Resident Evil #4 (WildStorm)

Welcome back to this week's 31 Days of Evil, as we continue with the fourth issue of WildStorm's Resident Evil comic series!
Yet again, we're looking at the cover. This time the shot on the cover is actually close to one from the book itself, unlike the shots from every other cover so fart. Issue #2 came close, but I'm almost certain that room on the cover wasn't actually in the comic.
Chris is doing his best to actually look like himself, and for once he's actually being a pilot outside of his back-story. Jill still looks like she stepped out of the eighteen-hundreds (Seriously, the version of her from Issue #1 looked more like Jill than this) aaaaaand Barry is starting to look like Billy Blazes as he's blocking the zombies out.
This cover appears to have been drawn by two artists, Carlos D'Anda and Mark Irwin. It's alright, but they could have done better.
Rather unfortunately, the cover-story of this issue is the last out of the three included within.
Our first story, "Night Stalkers" is written by Kris Oprisko and illustrated by Rafael Kayanan.
In the town of Saguaro Wells, a bunch of people have gone missing. Because of humanoid vampire-bats.
In a nearby underground laboratory that defies OSHA regulations, two Umbrella-funded scientists are remote-controlling the man-bats and attempting to mutate more of them. I know you can't actually see this comic, so let me assure you that their lair is the most stereotypical supervillain lair ever constructed.
Back in town, Sheriff Carey issues a curfew to keep people from going out at the times when the bat-men are attacking. He refuses to let them go out hunting the people creating the bats, but tells them they can defend themselves.
Later that day, his son "Little" Wayne is attacked by bats and bitten. By morning, he becomes a zombie. The scientists begin rushing to get more subjects to complete their flock. Meanwhile, Leon arrives to handle the situation. He looks more like himself in this comic than he has at any other point in the series.
Leon tries to fight the bats off, but they eventually overwhelm him and abscond to their lair. He regains consciousness, and hacks his way free with a machete and catches himself on a ledge. Leon then witnesses the mad scientists putting their plan into action. Leon then transforms into MacGyver (No seriously, come Page 16 he starts looking like a combination of Richard Dean Anderson, Jean Claude Van Damme and Neuclear Man) and starts rigging up a method of damaging the control-machine before calling for backup. Come Page 19, Leon starts looking like Tetsuo from Akira and begins acting like Kaneda. Leon's backup arrives as his sabotage kicks into action and firebomb the mountain base. The helicopter takes him out to his next destination, and the story ends.
Towards the start of the comic, the art looks good. Towards the end though, it delves into super-derp territory, especially around Leon's face. The fact that this was a quarterly comic should mean that they would have had the time to fix this shit.
The next story is called Special Delivery, written by Marc Mostman and drawn by Ryan Odagawa.
I'll be honest, this story is a waste of time. It's all about the guys in the helicopter who dropped Mr. X and a bunch of other Umbrella experiments off in Raccoon City before one of the monsters they're transporting busts out and kills them, moaning about "No loose ends."
The Resident Evil Files between this story and the next are of the zombies (No seriously) and Jill Valentine. If you needed to know what a zombie is at this point, then I envy you for having stayed away from the glut of zombie media for the last several decades.
Jill is listed as being 5'5" despite being drawn as only being an inch or three shorter than Chris is in the comic. She's also listed as weighing 111lbs, despite being drawn as having massive bulging muscles throughout this series. This is apparently taken from actual official Capcom stats. Now call me crazy, but I look at Jill and some of the crazy things she's done and can do, and I don't bet on her weighing less than 160lbs. She's a Delta Force operative after all, and she carries around a of heavy ordnance. If she was only 111lbs, she should have been knocked over by some of the weapons she's used. Once more, we're not told any more than we were already told in character bios from the first comic, or that we've learned from the games themselves. They mention a few of Jill's character details, but they forget to mention that she picks locks.
The final story is the one we came here for, the completion of the last story of the last comic.
Zombies Abroad is drawn by Norman Felchle (I won't even begin to try and pronounce that name) and written by Ted Adams.
Chris rushes to the cockpit to tack control of the plane. He comments "Of course, my S.T.A.R.S. training never required me to fly something as big as this!" Yeah, neither did your Air Force training, but it's still a god-damn plane! Take the controls and get this thing flying right! Or at least make sure the auto-pilot is working right.
Chris lands the plane and talks to his contact, Falcon about the leak. Falcon tells them he's on it, and instructs the three of them to investigate Europe's monuments to try and find Umbrella's headquarters.
Excuse me, no. No! There are too many monuments in Europe for this to be a reasonable course of action! They don't have enough information to go off of! This is like The Consuming Shadow with the lead cast of Resident Evil! Besides, I wasn't aware that the Umbrella Corporation's headquarters had to be secret, they're supposed to be a legitimate business. They should have just gone to the actual headquarters and broken in to see what's going on. They're likely to have themselves a large underground complex connected to it.
Anyways, after going to The Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Madame Tusseaud's, The Eiffel Tower, The Lourve, The De Gooyer Windmill, (Which I've never heard of) Oktoberfest, (Which I wasn't aware was a monument) and finally rounding it out in Queck Castle. Chris mentions that this is the last monument in Europe. To which I say, no! You missed Stonehenge, The London Eye, Big Ben, 10 Downing Street, New Scotland Yard, New London Bridge, The Palace of Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Vatican City, The Catacombs, The Palace of Versailles, and I could go on! There's plenty more. Granted, they didn't have the space to show them checking everything I listed out, but this was such an insane premise from the start that it shouldn't have been in the comic. Just make the whole comic about espionage and leave the zombie-killing for later, my god!
The three of them split up (Like they would ever split up again after the mansion incident) to try and cover more ground. They solve some puzzles, and for some reason Jill isn't the one to solve the music puzzle despite the fact that she's the one who solved the piano puzzle in the first game. They are all then set upon by monsters.
This story is alright, but the art has gotten further and further away from actually looking like the characters. Chris has basically become Arnold Schwarzenegger from Commando, Jill's beret is left behind entirely in favor of arm-wrappings that make her look like female CM Punk and nail-polish and fake nails, and Barry has completed his transformation into Billy Blazes.
Chris is supposed look more like mid-eighties, early nineties Val Kilmer. Jill looks more like Ada than Ada did in Issue #2. Plus the illogic of an ex-Delta Force operative having manicured nails like that. She's a member of the bomb-squad for gods sake, those will only get in the way! While Barry could be a bit more on-model, he always looked plenty like Billy Blazes as he was, so it's not entirely that much of a big leap. Although god only knows what would happen if this crew was given the rights to make a Rescue Heroes comic. Billy would wind up looking like Wesker, Wendy would look like Jill and Jack would inexplicably look like Chris.
