Resident Evil: Retribution | Fast forward to…

The Resident Evil franchise isn’t much for coherent plots or intriguing characters, but while the films’ video-game origins stunt their narrative growth, they’ve also endowed them with a rich visual vocabulary. Installment No. 5 starts with a jaw-dropping shipboard battle sequence played in reverse motion, a nifty stunt that leapfrogs over introductory exposition. (Unfortunately, it’s simply displaced, relegated to a monster recap inelegantly dropped in mid-film.) Even better, especially for those equipped with 3-D, is the sequence in which Milla Jovovich’s zombie hunter, Alice, wakes up in a translucent octagonal prison whose glowing walls seem to stretch to infinity. Ignore, if you can, that Alice’s captors have chosen to dress her in an outfit resembling two hand towels held together with Scotch tape and simply marvel at the geometric design, which cunningly extrapolates the red-and-white logo of the nefarious Umbrella Corporation. Watching the scene feels like being air-dropped into the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a detour into stillness and beauty amid the carnage. Keep going, and you’ll be treated to plenty of bone-crunching dismemberment, but nothing with quite the same modernist panache. (Available on VOD, DVD and Blu-ray Fri 21.)