Down the Rabbit Hole
The Resident Evil films bear little resemblance to the video games. Who cares?
I don’t really believe in guilty pleasures. If you like something, then just like it. When it comes to the celebrated world of films based on video games, I have pretty low standards. I’m not expecting avant garde direction, master class performances, or even spectacular production. I won’t tolerate Uwe Boll trash, but I won’t begrudge you for liking it. Somewhere in the spectrum between Borderlands and Super Mario Bros. exist the audacious six-film opus that has generated over a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. Yes, I’m talking about the series that cemented Milla Jovovich as an action superstar - and after watching over six consecutive nights last week, threatened to send me to marriage counseling - the Resident Evil saga.
It’s a small wonder, talking to someone about these movies. Even fans of the Resident Evil games seem surprised to hear there are no fewer than six separate films that exist. Spanning from 2002 through 2017, the Resident Evil films are a miracle, and an abomination. They represent both the future and herald the death knell of cinema. I don’t want to watch them, yet I cannot stop. As a renowned poet once put it, I’m hooked and I can’t stop staring. '
In the spirit of Halloween, I watched them so you don’t have to. I even deliberated over whether to buy them digitally, or if I should splurge on the 4K box set so I could bequeath them to an enemy upon my death as some sort of generational curse. Naturally, I found a box set that included a digital code for each movie. I’m not ranking anything here - what is this, Big Nerd Gaming - but mostly because they define ranking. There’s no way to establish a hierarchy of these films because, despite something which vaguely represents an overarching plot, they exist in their own vacuum. Each film focuses on what can be, unburdened by what has been.
Resident Evil (2002)
This is arguably the best of the franchise. It stars Milla Jovovich as Alice who awakens, alone in an empty manor, where it is eventually revealed she is an employee for the Umbrella Corporation, a health care and bioweapons monolith. The mansion she lives in serves as an access point to the Hive, an elaborate underground complex maintained by Umbrella where secret experiments take place. Someone released the T-Virus in the Hive, upon which the Red Queen - an AI program monitoring the facility - decided to kill everyone to mitigate exposure.
This movie - and entire series - is only marginally interested in the games. There are a series of well placed winks to the original game, but nothing of particular import. Who cares. Jovovich looks like Aya Brea from Parasite Eve as she kicks the shit out of zombie dogs. Speaking of Pavlov, there is an incredible hallway security laser scene that makes my jaw tingle every time I see it. I was so impressed by this scene in 2002 - as was Anderson, who seemingly references it in nearly every other film. I cheer for it every single time.
Paul W. S. Anderson loves Milla Jovovich so much. They met on the set of the first film, married between the second and third films, and they’ve continued to work together after this series concluded with 2020’s Monster Hunter - again bastardizing a popular Capcom series. Fool me twice, right? He absolutely loves her so much, it’s awesome. She’s subject to explosions, injections, being cloned - you name it, she’s done it. Hell, she spends the entirety of the fifth movie in a jumpsuit that another character refers to as S&M gear. An absolute wife guy, to the tune of a gazillion dollars. As Lucille Bluth said, “good for her.”
Anyway, this movie has it all. I enjoy most of the creative choices here: it looks great after all this time, has a supremely late ‘90s soundtrack featuring Marilyn Manson and ends with a great cliffhanger that begs for a sequel. It worked, because there are five of them.
Two years later, we get Resident Evil Apocalypse (2004), a film which threatens to be about the games. It takes place in Racoon City, hours after the first movie ends and the city has been overtaken by the undead. While Anderson wrote all six films (even if I think he used a beta version of ChatGPT for the last few scripts), someone else directed this film. This director sucks all the color and edgy electronic music out of the film, replacing it with a bluish hue and very basic explosion-y action movie music. I still love every second of it.
The film sees Alice, fresh after bouncing from the Racoon City Hospital, as she runs into other survivors while attempting to escape Racoon City. The city has been sequestered by Umbrella, who plans to destroy it to again mitigate the infection. Along the way, Alice meets up with characters ripped from the games, including Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr) and Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory). The film liberally borrows from Resident Evil 3, with Jill looking exactly like she does in the game, and Alice squaring off against Nemesis, the game’s namesake and villain. This movie is great, stupid fun that sorta resemble the games, even if it isn’t as ambitious from a technical or production standpoint.
The third film, Extinction (2007), is where the series starts to lose me a bit. We get another palette swap with another director, this time trading in the hazy blues for harsh bright tones that befit the film’s desert landscape. The description from Wikipedia simply states, “[t]he film follows the heroine Alice, along with a group of survivors from Raccoon City, as they attempt to travel across the Mojave desert wilderness to Alaska and escape a zombie apocalypse.1” I just watched this movie a few days ago and took notes on it; yet, that’s all I can remember, too.