As for the rest of the art, there are shading lines all over the place. Hell, the art is all over the place. While Chris looks like Arnold most of the time, occasionally he morphs into Dolph Lundgren or Jean Claude Van Damme. Barry sometimes turns into a redheaded oversized leprechaun, and Jill goes between looking like a Revolutionary War soldier, The Wicked Witch, and Scarlet O'Hara. But above all, where in the hell is Jill's beret? She and all the other S.T.A.R.S. members in this story have their standard gear (Fortunately without the S.T.A.R.S. logo on the shoulder, unlike in the first issue) so why doesn't she have her beret? You know what, a better question would be why isn't her hair tied up properly? I'm a martial-artist, and I play paintball. My hair is about as long as hers is and I've got to tie up every loose end or it gets into my face and obscures my vision. It gets into my eyes, it screws up my aim, and it keeps me from performing at full capacity. I could go on, but I've made my point.
All in all, this is yet another comic that wasted the vast majority of its pages on stories that didn't really matter while leaving the actually plot-important story a minority of the pages of the comic. The artwork generally sucks from page to page. Occasionally there are some decent panels or decent pages, but nothing is all that great. It's a shame that weekly Japanese comics have more consistent, more precise artwork than a comic that took three months between issues. Three months between issues. Let this sink in. Kazuki Takahashi, Akira Toriyama, Eiichiro Oda, Takeshi Obata, all of them managed to put out weekly comics for years on end without a lapse in the quality of the artwork. These guys can't put out one comic every three months without screwing up from page to page.
All in all, it's alright. If these stories were arranged chronologically it wouldn't be nearly as infuriating to read. All I ask is that they put the comic together decently. That's it. Unfortunately, it's not. Not even close.
In the end, I give it a 3.4*. Next week, we wrap the feature up with the novel Resident Evil #2: Caliban Cove!

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Resident Evil #3 (Wildstorm)

We return to the Wildstorm Resident Evil comics once more this week with Resident Evil #3. Which doesn't actually have an adaptation of Resident Evil 3 contained within.
Instead, we get a prequel to the original Resident Evil, a filler chapter about an outbreak on an island, and a story about the S.T.A.R.S. team's journey to Europe. There's also an interview with Shinji Mikami, the fan-art and letters page, and character bios.
Before we dig into the rest of the comic, let's take our customary look at the cover. According to the Resident Evil wiki, the cover for this comic was drawn by Jim Lee. After the improvement of the last cover (Still can't find out who drew it), we're back to strangeness.
The cover depicts Claire wielding her handgun and a gigantic Uzi-looking thing with a huge suppressor on the barrel standing in front of a scratched-up wall with blood on it.. Okay, that's basically to be expected at this point. Pan down to the bottom and we see that Claire's legs look alright. Moving up her torso however, brings us to yet another elongated rib-cage and upper torso as we move beyond her abdomen. Soon as we get to her face, we see that she looks more like Lara Croft than Claire Redfield. We also see that her back and chest have ballooned out to bodybuilder proportions, which isn't accurate in the slightest. Her right arm is wonky, almost Popeye-esque in nature. It's also severely elongated, especially in comparison to her left arm. Her left arm is somewhat shorter than it probably should be, but in comparison to the right it's just tiny.
Claire's ponytail is depicted as going all the way down past her shoulder-blades, when in the game it came down to the base of her neck.
Going back to the upper torso, if we extrapolate from the massive back and huge chest (I'm not even talking about her breasts, those are pretty close to being alright) we can estimate that Claire's shoulders go out beyond her hips, which isn't how she was modeled in the game. They were basically on the same plane. Plus, while she definitely had some pectoral muscles in the game, they weren't jutting out like they do here.
Finally, her tights don't come down low enough on her legs, her shirt doesn't come down low enough on her arms, and her shorts and vest are red instead of pink. This is just what I could notice off the top of my head when thinking back to Resident Evil 2. It looks fine, and I wouldn't normally bring up these last points, but Jim Lee got so many basic things wrong with this cover that I feel the need to nitpick.
The editors note mentions that this first story, "Wolf Hunt" takes place before Resident Evil. Not Resident Evil #1, Resident Evil 1. As in the game. This could be a typo, but who knows?
This story is written by Ted Adams and drawn by Ryan Odagawa. It starts off with three college-students, Michelle, Mike and Raquel, giving us exposition about how one of their classmates was murdered and the papers didn't report on it. Michelle gets attacked on her way from the library by some monster and killed. The next day, Barry and Jill are assigned to the case. Apparently the rest of Alpha and Bravo are on assignment, so Jill goes in undercover. Barry is Jill's backup, and is tasked with watching her back at all times. Come later that day, Jill runs into Mike and Raquel talking about Michelle's death. She asks what's up and gives her cover-story about transferring from another college. They tell her to go back and follow the curfew.
Naturally, since Jill is trying to bait the killer into revealing themselves, she disobeys these instructions and stays out late. She loses radio-contact with Barry and is set upon by the monster. She pulls out a Smith and Wesson (She's supposed to have a Beretta, but whatever) and puts three shots in its chest. Funnily enough, her gun appears to be drawn the way a gun should look. It's in the right scale and it's detailed properly. However, the gun appears to have been modeled on Claire's Browning HP from Resident Evil 2 as opposed to the modified Beretta 92F Samurai Edge she's supposed to wield.
Barry finally catches up to the two of them, and they find that the werewolf Jill just killed has transformed into a human. Since she didn't get a good look at him she doesn't know that he was a werewolf. The case presumably solved, they wrap things, and the story, up.
Throughout the story, the art has been alright up until these last two pages. Jill's gun basically just looks weird on the second-to-last page (I don't know what kind of gun the artist drew her as using so I can't confirm whether it's drawn improperly or not) and on the last page itself, save for the top and top-right panels, all of the art is derp. On the bottom-left panel Jill looks like a wraith with how distended her limbs are, and Barry's head looks squashed. Plus, his entire body looks like derp as soon as you move away from the torso and legs. His arms are just tacked-on, and his hands are the worst part. I'm not even sure how to describe how weird they look. It's like someone took one of those highly-poseable action-figure and twisted the arms all around until they looked like this. Barry's left forearm is twisted about, but his hand is basically in the right place. His right arm is drawn horribly, but it's the least of that sides problems. His right hand has been drawn upside-down. His index-finger is tiny and his pinky is enormous. Then there's the second to last panel, in which Jill looks more like Rebecca than herself.
In-between this story and the next, we see an ad for the S.D. Perry Resident Evil novels and an interview with Shinji Mikami. In the interview, Mikami discusses some of the Easter-eggs in Resident Evil 2 and the differences between the American and Japanese versions. One somewhat laughable question from Wildstorm is "How were the incredibly lifelike CG scenes filmed?" Look, I get that they're cool and all, but they're not realistic.
The next story is "Danger Island," written by Kris Oprisko and drawn by Lee Bermejo.
A couple vacationing in the East Caribbean goes snorkeling, while an Umbrella plane crashes into a nearby mountain. They emerge from the water to find that the guy they rented the gear from has been zombified, along with a bunch of leopards. An eel feasts on a body and somehow turns into a Tyrant within seconds. They flee into the jungle to get away from the monsters. There's a little reference to the games thrown in by way of a blue herb used to clean out the guys wounds. The problem is the blue herb is supposed to be an antidote to poison, not as an antiseptic. They are then set upon by a gigantic Venus Fly-Trap. The guy tells the girl to run away, while he fights the thing with his diving knife. They try to climb the cliff, but are set upon by the eel-monster, which kills the plant. Fortunately, the guy dislodges a fairly large rock with his foot, which beans the monster on the head.
