FILM’S REAL EVIL: NOT ENOUGH VEGAS

Saturday, Sept. 22, 2007 | 7:42 a.m.

A new movie opening this weekend portrays Las Vegas as a desert wasteland populated by grunting, soulless corpses with bloodshot eyes, beasts corrupting everything within reach.

It's fictional, too.

Based on the Jane Austen novel of the same name, "Resident Evil: Extinction" updates the book's comedy of love and manners in the English countryside by moving it to the post-apocalyptic southwest and adding zombies. A sample scene:

Alice: "Oh, Mr. Darcy, you are looking ever so pale."

Darcy: "Bleeeegh-ah-aaaaahhh!"

Alice: (Stab, stab!)

All in all, the best Jane Austen movie in years and a strong Oscar contender. ( OK, it's actually based on a video game. But it would have been the best Jane Austen novel ever.)

With all the hype surrounding the movie and it s Las Vegas setting (finally our very own zombie movie), the Sun decided to go to its Thursday night premier for an early glimpse of how we'll all die and how we'll look afterward .

First, the movie does get a few things wrong about Vegas.

For instance, none of the zombies is drinking whiskey sours and grinding out menthols on the carpet of the Imperial Palace. The Imperial isn't even in the movie, and neither is everything off the Strip.

See, in the movie, it's taken only five years since the zombie apocalypse for Las Vegas to be buried under a layer of beach-quality sand. The only parts of town that survive are the "Welcome to Fantastic (sic) Las Vegas" sign and most but not all of the Strip.

Excalibur seems to have vanished, along with Bally's, Wynn Las Vegas and bunch of others.

Luxor's there, of course, with a few smashed windows. New York - New York still stands, along with a battered Statue of Liberty. Paris Las Vegas makes the cut, or at least a charred-looking Eiffel Tower does (so someone can climb up it with a rifle). The Tropicana, covered with doomsday grit, looks pretty much the same.

Most of the fighting happens in front of the Eiffel Tower and on what looks like a bit of the raised walkways of Caesars Palace, as the protagonist, a gun-and-knife - wielding, genetically engineered psychic Eurobabe named Alice, fights off waves of super zombies. The zombies come spilling out of a cargo container planted by the evil corporate scientist bad guys (don't ask). How many zombies can fit in a cargo container? Dozens. Hundreds.

Then, after maybe 10 minutes of shoot-slobber-scream-shoot-slobber-stab, the fight scene is over and the movie is done with Las Vegas.

So, despite the film's heavy use of Las Vegas in its ads, and despite the movie's Planet Hollywood premier, Las Vegas gets about as much screen time as an abandoned radio station in Salt Lake City.

What can we learn from all of this? Nothing lives up to its hype - sure, but we already knew that.

The question is, what can we learn about the coming zombie apocalypse and what it means for Las Vegas?

Maybe the most instructive scene comes not from the movie, but from inside the theater at Planet Hollywood during the movie's premier. In it, one man was upset that his view of the screen was blocked.

"I'm a frigging platinum player and I'm sitting behind a box? How the heck does that happen?!"

He said the same thing five more times, only louder.

Watching this, the guy in front of me turned around, shrugged a shoulder and rolled his eyes.

"You know," he said, "there would be pluses and minuses to a zombie apocalypse."