No joke, the Resident Evil show is garbage but Lance Reddick as the Weskers was top shelf entertainment. RIP.
There’s this thing movie sequels do every now and again, where they completely disregard the ending of the prior movie and essentially rewrite it in the opening in order to put the pieces in the starting places the powers that be want.
A few famous examples of that would be the end of Aliens, with Ripley, Newt, Bishop and Hicks beating the Alien Queen, wiping out the Xenomorphs, and going into cryosleep as they head back home, a hopeful, satisfying ending focused on Ripley having found a surrogate family after she lost hers in the decades she was adrift in space. Enter Alien 3, and during the credits, the goddamn opening credits, we learn that a Facehugger had actually snuck onboard, damaged the cryopods, resulting in the gruesome deaths of Newt and Hicks, and impregnated Ripley with a new Alien Queen. The damage to the ship once again sends her off course to a penal colony, where she gets a brief reunion with Bishop before switching him off permanently. Yeah, what the fuck.
Or there’s Terminator 2, which ends with the destruction of the Cyberdyne building and all of Dyson’s research, along with the deaths of Dyson himself and the T-800, which tragically sacrifices itself in order to destroy all the remaining evidence of the Terminators and prevent their creation. Sarah closes out the movie with hope, that the future is not set, and they can create their own fate. Until Terminator 3, that is, which reveals that no, Skynet is this kind of cosmic inevitability. All they managed to achieve in the second film was delaying Judgement Day by a few years, and Skynet is back on their bullshit sending a new T model back in time.
But the absolute worst culprit of this is, without a doubt, the Paul W. S. Anderson Resident Evil series.
I was always confused by these movies when I was younger, and I used to think I was the problem. You see, I saw the first film a while after it had come out, thought it was a little eh, and then never knew about or never bothered to check out the second one (I was 9 when the second was released, for context). But I did catch the third film on TV late one night, and little ol’ me was absolutely flabbergasted. Why the hell is everything Mad Max now? Why is Alice psychic? Who dragged the love of my life Ardeth Bay into this shit
I assumed that I had to have missed no less than two films in the series, probably more, one of which was a detailed depiction of the downfall of global civilisation, explaining where all of this came from. It wasn’t until I rewatched the whole series from start to finish over Christmas – I know, festive, and also yes this is how long I take to make things – it wasn’t until then that I realised there was only one movie that I’d missed, the explanation of the world ending is contained entirely in the third film’s opening monologue, and watching the second only added to my questions. Not to mention this turned out to be the mildest instance of huge leaps and retcons between films in the series.
I do think the naming of these movies is partly to blame – there’s no Resident Evil 2, 3, 4 or 5. They’re Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife, and Retribution. Every one of those titles could be swapped for a different film and it would still make sense. The only ones you can trust yourself to know are in the right place are Resident Evil, no subtitle, and The Final Chapter.
Honestly, it takes some particularly weird shit to catch your eye in this series. For me to look past all the rest of it, like Alice’s never-ending supply of tactical corsets, Japanese swords, and weapons that come in pairs, the bizarre slow mo explosion reactions, and the clones – dear lord, the clones. By the end of the series we’ve seen three Rains, three Carloses, three Isaacseses, possibly two Weskers, two Shades, two turtle doves, and I shit you not a few hundred fuckin Alices in various forms throughout the series. I’m just filling this bit in the script with words because I don’t know how I could possibly convey the sheer number of Alices there are in this chunk. It’s truly some Rick and Morty shit that these three characters in the same shot are all based on the same person, one being the original, another being a clone, and another being a digital copy. It’s reminding me of the ending to League of Superpets where the scene has three separate characters interacting who are all voiced by Dwayne Johnson. It’s wild to me that movies adapted from a series of games whose bread and butter is zombies resulting from engineered viruses, would have the zombies as a backdrop and throwaway line or two, and instead make the series entirely about clone shenanigans.
But I bring up all of this to say that by far, the strangest thing in the series is how it ignores the endings of previous entries. And no, I’m not giving a spoiler warning. It’s inherent to the premise of the video so you should be able to guess that’s the case, but also I’m actively encouraging you not to watch six god-awful movies, and I swear it’ll make just as much sense from me explaining it as it would by watching them.