They try to make their way to a satellite relay-station, but are set upon by a group of monsters. The man, Stan, manages to kill the eel monster after it scared off all the others that came after them. His girlfriend calls for help, but unfortunately for them, they don't get the United States Army, the US Navy, the US Coast Guard or S.T.A.R.S., they get William Birkin and the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service, who put two in their heads and then torch the whole island. That wasn't entirely pointless at all. No siree. Although it really wouldn't have been pointless if these stories were published in chronological order.
We see more Q&A with Mikami and the readers art-gallery before we move on to the third story, "Dead Air: Part 1" written by Ten Adams and drawn by Carlos D'Anda.
The team discusses their next course of action before deciding to head off to London to find out if Umbrella is up to anything else. Apparently they're being funded by some kind of top-secret international agency for some reason. I don't know what. This is an original concept introduced by Ted Adams. The Europe angle was never really explored in the games.
The first thing to note is that the art is super weird on this page. Barry looks alright, except for his eyes. Jill looks like Scarlet O'Hara, and Chris looks like a humanized version of Scourge The Hedgehog. (Ironic considering his longest-serving VA went on to play Sonic The Hedgehog) As they're boarding the plane, a guy from Umbrella is seen reporting to his overlords about how his team infected the drinking-water and champagne with modified T-Virus to make the plane crash. You know, because a bomb or sabotage would be effective. Because trying to infect a plane with a highly-contagious virus to kill three people (It should really be four since Rebecca should be with them) who might I remind you have already survived an outbreak and your ultimate weapons! Then there's the idiocy of trying to crash a plane with an ace pilot on-board! Need I remind you that Chris Redfield was thrown out of the United States Air Force over a nigh-impossible rescue-mission that he pulled off on his own! The man could have flown the S.T.A.R.S. chopper himself if he had to, and you're putting him inside an airplane instead of staging a home-invasion and filling him with copper?
Now, granted a fighter-jet, a helicopter and a jumbo-jet are very different, but he's a smart guy and he's made his name in S.T.A.R.S. on his ability to adapt to the situation as necessary. Plus, this is still a horrible idea! You don't call upon a horde of uncontrollable monsters to solve your problem when three bullets could do the trick!
As soon as the zombies start attacking, the S.T.A.R.S. team begins handling the situation. Jill begins herding the civilians to the back of the plane to keep them safe, and kills one of the zombies with a food-tray. Barry then creates a flamethrower from hairspray and a lighter to torch some zombies. Because this was pre-9/11 and you could still bring a lighter and hairspray onto a plane. Chris puts out the fire that spread to the seats with a fire-extinguisher and then bashes another zombies head in with it. Jill then smashes the last zombie with some CQC. Unfortunately, that zombie was the pilot.
The artwork in this story was horrible. Not only does Chris look nothing like he's supposed to, he's repeatedly drawn like a brontosaurus crossed with Paulie from The Sopranos. Jill doesn't look anything like either her actress, her in-game model or her previous appearances in the comic. But! She at least looks like a human-being.
Finally, there's Barry Burton. He looks like he's supposed to, apart from the overly-tiny eyes in some shots.
The unfortunate thing about the writing in this story is mildly off. Just off enough that it's less than perfect. Especially when it comes to the dialogue. Jill is spouting off one-liners like she's James Bond, and Barry is unnaturally quiet. He's supposed to be Mr. One-liner dangit!
After the story, we get character bios on Chris and Claire Redfield, with little portraits alongside them. Chris was drawn by Olivier Coipel, and Claire by Chris Brunner. Both of them look horrible. They look like someone took one of those chibi figures Japan loves so much and mashed them up with regularly proportioned drawings.
First off, this portrait shows horrible trigger-discipline. Second, Chris's face looks nothing like his in-game model, or his actor, and very little like his appearance in the comic previously.
As far as the bio goes, we're told very little, if anything that we didn't already find out in Issue #1
Likewise, Claire's bio tells us nothing we didn't already find out from Issue #2. In fact, only the bottom paragraph tells us anything about her. If we didn't know who she was already, this would offer absolutely no information.
All in all, this wasn't a bad issue, but it really shouldn't have been the third issue. Stick the first story in Issue #1 and the last story in Issue #2 ahead of the RE2 adaptation. Or just publish all of these stories as their own issues (Sans the stories in Issue #1, that should have been cleaned up and made into a single cohesive one-shot to gauge interest) in chronological order.
In the end, I give it a 4.2*. I'll see you next week with  Issue #4. Then after that, I'll wrap the month up with the second of the S.D. Perry novels, Caliban Cove.
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Resident Evil #2 (Wildstorm)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third annual 31 Days of Evil! We're coming right off of another series of event reviews and going straight into another!

For those of you just joining me, every October I dig into my favorite horror franchise, Resident Evil! From the games, to the comics, to the novels, and eventually to the movies, I hope to one day cover it all!

We're kicking off this years special with the second issue of Wildstorm's Resident Evil comic series!

Yet again, I'm borrowing a bit of my format from Linkara of Atop The Fourth Wall by starting this review out with a quick look at the cover.
Compared to the first cover, this one is actually pretty good. The characters actually have the proper anatomy. Claire and Leon's torsos aren't extruded all over the page, and their legs aren't posed awkwardly for the most part. Claire's right leg is a bit wonky, but other than that she's fine. Leon's hair is drawn somewhat sloppily, but the biggest issue on the page is his body. While Claire's body is close to her model from the game, Leon's body looks like Brock Lesnar's. His biceps are huge, his back looks like a gorillas, and then we get to his legs. Those look fine strangely enough. That makes the rest of his body look even worse.  Then we get to the faces. Once more, Claire looks enough like her in-game model to get a pass, but Leon looks more like someone pasted Chris's face onto Leon's skull.
One other thing that I noticed is the gun in Claire's hand is horribly drawn. First off, it's too big. Look at it, the proportions are all wonky even if you don't know what the gun is supposed to look like. Second while the front of the gun is drawn like it's in the middle of being fired (And judging by Claire's other hand, has recently run out of ammo) but the back end of the slide isn't extended beyond the top of the grip like it should be. Also, the front of the Browning Hi-Power (Which is the gun Claire uses in Resident Evil 2, which this comic is partially based on) doesn't actually look like that when the slide is locked back. The barrel is supposed to extend over empty space, not the lower half of the gun. If you want a look at the way the gun is supposed to work, check out this video I found.
Speaking of guns, Leon's shotgun is slightly off from the in-game model, having been given a brown pump despite the in-game version being entirely silver. If they were going for the Custom Shotgun instead of the stock Remington M1100-p, the barrel should be much longer, there shouldn't be a pumping mechanism and there should be a stock, although it's not like we would be able to see that, Leon's body is blocking where it would be.
The cover boasts a roughcut metal version of the Resident Evil 2 logo, which I think looks mighty fine. Then we move on down the page and see that, once again, the comic has been divided into three stories instead of just adapting Resident Evil 2 as a single issue. It also boasts "Artists' zombie sketches!" and "Internet story cover!" which sounds utterly irrelevant and like this comic has been translated into English by an idiot respectively.
