lack of trying to make the dialgue and lips sync up in these cases was painful. But at least this disc did come with previews for the new Resident Evil game, so if you are a big enough fan to pick up the movie, then at least you will get that nice treat.
So is Resident Evil: Degeneration worth the purchase? Well, the CG looks great on Blu-ray and the animation itself is just beautiful (though the peoples' skin was just a bit to plastic looking). The story definitely gets its message across, but there just doesn't seem to be enough action (or zombies) to make it worth while.