So here we go, the weirdness starts off mild, more a stretch of convenience. The first film ends with Alice being taken off by Umbrella, who decide to go down to the zombie-ridden Hive base to investigate. Alice wakes up in a lab/hospital an indeterminate period of time later having clearly been experimented on. She stumbles out of the building to find Raccoon City in shambles, the zombie apocalypse kind of shambles, with no one on sight.
At the beginning of the second film, as the Umbrella team inevitably get ganked by zambos, it takes thirteen hours for things to go from normal to this. It’s here that Alice is woken up and emerges at what looks like twilight. The next time we see her is the same night, still plagued with memory loss, sporadic flashbacks, and crippling pain from the experiments they did on her. Then, less than ten minutes of movie time later, she’s Trinity. Like no joke, she’s crashing through a church window on a motorbike, jumping around on wires, and mowing down everything in sight. Now, having the superpowers is cool and all, you can guess that’s a result of those experiments, and it’s confirmed later, but the attitude change is jarring. Alice becomes cold as ice from this point on, and the change occurs offscreen in no more than a few hours.
You might be thinking that’s not so bad, and I’d agree, but this is just easing you in for the strangeness to come. The second one ends with the city being nuked to kill all the zombies and cover up Umbrella’s involvement, but our band of survivors including Alice, Jill, Carlos, LJ, and Angela helicopter out of dodge, until Alice gets hit with a flying pole defending Angela. She’s found by Isaacs and taken back to Umbrella, and either she died and this is a clone, or she miraculously survived and they fixed her up. Either way, she breaks out, showing off that she now has psychic powers, and takes off with the rest of the gang. Except syke, Isaacs actually wanted this, deliberately letting them go and activating something called Project Alice. It’s implied that Alice is under Umbrella’s control, monitored via satellite, with them able to see through her eyes, possibly a sleeper agent to take out this lot who know too much about the nuke cover up. What a juicy stinger, I wonder what will come of this.
Well, cut to 3, and like I said in the intro, everything is completely different. The infection still manages to spread from Raccoon City, collapsing human civilisation in a matter of months, and somehow affecting the ecosystem in general, turning everything into a Mad Max desert wasteland. Once again, all five years of this is happening in the opening monologue, trying to give X-Men Origins: Wolverine a run for its money. Add to that, Carlos and LJ are hanging out with a new crew, while Alice is on her own getting into classic post-apocalypse zombie cannibal redneck torture family adventures, and Jill is nowhere to be found. It will never be explained why the group separated and I don’t know if it was ever explained what happened to Jill in the intervening time, I will admit I slipped into sweet unconsciousness a couple of times in these viewings.
Probably the weirdest retcon of this film is that for the majority of the film, Isaacs is desperately looking for Alice. It’s not clear how they lost track of her in the first place, but the opening scene shows them creating dozens of clones of Alice, trying presumably to make them as mega-badass as her, and failing because they don’t have the original. So why let her go at the end of the last one, ya numpty? They temporarily regain control of her about two thirds of the way through the film, showing that once they get a satellite above her, they can see through her eyes again and completely shut her mind down remotely. All of this begs the question, what was the original reason for letting Alice go? What did it achieve? Was the original plan for her to act as a sleeper agent and they were just distracted by the apocalypse? If so, could they have written a line or two maybe explaining that?
Well buddy, if you think that’s bad, it gets much worse, much much worse. The third one ends with the group splitting up, this time onscreen amazingly. The surviving gang fly off to Arcadia which definitely isn’t a trap, nope, no sir, just a perfectly safe community with plenty of food and no zombies. Meanwhile Alice goes off to kill Isaacs and rescues her clones along the way, threatening to come after Umbrella in Tokyo. Again, what a setup, imagine what an entire army of supersoldier Alices could do against Umbrella.