Turning to the inside, we once more find a letter to the readers, detailing the contents of the comic. We've got an adaptation of Resident Evil 2, a side-story (read; filler) and an interquel set between Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2. Seems like that should really be before the Resident Evil 2 story.
The first story, "A New Chapter of Evil" opens cold right in the middle of the opening cutscene of Resident Evil 2. Leon and Claire start out in the police-car they found in the beginning of the game before the truck-driver from the beginning (You really have to have played the game to understand what's going on here) crashes into it and and they're divided by a wall of fire.
Leon goes to the police-station where he finds it has been over-run by zombies. One remaining officer explains the plot of the last Resident Evil game and all subsequent events to Leon before telling him to shoot him in the head before he turns into a zombie.
Meanwhile, Claire makes her way to the police station and runs into Mr. X along the way. She unloads a grenade-launcher into him before meeting up with Leon in the S.T.A.R.S. office. Leon informs her that her brother and the S.T.A.R.S. team have left to Europe, and gives her one of a pair of radios he found. Claire leaves, and Leon goes downstairs to free someone he found in the holding cells. On his way there, he runs into Ada Wong. They talk the the reporter, Ben, in the cell. Ada tries to find out where her boyfriend, John Fay is, and Leon tries to convince him to leave with them, but neither get anything out of him. Then Ben is attacked by a monster in his cell, and tells the two of them everything he knows before dying.
Claire runs into Chief Irons and tries to convince him to leave with her, somehow not noticing the girl clad in white and blood laying on the mans desk. Attempting to leave, Claire runs into Sherry Birkin. Chief Irons then pulls a gun on them and promptly gets eaten by a monster.
Ten minutes earlier, Leon and Ada ran into Annette Birkin, and Leon was shot. Ada tucked him away behind cover and went to kill Annette. Claire bandages him up, and goes to find Ada. An indeterminate amount of time later, Ada emerges from around the corner and a giant gator bursts through the wall. Leon shoots the gas canister on the wall and kills it. On their way to the escape-train, Ada is attacked by a mutated William Birkin (Who we have not seen once in the comic so far) and Leon blasts the man with his shotgun. He then hauls the wounded Ada to safety, but they're set upon by Annette once more. The self-destruct sequence of the hidden Umbrella laboratory (Not that you'd know that if you hadn't played the game) and some pipes bash her over the head. Ada tries to take the G-virus sample, but gets shot by Annette. Leon tries to save her, but she slips from his grasp and falls. Leon and Claire reunite, and leave in the escape-train just as the lab self-destructs.
On the plot-front, this story has been abridged beyond coherence. If you haven't played the game it's based on, you won't have a single clue what's going on. Plot-points show up out of nowhere and vanish straight back into nowhere. That's what you get out of smashing a twenty-hour game into a twenty-page story, when you have to adapt an hour of gameplay for every page of the comic.
Then we come to the artwork. Starting at the first page, the architecture of the buildings and the details of the vehicles, etc are beautifully drawn, but the human characters look horrible. Leon is routinely drawn like he's a brontosaurus (IE, his neck is too long) and Claire is always a mess of tangled limbs and poorly-defined combat-gear. The weapons are almost universally too big compared to real-life and the game, and Carlos D'Anda seems to rely on close-up shots and obscuring shadows to avoid drawing too much detail on minor characters and wide shots. Speaking of, wide-shots of most characters look fine, but the closer they get to the "camera" the weirder they look. Leon's face looks squashed most of the time, but Ada generally looks fine. The reporter, Ben looks like a squashed version of Jaeris The Gunslinger and Claire usually looks more like Mila Jovovich than her in-game model. Then there's the picture of her in the lower right panel on page eleven. Her head is alright, and some of her upper torso looks fine but moving down the picture we see that she's been afflicted by the same issues as Jill from the cover of Issue #1. Her torso is elongated, her vest and shorts are red instead of pink, she's got two belts instead of one for some reason, her hips are at an odd angle owing to the elongated torso, (If they just came straight out from the first belt it would look fine) her gun is huge, and her right arm isn't attached to her body. Or at least it doesn't look like it is. I don't know, her right sleeve looks like it could be the shadow from the ax on the wall and her skin is the exact same color as the wall behind her. It could just be my copy, but it really looks like part of her arm is missing here.
Going back to character art, for some strange reason Annette actually looks the way she's supposed to.
Overall, this story was below-average, the art kind of sucks and if you've played the games there's nothing new for you here.
The next story is "Mutant Menagerie," and it's written by Kris Oprisko and drawn by Lee Bermejo.
Our story begins with two security guards at the Raccoon City Zoo chatting as one of them clocks out. Some thing crawls over the wall as one of them tells the other to check out the electrical grid. On the next page, we see the murder of William Birkin by Umbrella's security forces. Despite having been riddled with hundreds of bullets, he manages to inject himself with the G-Virus and turns into a Tyrant. Back in the present at the zoo, Birkin bites, eats and kills many an animal, not to mention wholesale slaughters the attendants. One of them, a man named Brady manages to escape the wrath of Birkin and his zombie army long enough to lock himself in a building with a radio. He finds Leon attempting to contact Claire on the radio. Brady explains what's going on, and Leon tells him that he needs to try and kill the animals before the G-Virus spreads to the city. Brady remembers that if the system overloads he can possibly blow the zoo up and take the infected animals with it. He loads himself up like he's John freakin' Rambo and shotsguns, cattle-prods and blasts his way to the utility shed. He overloads the grid and blows up the zoo, taking most of the animals with it. Several hours later, he regains consciousness and makes his way back to the headquarters building, where he contacts Leon and Claire, who have since escaped the city. Brady makes camp in what's left of the building as sleep claims him. Right before he's attacked by... Something.
In terms of plot, there's not much to this. Patrick Brady wasn't in Resident Evil 2, and he wasn't mentioned in the previous story once. The only plot-critical information is what Birkin did to turn himself into a Tyrant, and that should have been in the previous story.
In terms of artwork, it's certainly a step up from the previous story. There's nothing quite as egregious as any of the examples I mentioned before, although Brady's face looks a bit like Hank Hill's in the first few pages. Later on, he morphs into some sort of cross between Leon S. Kennedy and Patrick Swayze. In fact, William Birkin even looks quite a bit like Leon. I guess they were making up for Leon not looking like himself in the last story by making everyone look like him in this one.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to mention that Birkin only makes appearances in his second form in this story. I don't know when this is set, but the comic makes it seem like it's right after he got infected, which should mean he'd be in his first form. If there was any kind of telling how long it had been since he transformed, then I wouldn't be questioning this, but there's not so I am.
Our third and final story is "Lock Down" with the same writing and art team as the last one.