Here we are introduced to the first of Alice’s clones through a pretty neat opening that features the first callback to the iconic death lasers from the first movie. While her clones are dying during failed experiments, the real Alice is traveling through the desert when she comes across claims of a place in Alaska which is free of infection. She meets up with a convoy run by Carlos (returning from the prior film) and his friend, Claire Redfield. She’s played by Ali Larter, having a moment here in 2007 because of Heroes. She does pretty great work during her run as Claire, essentially becoming the series’ second heroine.
The envoy intends to trek towards Alaska, stopping through Las Vegas which has been seemingly reclaimed by nature in the five years since the apocalypse. Would it really happen that quickly? I know Ashanti is in this movie, and there is an absolute gonzo scene involving a murder of virus-infected crows which are out for blood and somehow take out half the cast. It’s not terrible, but mostly suffers from a disjointed, threadbare plot. It starts to feel like the film is biding time to get to the next movie - which has almost nothing to do with anything that happens here.
I have one significant complaint, though. Aside from some egregious product placement, nearly every close up of Jovovich’s face is so extremely airbrushed. It looks awful and fuzzy, considering its technology old enough to drive a car. It’s also a little offensive - the woman is a supermodel, and you’re airbrushing her face? Clearly her husband didn’t direct this one either, because he would never.
Which brings us to our next film, Afterlife (2010). So much has changed since the last film, including the return of our boy, Paul W. S. Anderson. This movie is shot in 3D - remember those - and it really wants you to notice. It’s a little jarring watching it now. If you wanted to split the films into two trilogies, you would be wrong because there is no visual, thematic, or even cogent plot to string them together. But there is definitely a vibe shift here in terms of production, audio and visual design, and of course plot that carries from Afterlife into Retribution (2012). It’s the closest the series comes to approaching cohesion.
The Ultra HD and eye-popping colors work for the next two films since the entire ordeal feels like a violent cartoon. The music by tomandandy is a highlight, featuring explosive synth beats with tinges of the metal heard in the first film. Afterlife starts with Alice and her clones assaulting Umbrella’s Tokyo headquarters. During this encounter, Alice battles with Albert Wesker who injects her with a modified version of the T-Virus, neutralizing the psychic powers Alice has accumulated since the second film. The plane she and Wesker are fighting on crashes into a literal mountain, and Alice - again, just stripped of any of her powers - magically survives.
Six months later, a fully healed Alice is flying a small plane where she lands in Alaska in search of Arcadia. There she is attacked by a seemingly feral Claire Redfield, last seen splitting from Alice in the prior film to head to Alaska. Alice removes a robot spider from Claire’s chest, causing her to regain consciousness as well as her memory. From there the two head south in this little plane when they see survivors signaling for help atop a prison in Los Angeles. The prisoners assume Alice and Claire came from a large ship parked right off the coast - it’s named Arcadia.
It doesn’t make any real sense. The prison is surrounded by a horde of zombies threatening to break down the barricade, and crash landing on the prison roof doesn’t seem practicable. To ask these questions is to think more critically about the basic plot than anyone involved in this billion-dollar enterprise. Someone that reminds of Pyramid Head from Silent Hill appears and breaks down the barricade, allowing the undead to overrun the prison. This fight scene between not-Pyramid Head, Alice, and Claire is great fun to watch. This series basically guarantees at least one great set piece per film, and this one delivers.
Chris Redfield - Claire’s brother - is in this film. Their reunion is weird as hell since she has amnesia, so there is absolutely zero emotional connection between them. The acting and dialogue is so stilted I am unconvinced these two could ever come across as anything other than total strangers. You keep waiting for them to acknowledge any relationship, but it doesn’t happen. Maybe in the next film? Nope! You never see Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller) after this movie, and Claire disappears until the last movie.
The film ends with Chris, Claire, and Alice arriving upon the Arcadia, only to be met by Umbrella troops led by…Jill Valentine. Yes, our heroine from Apocalypse has returned after all this time, sporting a new haircut and another robot spider that is making her evil. It apparently has the effect of making every line delivered by the actor sound as if read by a Tik Tok caption voice. Seriously, Guillory wants to chew scenery as she struts around as Evil Jill in a purple catsuit, but she mostly sucks.
Lucky for us, she’s the main antagonist in Retribution (2012). This film opens with Valentine’s attack and subsequent capture of Alice and the group. Wentworth Miller was presumably saved from Umbrella by his agent. Almost the entire movie takes place at an underwater Umbrella facility in northern Russia. Naturally, we follow Alice as she attempts to escape the facility with the assistance of Ada Wong, a fan favorite from Resident Evil 4. Wong is assisting Alice at the behest of Wesker, who has sent a strike team led by Leon Kennedy to rendezvous and extract them.
