Well and Thoroughly Fucked

So the boyfriend and I are great fans of zombie flicks, and as he's been working on a big commission and essentially housebound, we've been plowing through the Resident Evil franchise, admittedly influenced by the fact that Mila Jovovovovovovich looks like a really hot little twinky boy if you sort of mentally remove the little boobs. Anyway. Jovovich plays the bad-ass, amnesiac, zombie-kickin' heroine, and some other people play zombie dinner. One of these dudes, who ultimately ends up with a fate worse than zombitude, is some kind of ex-military crusader against the evil corporation that was creating zombies in the first place. Well into the movie, after a bunch of folks have already got eaten up, with the prospects for surivival looking implicitly bleak, and after a whole, voiced-over prologue explaining that the evil corporation makes all its money doing super-secret research for the government and military, the good-guy reformer tells Jovovich, very forcefully, that "These corporations aren't above the law. They're not." Except, um, that they are. Yet this is a common strophe in action/adventure/horror/thriller films: the idea that even though the very premises of the plot should preclude any confidence in the notion that the cops or the courts or the press is going to help, and even though the characters are to a man aware of precisely such mechanics, they nevertheless persist in uttering some form of "You're never going to get away with this!" And, oddly enough, films oven turn on a dime to indulge precisely this fantasy, so that at the end of a film about the total venality of the government, everything is resolved by Congressional hearings. (That's the Bourne series, and I owe this insight to a blog review that I can't find--link appreciated if you recall what I'm talking about.) Fortunately, ResEvil doesn't seem to be heading in that direction. Everyone appears to be well and thoroughly fucked.


UPDATE: Bourne. Thanks, Mr. B.