This story is set exactly a week after the mansion incident in the previous issue. Once more, I wonder why this wasn't the story that started out the comic. Barry hasn't been handling the zombies situation very well, as is demonstrated by the fact that he sees them everywhere as he walks to his psychiatrist, Dr. Lengle. At the doctors office, an alarm goes off and zombies attack. Dr. Lengle's throat gets torn out by a zombie, so Barry pulls out his gun and blasts the monster. He finds a security-access card on Lengle's body, and finds that zombies have overrun the building. Barry makes his way to the basement to seal the zombies in the building. There, he finds a disemboweled man who tells him to gather pieces of a bomb so he can blow up the building and kill the zombies. He kills the man to keep him from turning into a zombie and takes the instructions for the bomb. Barry then finds himself face-to-face with a Tyrant.... Somehow. Barry chops its arm off with a fire-ax and tosses chemicals in its face as he escapes with one of the parts. In the mail-room, Barry finds one of the parts and a shotgun in the same locker. He finds the last part guarded by giant bugs. After getting it, he puts it together, rides up to the penthouse, torches it with the flamethrower he somehow has, sets off the bomb, and dives into a conveniently-placed pool.
All in all, this story was basically filler. It's not bad, but not great and not particularly interesting.
The artwork is pretty good. Barry looks like he's supposed to throughout, and the weapons are actually in-scale as they're supposed to be, despite the fact that Barry is carrying a semi-automatic instead of his signature Colt Python. One major issue in the comic however is the fact that it's basically a Die Hard ripoff with some incredibly lame action-movie clichés thrown in for good measure. I also have no clue where Barry got his flamethrower. If they could keep this kind of steady quality throughout the comic, that would have been great. In fact, if they'd just stuck with adapting Resident Evil 2 and left out the other filler stories, dedicating the remaining pages of the book to adapting the story of the game.
Considering this series was released once every three months, and they got at most one issues worth of relevant content out of it, maybe they could have made it a monthly series, spread the adaptation of the first two games out a bit and brought in some connecting details between the stories. Dedicate several issues to the aftermath, clean up the overall pace, and I think they could have done incredibly well.
All in all, this issue was okay at its best, disappointing at its worst. I give it a 3.2*

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Suicide Squad

After seeing basically the perfect Suicide Squad in Arrow I wasn't entirely sure what to expect out of the DCEU version. We got the cool villains, some cool operations for them to flex their skills with, and some decent characterization to boot. I've never gone from loathing to loving a character the way I did Michael Rowe's Floyd Lawton. A suicidal depressive veteran turned hitman who would rather die a hero than live on as a villain if that meant his family could be taken care of. Will Smith is a damn fine actor, but once you've seen Rowe in action it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role. It's like Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen, Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man, or Henry Cavill as Superman. It's hard to recreate perfection.
Fortunately, there weren't that many re-casts between the television universe and the movies. In fact, the only other one that had a major role in this movie was Amanda Waller.
It's rather odd to see the Suicide Squad get a movie before the Justice League, but as far as the narrative goes it works fine. The DCEU seems to be going for a very natural story progression, a natural escalation of the stakes. From Man of Steel to BvS to Suicide Squad, I can clearly see the decisions that lead up to every action and reaction in each succeeding film.
Spoilers inbound as usual, for Man of Steel, BvS and Suicide Squad alike, but if you're on the fence about watching this movie, do yourself a favor and watch it now, because you need to experience this film.
After the death of Superman, the United States government is looking into creating a team of superhumans that can combat a threat akin to that of General Zod, or Doomsday. At the very least they want something that can combat a group of supervillains. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) pitches the idea of a team of supervillains, the best of the criminal underworld, people that they can control with force, people who can be disposed of without raising the eyebrows of the public if they go rogue. There's Deadshot (Will Smith), who was taken in by Batman (Ben Affleck). Captain Boomerang, an Australian bank-robber (Jai Courtney in one of the best roles of his career) who was taken in by The Flash (Ezra Miller). El Diablo, a pyromancer who turned himself in. Killer Croc, a dude who looks like a croc who lived in the Gotham sewers until he was driven out by Batman and captured by Waller's people. Slipknot (Adam Beach), who is the guy you call if you need to climb, rappel, or otherwise need to use ropes and grappling technology to their most effective in your criminal activities. Harley Quinn, (Margot Robbie) the Arkham Asylum psychiatrist assigned to The Joker (Jared Leto) after his capture by Batman and the Gotham City Police Department subsequent to The Clown Prince of Crime's murder of Bruce Wayne's second adopted son, Jason Todd. Or possibly subsequent to his capture in The Dark Knight, depending on how Ben Affleck's Batman movie goes down. Over time she fell in love with The Joker and wound up assisting him in escaping from custody and returning to his place as the king of crime in Gotham City, with Harley as his queen until Batman caught up with them and captured Harley. For those of you wondering, the vast majority of this films takes place after BvS. The captures of Deadshot and Harley for one thing definitely do. However, a good amount of the flashbacks could easily take place beforehand, depends on what you personally think I suppose.
Then there's Dr. June Moon (Cara Delevingne), an archaeologist who is possessed by The Enchantress, an Aztec spirit who can take command of her body and basically do whatever. Enchantress is basically the thing that seals the deal as far as Task Force X is concerned. She delivers classified documents from enemy nations to the committee deliberating on whether to approve the formation of the team.
Finally, there's the leader of the team, the greatest special-ops soldier the US military has produced, Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) one of two people who don't fall under the "suicide" purview of the titular Suicide Squad. He was assigned to Moon in the hopes that they would get romantically entangled and it worked. This lets Waller rope Flag into any stupid plan she wants him to be involved in as long as she's got June to manipulate him with.
For as powerful and useful as The Enchantress is, she's unreliable as all hell when she wants to be. She'll plant a bomb, but not activate it. She'll teleport to nowhere and then come back, freaking out June and Rick alike. She'll give Rick a vision of June dying in his arms for absolutely no reason, and then piss off to resurrect her brother, Incubus so she can attempt to take over the world and gain revenge for being sealed away after being worshiped as a god. This leads to her going completely rogue and laying siege to Midway City. Waller then activates Task Force X to extract high-profile subjects from Midway, but the actual team are told they're dealing with human terrorists. They are injected with explosives to blow their heads off if they go rogue, and gear up to fly out to the city. On the way out, they're joined by the only other member of the squad who is here voluntarily, Katana (Karen Fukahara) who serves as Flag's bodyguard.
As they're leaving, The Joker continues his investigation into Harley's whereabouts, eventually blackmailing one of the people who works for Waller into telling him where she was being held. There, he finds out about the explosives planted inside the Suicide Squad and steals what they need to defuse them, and sets out to rescue Harley.
On the approach to the LZ, Task Force X's chopper is shot down, and they have to approach on-foot. Boomerang tricks Slipknot into trying to escape to see if the explosives are for real, and sure enough they are, because Slipknot's head is blown off like he took a fifty millimeter bullet to the head. Thus was born a million stupid Slipknot memorial memes.
What follows are some absolutely incredible action-scenes and some great interactions between the cast. Enchantress's minions attack the team, but they fight them off, and make their way to the  safe-house where their extraction target is revealed to be Waller herself, who is in the process of wiping servers, destroying documents, and capping her henchmen in the head.