And at first, it seems like for once, these movies are going to deliver on a promise. The opening scene shows the Alice army, somehow in possession of hundreds of identical outfits and weapons, invading the Tokyo Umbrella facility and massacring everyone inside in a matter of minutes. Sure, she’s forgotten that she can kill people through security cameras with her mind but you can’t have everything. Wesker takes a look at the situation and nopes out of it almost immediately, escaping on a jet. Oh, this is an early win for the Alices, I was thinking, showing off their strength so that’s it’s all the more dramatic when Wesker comes back with the full might of Umbrella and the T-virus and manages to give them a run for their money. Foolish me, I was probably drunk or something. No, Wesker detonates a bomb that mega-nukes the facility, killing every single clone, every single one, in the blink of an eye. Well that was fun while it lasted. Not to worry though, the OG Alice got on the jet with him, and she’s gonna get revenge for her sisters- nope he injects her with a thingy that gets rid of all her superpowers. Now she’s just an ordinary human that can still survive high speed crashes whilst unsecured and perform acrobatic backflips on slippery surfaces. A totally normal human bean.
So everything that was cool and intriguing about the end of the last film is now dead and gone. And the cherry on the cake – when she finally gets there herself, Alice finds no Arcadia at the coordinates she was given, just a rabid Claire trying desperately to become a Blue Beetle villain. This is where I started to lose my shit and think about writing this video.
The fourth one ends with the group tracking down the actual Arcadia, an Umbrella ship trapping and imprisoning survivors, killing Wesker with the same explosion that killed the Alice army, and freeing the 2000-odd prisoners. Don’t ask how the ship holds that many spaced out in tubes like this, it’s a Tardis ship. The film ends on a note of hope, with Alice re-recording the message that led them to Arcadia in the first place, a whole colony of survivors at her back. Except syke, this is another fake out ending, and a veritable flock of Umbrella helicopters come for the ship, led by none other than a brainwashed Jill Valentine who hypes up her soldiers in a mid-credits scene by warning them about how difficult it will be to fight such insanely dangerous combatants as Alice and the Redfields. OK sweet, the fight isn’t over, we’re gonna go into the next film with an all-out war between Umbrella and the 2000 survivors.
Well, no. The fifth one starts with everyone on the ship being immediately massacred, the Redfields vanishing into thin air, and Alice herself getting taken out in less than a minute. Turns out a fleet of armed helicopters is more than a match for a lady with a coin gun and 2000 unarmed dizzy people. I wasn’t even surprised by this one, it just washed over me at this point in the series. Once again, because originality is for gormless suckers, we cut to a confused Alice waking up in a lab to enjoy a plot about traps in an Umbrella facility featuring lots and lots of clones.
That story ends with the gang heading off to Washington, where the last survivors of humanity, I repeat this is it, these are the last humans alive, and they’re camped out at the White House under constant assault from a horde of zombies, grumpkins and snarks. And the survivors are led by none other than Albert Wesker, who gives Alice back her superpowers, telling her that the Red Queen is determined to wipe out humanity and that they need to unite in order to stop her. And our five legendary heroes line up and strike their poses on the roof, ready to face the army of the dead. OK surely now, surely this time we’ll get what the ending promised. What? What’s that? This is the worst retcon yet? OH GREAT.
That’s right, once again, the opening monologue of the final film retcons the entire ending of the last one, and this time it’s not even clear what actually happened. Turns out, that whole thing was a trap by Wesker, and when we start the film, the White House is completely destroyed, Alice is the only apparent survivor, and all the other main characters are MIA. But that’s not all kids, no, for the price of just one backpedal you get not one but two more. Wesker was also lying about the Red Queen wanting to kill all humans. She’s actually trying to save them and it’s Wesker and Isaacs doing the exterminating. What’s that? You thought everyone was already dead because the White House was the last holdout of humanity? You silly billy, you forgot about the second backpedal! There’re actually around 4000 more survivors in other outposts so we’ve still got other, less expensive side characters to hang out with during the film.
This one is to me by far the most egregious, the most retconny, and the most disappointing of all of them. The letdown, right before the final chapter of the saga, meaning I won’t even get the chance to not be let down ever again, was immense. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be let down in the future, like I’ll never get back up again, but I’ll never be personally let down by Paul W. S. Anderson’s inability to rewatch any of his movies.
