I always said it wouldn’t take much to improve upon the live-action Resident Evil movies (or LARE), and here’s the proof. This is not the first CG-animated movie to be based on the video game franchise, but it’s the first be based directly upon the Capcom series of popular games themselves, including the crossover of certain key characters. Big whoop, I know, for anyone that hasn’t been obsessive over the games, but like I said, what we’ve got here is a world of improvement if still not completely satisfying. At least it captures the conspiratorial bent of the franchise better than the movies, without feeling like a constant Living Dead rip-off.

The film takes place exactly one year after the events of Resident Evil 4, if that means anything to you. A businessman on a passenger plan suddenly succumbs to the T-virus and zombifies on a plane full of people. When the plane crashes into an airport terminal, the walking dead are unleashed and the airport is shutdown as the military tries to contain the situation. Amongst those trapped inside is Claire Redfield (Alyson Court), a Racoon City survivor and current activist out to stop the growing clout of WilPharma Corporation, Umbrella’s successor in the bio-tech sector. Meanwhile, Leon S. Kennedy (Paul Mercier) is activated to take charge of containment.

I’d be lying if I said that I completely understood what was going on in this movie, but it doesn’t matter all the time whether you get it or not if it means that you’re watching soldiers shoot the crap out of zombies. The initial airport setting offers something new to feed on it terms of action set pieces, and I will say that the plane crash into the terminal is one of the best-looking CG animation sequences I’ve seen in a movie of this type. I wish that the realism had extended on down to the human characters though. Having soulless looking automatons leading you through the story may be fine in a video game where you exercise some control, but it’s entirely different when you’re engaging them as characters.

But I found the story and the creature designs strong enough to hold my interest, and that goes double for this one creature that looks like something thought up by Henry Selick with a big, huge blinking eye on its shoulder. It’s one of those monsters that’s just so weird looking you can’t help but become a little enthralled by it. But it’s not just all about the creatures because somehow there’s even a little room for subtext in this Resident Evil. Stuff about the greed of corporations, the corruption of politicians and reckless pursuit of science out of fear the other guy will get there ahead of you.

Of course, I’m not saying that this is an intellectual exercise, but it always seemed to me that there was never any room for anything in intelligent in the LAREmovies. All I remember about them is how they always seemed to be ripping off other movies and cannon fodder came before character development for the people featured in them. Not that Degeneration is a film of Kaufman-esque brilliance, but I didn’t find reason to brood over the lack of imagination in scene upon scene. Zombie movies should enthral you with survivalist nightmares, not have you checking your watch or counting in how many ways a scene reminded you of other different movies.

I think that gamers will love it, and fans of the genre might enjoy it to. But the dialogue is stilted, which probably comes from the Japanese translation, and the narrative relies a little too much on details that casual viewers will in no way be familiar with. That’s probably my biggest disappointment, that this could have been the first in a whole new franchise that could have grabbed new fans proper without all the retread crap from LARE. Regardless, Degeneration manages to work just enough on its own and is perfect for killing a couple of hours on a cold winter’s night.