One chopper evacs Waller, but the other has been hi-jacked by The Joker and his gang, who suppress the Suicide Squad enough to deactivate the bomb in Harley's neck. Harley escapes, but the chopper gets shot down, and The Joker pushes her out of the falling helicopter onto a rooftop below, and the chopper explodes, presumably killing The Joker and his men.
Meanwhile, Waller's chopper gets shot down, and The Enchantress's minions capture her. Deadshot finds Waller's files on superhumans and finds out why Enchantress's people have been going after Flag specifically, because she inhabits his girlfriend and Enchantress is scared of him. Because she's super powerful, is gathering an army of monsters to her side and they'll be killed whether or not they follow Flags orders, they decide to chill in a bar in their last moments of life. Eventually, Flag sits down for a drink with them, and lays all of his cards on the table. He deactivates his detonator that controls the explosives in the teams necks and tells them they're free to go as he sets off to rescue June on his own. This tugs at the heart of the family man inside of Deadshot, who decides to accompany Flag on the mission. Harley joins them, and Killer Croc goads the others into coming along.
They figure out where The Enchantress put the bomb she misplaced earlier in the week, and decide to force Incubus over top of it and kill him so that they can cut Enchantress's heart out and force her to vacate June's body. However, Enchantress feeds the Suicide Squad pictures of their ideal lives, but El Diablo manages to break out of it, and this helps everyone else break free as well.
Killer Croc leads the group of Navy Seals that accompanied Flag down into the sewers to detonate the bomb, while the rest of the team tries to get Waller and June free.
El Diablo goes one-on-one with Incubus, and eventually kills him at the cost of his own life. Enchantress gives them a chance to join her again, and it seems like Harley is going to join in exchange for Enchantress resurrecting The Joker, but she uses Katana's sword to cut out Enchantress's heart, and Deadshot uses Harley's Colt Python to blast the sorceress in the head. June breaks out of the shell of The Enchantress's dead body, everyone gets a decade off their sentences, and some reward. Deadshot gets time with his daughter, Killer Croc gets cable TV, Harley gets an espresso machine, Boomerang gets locked up even tighter because he didn't ask for anything doable, and June gets discharged because she's no longer possessed by The Enchantress.
While Harley is enjoying her coffee, a SWAT team breaks into Belle Reve and uses a K-12 to bust into Harley's cage. The leader takes off his mask, and reveals himself to be, of all people, The Joker!
Due to the fact that Waller made some monumentally stupid decisions, she goes to Bruce Wayne for protection. In exchange, she gives him the governments files on superhumans, setting up for the Justice League film.
All in all, this was a damn good movie. I've seen films that try to do the same thing Suicide Squad does and fail. The Expendables is probably the worst example of an ensemble action film in existence, not counting the sequels obviously. Suicide Squad proves that you only need another twenty minutes to your run-time, better characters, better sub-plots, a better main plot and better effects to really make that work. It's not an impossible feat, you just need to have a decent studio behind the movie, rather than one that routinely produces sub-standard direct-to-video action vehicles.
As far as characters go, we've got a brilliant line-up for the most part. Everyone gives a pretty good performance at the very least, so I won't bother name-checking every individual member. However, there are a few specific instances I would like to bring up. First off, I'd like to congratulate Jai Courtney for finally finding a good movie to be in. A Good Day to Die Hard was a movie that didn't really need to exist, and Jai Courtney didn't particularly sell himself as Jack McClane anyways. On the other hand, from the moment he spoke a single word in this film I bought him as the bogan-y bank-robber.
I could tell from the production stills and the handful of trailer clips I couldn't avoid that Margot Robbie was going to be a good Harley Quinn, and she didn't disappoint. She's not quite Tara Strong, but hardly anyone is.
This brings us to Will Smith as Deadshot, possibly the biggest issue with this film. I love Will Smith as an actor and a comedian alike, but his portrayal shifts back and forth between a pitch-perfect version of Deadshot and Agent J from Men In Black. This might be a product of the re-shoots DC ordered, but there's no way to tell until the film comes out on home media later in the year so we can take a look at all of the deleted and alternate scenes. If they decide to put all the cut footage onto the home release. I'm erring more on the side of studio-mandated re-shoots, considering the fact that a good number of Joker scenes appear to have been left on the cutting-room floor, not to mention the sheer amount of plot-sensitive content they cut out of Batman V Superman.
This brings me to The Joker himself, Jared Leto. I'll admit, I was apprehensive when I first saw Leto as The Joker. The tattoos and crowns were off-putting to say the least, but when Leto started performing, I was blown away. I didn't think anyone could pull off a combination of the Nicholson, Hamill and Ledger Jokers, but Leto and Ayer managed it. I wouldn't go as far as to say that he's better than Ledger, we'll have to wait for Ben Affleck's Batman movie to determine that, but he's up to par, certainly.
I like the chemistry Leto and Robbie have in this film. It's a twisted sort of chemistry, but it's still a good romantic chemistry. As opposed to some previous incarnations of their relationship, it seems to be a bit less exploitative on the part of The Joker and more of a mutual attraction. The two of them seem to genuinely care for each other, considering the lengths that The Joker goes to to rescue Harley, and even puts her safety above that of his own. It's sweet in an incredibly demented sort of way. Granted, he's still the freaking Joker, and given an assault-rifle with one magazine, an approaching zombie horde and The Joker as my only partner, I'd empty my rifle into his head and neck, steal everything he's got on him and bludgeon my way out of the horde with the rifle, because an empty gun is less likely to kill you than the freaking Joker.
I'm interested to see more out of the characters this film has introduced, and I'm also interested in seeing where the DCEU goes from here. Justice League, Suicide Squad 2, Teen Titans, wherever it goes from here I'm on-board. I want to see more of this.
Finally we come to the soundtrack. From the licensed tracks to the original score, we're looking at a brilliant selection of tracks. Out of the two films with "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath featured in them, Suicide Squad is the better film, but that's not saying much.
The one slightly off selection I can find is the placement of "Without Me" by Eminem while the Suicide Squad are gearing up. It would have fit into the film better if it played during the credits after the return of The Joker. However, there's less artistic bankruptcy to this licensed soundtrack than there are to most. I would prefer a mostly original soundtrack, but some things you just can't evoke without a specific song from a specific artist, and some scenes just scream awesome with their associated tracks. "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" by AC/DC is used to great effect during The Flash's encounter with Captain Boomerang.
However, the actual soundtrack album that was released is absolutely insane. In the film and trailers Queen's original version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" plays, but the Panic! At The Disco version is the one included on the album.
Then there's the fact that more than half of the tracks from the movie weren't included on the soundtrack album. This is somewhat absurd to me, but considering you can basically get those tracks on any number of other albums, it's not as egregious as certain films which don't include original compositions on their soundtrack album, like Top Gun. Worse, some don't have soundtrack albums at all, like Highlander.