I fully believe that if this wasn’t the last entry in the series, it would turn out that the zombie cure was all a ploy by Wesker and a hitherto unforeseen different coloured Queen AI to mutate the zombies into a new breed that are basically the same but with a slight cosmetic change, maybe Crimson Heads, and it turns out that Leon and Ada survived because those actors happened to be available at the time. And I kinda wish that’s how history played out.
But speaking of actors being available, what I’m wondering is, how the hell does this happen? All of these movies are written by Anderson with very little additional outside input, they’re so divergent from the game’s canon that there’s no pressure to do things a certain way, and producers didn’t give a shit about how video game movies were made until like a few years back, so surely this should be the most cohesive series ever created.
So what factors are we aware of that might affect continuity? Well, the second one was directed by Alexander Witt because Anderson was busy with Aliens vs Predator. Witt said that he’d made some small adjustments to the screenplay, nothing major – it’s pure conjecture but maybe that resulted in some of those characterisation changes in Alice that I’d mentioned. By the way, please check out the interview where he talks about this. It’s drier than a nun’s vag, it’s the most boring thing I’ve ever read. Witt is a very experienced second unit director with a mad resumé of big budget pictures, and it’s clear he’s not the guy people usually ask questions to, and he has absolutely zero vested interest in this project.
Jill didn’t come back for Extinction because Sienna Guillory was signed on for Eragon at the time, and I’m not sure which was the worse choice. This seems to be the whole reason Claire is in the movie at all, to fill a space for a video game character, but I can’t see it drastically changing the overall plot.
And that’s pretty much all I can see in outside influences, it’s honestly all Anderson. This is all a result of his whims.
He’s said that he started writing the second one immediately after the first, which probably explains why it’s the most connected of the two. No one was particularly pushing to make another one after the third, with the producers describing it as the end of the series, but these things make money so, three more, plus a reboot, plus a spin-off show. Anderson was planning to make 4 and 5 back-to-back, but he decided against it in the end.
The major tone and setting changes for the third film, y’know turning into a Mad Max zombie film, are down to Anderson wanting to appeal to a wider moviegoing audience who might not have played a Resident Evil game, but almost definitely have seen a sandy post-apocalypse neo-western. He picked the director of that one, Russell Mulcahy, specifically because he liked his style.
It’s hard to say how planned out they were from there on, at least on the script side – Anderson said he definitely had something in mind for the rest of the series by around movie 4, but he also said that he takes it movie by movie. That seems to be the all-consuming truth of the affair – Anderson wrote them as and when he had the green light to make another one, and given the huge amount of creative control he has on the project, he could just write whatever he felt like writing at the time.
The guy moves from project to project so quickly, like just look at his schedule for that period of time. It’s not exclusively Resident Evil he worked on either, he’s hopping between a bunch of different properties. He doesn’t sit on things; he makes a film at the speed of sound and then moves the fuck on to the next. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t spend a huge amount of time at the scripting stage rewriting or proofreading.
I mentioned before how he was influenced by other movies and directors he enjoys, and he’s certainly more inspired by films than games, despite this being a video game series. He and producer Jeremy Bolt have cited Avatar, Inception, the original Westworld, Blade Runner and more as things Anderson loves, and you can see those films bleeding into the Resident Evil series as they come out and make a splash. It seems like the direction the Resident Evil series went in would be dictated by whatever cool movie Anderson had last seen.
Anyway, now that’s off my chest I don’t have to think about these movies ever again. My soul has been purified. I feel so much worse.
It’s funny I brought up Aliens and Terminator 2 in the intro because there’s this bit in the third film when Carlos blows himself up where they just play the Terminator theme. Like I know that’s a really basic rhythm but c’mon, Terminator has dibs on that, find something else. Then there’s this bit in the fifth film where they just do Aliens. Like they just take the third act of Aliens and do a shitty version of it with Resident Evil characters. The ass-kicking female lead’s surrogate daughter is taken by a giant monster with a weird tongue, and she goes after her despite a ticking clock that will destroy the facility they’re on, forced to leave behind her love interest because he got injured. She beats down the monster in a fight and rescues the surrogate daughter by tearing open a goopy thing that’s restraining her. Imagine having like 6 or 7 games of content to draw from and you shamelessly steal from Aliens instead.
Wild stuff.
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