This bonkers script absolutely feels like a video game, as Wesker sends Alice and Ada through a handful of Umbrella built zones meant to simulate conditions across a variety of climates. That means we get to see Alice stomp through Tokyo, the suburbs, and even Moscow. It is so disorienting that some of the zombies are able to drive motorcycles and shoot rocket launchers, and you never stop to think about the sheer absurdity. There’s also some shameless repetition of gags and enemies from Afterlife, but a) we’re used to it at this point, and b) it’s fun.
The new characters frankly suck. They are so paper thin and have the driest dialogue. I don’t think I can remember anything Leon says. All of Ada’s dialogue is dubbed in by the voice actor from the video game, which explains why she sounds so oddly invested in what’s happening on-screen. While it’s nice to see them, I guess, they are outranked by the return of Michelle Rodriguez, who plays two cloned versions of her character from the first film. It’s an interesting wrinkle that is under-explored, and a nice bit of fan-service. All the while they are hunted across the facility by Valentine, culminating in a rather explosive fight scene with Alice.
At the end of the film, Alice is whisked away to Washington D.C. where she is reunited with Wesker. There, he inexplicably injects her again, this time to give her powers back because they will be needed as humanity takes a final stand against Umbrella. It ends on a shot of Alice, Wesker, Leon, Jill and Ada as they stand on the roof of the White House staring out at the legion of zombies and flying dragon monsters around. This fleeting sense of continuity from the last two films is thrown out the window with the creatively titled The Final Chapter (2017).
This film opens up just after whatever climatic battle was promised at the end of Retribution. We will never see or hear from Jill, Leon, or Ada again. We also learn that despite what we saw at the end of the last film, Wesker did not actually inject Alice with the T-Virus to return her powers. It was a trap, apparently? Why did he orchestrate breaking her out of the underwater facility - the entire plot of the previous film - so he could pretend to give her any powers back? Why is my brain thinking about any of this? At some point he even says something like, “I should have killed you in DC.” If you wanted to keep her from meddling, then why did you break her ass out of the underwater prison in the first place?
The Mad Max-yassified Alice is approached by a new iteration of the Red Queen, who tasks her with returning to the Hive - the scene of the first film - to access and release the airborne antidote to the virus which, when produced to the world, would essentially neutralize it immediately. You’re telling me the cure to this thing was sitting under our noses the entire time? Regardless, Alice and a new crew - including Claire, who inexplicably ended up in Racoon City after the end of the fourth film - descend into the Hive. It doesn’t look anything like it did, which is one of those understandable changes.
Yet the set design and lighting cues were so interesting in the first (and forth and fifth) movies that seeing a more neutral, boring version of the Hive makes it feel cheap. The film hardly revisits locations from the Hive - mostly, we are treated to another bout with the world’s second most famous laser. At some point Alice descends further into the bowels of the Hive, where we see some sterile CGI looking spaces that are so conceptually incongruent with what the Hive looks like that the dissonance could incapacitate if the film was not busy trying to retcon giant chunks of the nearly ten hour saga in its final minutes.
Personally, the last movie seems like everyone is just ready for the endeavor to be over. Crushed under its own history, the series decides the best practice in its final hour is simply to ignore it. While Alice gets a somewhat happy ending, it was still a hard fought battle. Alice drives off into the sunset, where she gets to live - and fight, probably - another day.
While Alice’s saga may have ended, the Resident Evil live-action jaunts have continued. There is a single season of a Netflix produced television show, as well as the 2021 film Welcome to Racoon City. Neither have been able to replicate the grandeur of these beautiful, stupid films. That’s part of the reason why I like them so much. Are they good movies? Hell no. Can we still enjoy them anyway? Hell yes!
There’s no room in my life for guilty pleasures. If I’m going to enjoy something, I’m going to spend my time actually enjoying it, like Matlock on CBS. It’s also why I recommend this one-man tribute to Jovovich. There are hours of bloody, schlocky fun waiting here, perfect for Halloween or even Christmas. For those unafraid to venture into Raccoon City, there is a certain spectacle to behold with the Resident Evil films. Yes, an undead horde animated by a government-subsidized virus is scary - but the biggest threat here is simply thinking too much.
Resident Evil: Extinction - Wikipedia
I freakin love Milla kicking ass and I love these movies, the good and the bad! Now you’ve inspired me to watch them all over again. 😊😊😊😊