Before we wrap up the review, I'd like to make one final note. This has been a terrible year for trailers. BvS had way too much being shown in the trailers, Ghostbusters had monumentally horrible trailers and TV spots across the board, and this film had way too many deleted-scenes shown in the trailers. That's something that I've always wondered about, why would they think that's a good idea? That's a tacit admission that the director wasn't involved with the marketing, and that's a horrible decision. There are some scenes that shouldn't be shown outside of the theater, and marketing shouldn't be allowed to spoil that for any reason. Then there are some scenes that were never meant to be shown at all that somehow wind up in the trailers. This is why I don't watch trailers anymore, they're ludicrous and absolutely superflouous. They're almost never representative of the final product, and typically wind up being deceptive. Bad movies tend to get good trailers and good movies tend to get bad ones. The art of trailer construction appears to have been lost to the ages, because the only good trailer I've seen in the last several years was for The Force Awakens. The Civil War trailers either got worse, spoiled more or both with every subsequent piece of additional footage after starting out with fairly strong trailers.
I might have to write a full article on the art of the trailer. Hell, I might even wind up ranking best and worst trailers this year. However, the quality of the trailers do not impact the rating of the movie.
In the end, I give Suicide Squad a 9.3*. I'll see you next week with either Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson or Sausage Party.

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Image from Impawards.com

L: Change The WorLd

This is it. The last (So far) of the live-action Death Note movies, and man, oh man is this one hell of a damn good movie!
Ever since I finished the Death Note comics years and years ago, I thought it would be great to see a spin-off series revolving around L solving crimes before the Kira case began. That's part of the reason why I like the novel Death Note: Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases, because it's a sample of L's work before the Kira case began.
Spoilers for the movie inbound, if you're okay with that (I don't see why you would be, but if you are) keep reading. If not, get all three live-action Death Note films and watch them one right after another. It's well worth your time.
If you want to know at what point in the series timeline this movie is set, that's a complicated answer. You see, the movie starts off before L joins the Kira investigation, and then transitions to the climax of said investigation, before finally settling into a groove after the investigation wrapped up, but before the end of The Last Name.
As the title would suggest, this movie is very L-centric, following him through the last twenty days of his life before his death at the end of The Last Name. L even echoes the title of that movie, saying that his name shall be the last one written when writing it down.
Meanwhile, in Thailand a deadly viral-weapon has been unleashed on the village from Kickboxer (Seriously, it looks like it's right next to the ruins Kurt Sloane trained in.) and people are dying left and right. What appears to be the US Military show up (They're in Humvees, they're answering to what appears to be an American general and they're speaking English with American accents) take a bunch of blood samples, determine that the virus has gone beyond curability and decide to firebomb the village, but not before one of L's undercover operatives, F flees the scene with a boy who hasn't been affected by the virus. He manages to get far enough away to give the boy his pendant and a code to contact Watari with before being blown up by the helicopter. Apparently the virus is so potent they can't let anyone get away.
In Japan, a girl named Maki is seeing her father at the Japanese equivalent of the CDC for homework and an injection. The father, Dr. Kimihiko Nikaido is working with Dr. Kimiko Kujo on a sample of the virus taken from the village. He'd tested it a day ago, but it changed radically in the time since then. Apparently it had become immune to whatever he'd had in mind for a cure, or whatever inoculation there might have been since then.
We see Watari's death once again, and it's not any less sad than it was before. L wraps up the Kira case, informs the other operatives from Whammy's house of the situation, burns the Death Notes, and buries Watari. With twenty days left to live, L spends his time solving case after case after case, burning through hundreds of cases from dozens of countries in under a week. Eventually, he comes back to the release of the viral weapon. He knows F is dead, but he doesn't have much other information, at least until the boy from Thailand calls up the investigation headquarters with F's access code. L has him airlifted out of the country, and tested for the virus. When he comes back negative, L takes him under his wing to figure out what's happened. After bonding over their mutual love of food, the boy lets L look at the pendant F gave him. Inside, L finds a Micro-SD card inside, with video taken by F on it. This gives L a better look at what happened in Thailand, and about how the virus works. This also reveals who performed the attack, a terrorist organization called Blue Ship.
Meanwhile, Dr. Nikaido gives his daughter, Maki another injection, some new homework, a box with a syringe in it, and a pendant similar to the one F had. She leaves for home, but goes to see her father at work later that day. Unfortunately for her, Blue Ship is raiding the lab looking for a cure her dad made. During the raid, it's revealed that Dr. Kujo, Nikaido's lab-partner is the one in charge of Blue Ship, and the one who created the virus. Nikaido destroys the cure he'd been working on, as well as the enhanced virus, but he dies in the process, to keep them from using his daughter against him. Unfortunately for his daughter, she sees him dying of the virus while simultaneously burning to death in the lab. Fun childhood memories!
She dashes out of the lab and gets into a taxi, giving the driver a list of addresses off the memory card in the pendent her dad gave her. Eventually, she gets to L's headquarters from the Kira investigation, and gives him the SD-card inside the pendent.
Dr. Kujo and Blue Ship tear apart the lab looking for where Nikaido stashed the data on the vaccine, since a bio-weapon can't be used or sold without having an inoculation or cure handy, otherwise the administrator of the weapon would get infected and die.
Kujo, a former member of Whammy's House contacts L under the pretense of asking for help to cure the virus, but L notices her flunkies in the reflection of a mirror on her desk. Kujo remembers something she saw from Maki's homework, and realizes that the secret message inside it was "Watari." From that she deduces Maki must have taken up refuge with L, so she has her team raid the former headquarters of the Kira task-force.
Maki goes out to confront the people responsible for her fathers death, intending to infect them with the viral weapon, but apparently the shotgun-wielding idiot of the group seems to have forgotten that the virus is transmissable through blood and attempts to shoot her before L kicks his ass and flees the base with her and the boy. On the way out, they meet with an American FBI Agent named Hideaki Suruga sent to retrieve the Death Notes, who helps them flee in a crepe truck that doubles as L's mobile base.

As they're leaving, L wipes the local server in the old task-force headquarters so Blue Ship can't get into his files. On the way out, L ditches the crepe van so Blue Ship can chase after Suruga while he takes the kids in a different direction. He goes to meet with Dr. Koichi Matsudo, one of Nikaido's lab assistants, but Kujo gets to the media to tell them Maki has the virus, so they are forced to proceed via bicycle the rest of the way. At one point they stop by an open-air market to buy some supplies and then lay low in a maid cafe while L loads up on sugar and tinkers with the stuff he bought at the market. They then make their way to Matsudo's lab, and he begins to analyze the virus in an attempt to figure it out. L deduces that Maki must have some sort of immunity to the virus, either naturally or through her father's machinations. Since the virus needs glucose to replicate, it's feeding on Maki's blood-sugar. As far as they can tell, the virus isn't contagious as long as her immune-system can combat it, but the way the virus mutates could become active at any time, and Matsudo can't figure out how to deconstruct the virus. As they're doing this, the boy solves an equation from Maki's homework, coming to the numbers of thirteen and eleven. L extrapolates this to the letters MK, and he and Dr. Matsudo come to the conclusion that this refers to the MK protein, Midkine. Midkine promotes cell-growth and regeneration, as well as the development of new and reinforcement of existing blood vessels. The virus in question is a cross between Influenza and the Ebolavirus. For those unfamiliar with the Ebola virus disease, it's an infectious virus which causes the breakdown of blood-vessels and immune-cells. It also causes issues with clotting, the lymphatic system, and the immune system. Since Midkine helps propagate the growth of new cells, it can help with the symptoms of the virus, and stave off death. No, that's not just the movie science talking, I actually looked this stuff up. As far as I can tell, they're not just spinning science-fiction here. It actually seems like the Midkine protein might work as part of a vaccine in this situation. I've left some links for you guys at the bottom of the review so you can check things out for yourself.
The problem is that while Midkine might help, they don't have a way of synthesizing the protein at the moment. However, L figures out that boy has an elevated production of Midkine (Just gotta hope this doesn't lead to cancer. Elevated Midkine levels tend to be associated with cancerous cell-growth.) and that's why he survived the infection of his village. They confirm this with a blood-test, and this allows them to fast-track production of a vaccine.
Maki takes L and the boy onto the roof for a picnic, and there we have some very touching moments between the three characters.
After this symbolic goodbye, Maki calls Dr. Kujo in an attempt to infect her with the virus and kill her, but Kujo's knife-wielding psychopathic sidekick grabs her and they take her onto a plane so they can infect as many people as possible so they can reduce the population of the world and save the planet from mankinds overpopulation. Yes, Blue Ship is one of those groups. They'd get along fairly well with Victor Von Doom from Fant4stic.
L finds Maki's backpack after noticing she's missing, and considering that he knows Kujo doesn't have a vaccine, and considering Blue Ship's manifesto, he figures the plan must be to infect an international flight. From here, he finds out which plane has had to host an emergency patient, and determines what plane they're on from there. With a sack of vaccine syringes, L meets back up with Agent Suruga, and they manage to ground the plane. Unfortunately, Kujo has her team hijack the plane and attempt to fly off anyways, but L jumps aboard the plane with the vaccine. He manages to stall Kujo long enough for all of the hijackers to become incapacitated, and he decides to give her a second chance by giving her a dose of the vaccine. As passengers and hijackers alike are dying, L tells the crew to vaccinate everyone while he hits the air-breaks on the plane to keep it from crashing into the airport. Maki wants to kill Kujo, but L talks her out of it, and they part ways. Maki going to the hospital and L to Whammy's House with the boy, whom he calls Near.
I rushed the summary towards the end, but I did that because I didn't want to spend any more time crying than I had to, because the end of this movie was incredibly sad.
So, all in all this was a great movie. If you wanted to see more of Matsuyama Ken'ichi's amazing performance as L, this is the movie for you. If you wanted to see L working on other cases, interacting with other characters, and being generally bad-ass, then you definitely want to see this film. I would like to stress, however, that you absolutely need to watch the first two live-action Death Note films first.
I have to say, it's a rare case that I see a trilogy where each subsequent installment is legitimately better than the previous one. In this case, this film actually fixed most of the major issues I had with the first two films, primarily the incredibly sparse soundtrack. According to the credits, Kawai Kenji, the composer for the previous two movies returned to compose this soundtrack, and I have to say that he nailed this soundtrack. This movie has the kind of soundtrack the previous two films should have had. They knew when they needed music to enhance the scene and they knew when the soundtrack needed to be quiet. In that regard, they took a lesson from the animated series
Unfortunately, the ending theme-song is a licensed track from Lenny Kravitz, titled I'll Be Waiting. If only they'd used an original track, possibly a slow piano rendition of L's theme from the animated series, it would have been even better.
As a detective film, the intrigue is top notch. As a thriller, the suspense is brilliant. As a character piece about L, it's beautiful. Surprisingly, it works well as a horror film too, owing to the fact that the director is Nakata Hideo, best known as the director of The Ring series. I especially love the effects in this film. Barring an appearance by a badly CGI'd Ryuk, the effects are brilliant. As far as I can tell, Nakata primarily relied upon practical effects for those infected by the disease, and they look pretty convincing. When I found out that the third movie in the trilogy had been handed off to another director, I was fairly dubious, since that doesn't usually turn out all that well. After having seen this film, however, I can safely say that Nakata Hideo was a good choice. He wrings every bit of emotion out of every scene and then some, delivering a poignant, sad film that doubles as a pulse-pounding action-thriller. Kobayashi Hirotoshi wrote the screenplay, and he didn't miss a single beat in his writing. In conjunction with the awesome direction and amazing performances from the cast, it all comes together into one awesome, sad film.
Light Yagami is always going to be a hard act to follow, but Blue Ship delivers as an ensemble act. Hatsune Misawa (Played by Satō Megumi) could have carried an entire movie on her own, especially if she'd gotten her hands on a Death Note. She's so insane it's both entertaining to watch and fairly unsettling as well. Daisuke Matoba (Played by Takashima Masanobu) and Kimiko Kujo (Played by Kudoh
Youki) both handle the roles of charismatic leader, with Kujo actually seeming slightly more threatening than Matoba most of the time. Not that Matoba is a slacker, he actually stabbed his boss to death early on in the film. It's actually kind of hard to believe that there could be anyone, even a group of people who could seem like a threat when compared to Light Yagami, but Blue Ship somehow managed to pull it off. Had things gone a different way, they might have come up against Light at some point. They might have even proven to be formidable foes for a while.

Now we get to the minor criticisms I have and points i'd like to make. Take a look at the screenshot to the left, and look at Maki's hair. It's cut exactly like Mello's is in the animated series and comics. However, Mello isn't in this film. That's something I'd just like to throw out there.
Now we get to the one other issue (Aside from the licensed music) this film shares with the previous two. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Near? For me, it's his shaggy white hair. Take a look at the poster above, at the little boy in the lower left of the image, right below Watari. That's Fukuda Narushi, and you'll notice that his hair isn't white, and it's cut straight around his head, like Gohan's haircut during the Frieza-saga of Dragon Ball Z. It's a small thing, but if they'd dyed his hair white at the very least it would have been a little better. They might have been trying to preserve a twist at the end, since they never said his name until the end, but come on. He's dressed like Near, he acts like Near, he's a genius like Near, and his favorite toy is the exact same kind of robot that Near always had with him in the comics. There's no way this kid was ever going to be anyone but Near, so they might as well have just gone straight for the white hair. It's not like Death Note had all that many odd hair-colors the way most anime does, so it was incredibly unusual for Near to have such white hair. It made him stand out the way Misa's bright yellow hair made her stand out, or how the color-shifting in the animated series helped differentiate the characters.
In the end though, this was a brilliant film. It was well-written, well-directed, well-acted, and incredibly well-made all around. It's also incredibly sad, so if you watch it you should get a handkerchief ready.
I'll give it a 9.9* rating. Now that I'm done with the live-action movies (At least until the sequel to this film comes out), I'm going to attempt to find the Death Note musical, and the novelization of this film before moving on to the live-action television series. Meanwhile, expect some gaming reviews in the interim. I'll see you then!

Cover image from Amazon.com. Screenshots taken by me.
Citations for the science:
http://jb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/132/3/359
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12630-014-0257-z
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4197285/
Smith, Tara (2005). Ebola (Deadly Diseases and Epidemics). Chelsea House Publications. ISBN 0-7910-8505-8.
http://www.nature.com/modpathol/journal/v13/n10/full/3880195a.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11048798