
By
Robin B. Devlin
Let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
– Inigo Montoya. “The Princess Bride.”
Sometimes, there is just so much lore that if you want to dip into something new, you find that you must memorise a complete wiki before you can sit down and enjoy a movie to know what is happening. So here I have taken entire franchises and distilled them down into 300 words or fewer per entry, saving time and catching up with a franchise so you can see if it’s your thing or if it will leave you cold.
The first up for the speed review process is the Resident Evil franchise. Stay tuned for more in-depth looks and opinions on the quality of the upcoming films.
The Resident Evil franchise.
A.K.A Seriously, You guys, look at how hot my wife is!
Resident Evil 2002

An unknown asshat deliberately lets a dangerous biohazard loose in a secret Umbrella lab under a hot girl’s house, causing the company AI to kill everyone in the base to keep it contained. Hot girl – Alice – wakes up with a Swiss Cheese brain and a sexy little red dress. She meets a fake cop (Matt), and the mansion gets stormed by commandos. They insist on taking them to ‘The Hive’ (the lab complex under the mansion and nearby Racoon City). They pick up a mystery man on the way who is Alice’s fake (but kind of real) husband.
An overly elaborate laser hallway cuts half the grunts into dog food, the AI gets switched off, the zombies are let loose. One of the grunts gets bitten by a zombie, wastes a lot of ammo on it. Matt is here to find his sister, who was going to help him blow the lid off the evil bioweapon. Alice was going to feed them the information for reasons.
Two of the commandos get bitten, which is bad, but Alice remembers the cure, which is good. The only problem is Alice’s fake/real Hubbie was the asshat who started the outbreak to cover his theft of the T-Virus, he pulls a gun and backs out away to the train. He is missing her already. The AI sics a super-duper zombie monster on him, he dies, Alice is missing him already. On the train on the way out, the last commando dies, leaving just Alice and Matt from team Suicide Mission. Just when they are almost out, Matt starts to mutate, and a biohazard team take him away.
Alice wakes up in a deserted hospital, stumbles out amid a full-on zombie apocalypse, grabs a shotgun and starts limping towards the fucking city because movie.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse 2004

In Raccoon City, a quiet evacuation is taking place with sinister black SUVs picking up VIPs. Umbrella builds a wall around the entire city in no time flat because realism is for nerds. A very British man (Dr. Ashford) won’t leave without his Daughter (Angela), whose car promptly gets rammed. A cool badass cop on suspension (Jill) goes to the station and kills half a dozen zombies. Jill wants to GTFO, but Umbrella closes the only way out of town. Umbrella sends in a strike force (because that ended so well last time) but abandons them when the mission goes south.
Alice saves Jill, a TV Lady, and some redshirts from a Licker in a church, Dr. Ashford starts to hack security cameras and payphones – trying to get Alice to pick up, he eventually makes contact and offers a deal; a guaranteed evacuation if they rescue his daughter, they need to get a move on because Umbrella is going to nuke the city at dawn. Meanwhile, a big lad called Nemesis uses a group of mercs as target practice and brawls with Alice, no score draw.
Jill finds Angela but gets into a scrape and needs Mary Sue – sorry ‘Alice’ – to rescue them. Angela is immune to the T-virus, and it was created to heal her. Nemesis shows up again, but we learn he is Matt from the first film; he swaps sides.
Good guys get to dah choppa’, but the nuke goes off, and the shockwave makes them crash. Alice sacrifices her life to save Angela, but later recovers. She kills the base that resurrected her and just walks out the front doors into the arms of Jill & Co., who have arrived to rescue her.
They GTFO, bad guys let them, the world carries on.
Resident Evil: Extinction 2007

The world ends. The T-Virus is magic now, and so is Alice. The T-virus has escaped from Raccoon City and ravaged the whole world. Umbrella isn’t even trying to hide that they are evil anymore and have a pit full of dead clones because reasons.
Some rapists attack Alice; it ends poorly for them. She finds a journal that mentions an infection-free place in Alaska called Arcadia.
A convoy led by Claire Redfield is driving aimlessly through the desert that used to be the Southwestern U.S. They stop at a motel looking for supplies but only find a metric-fuck-ton of zombie crows, which attack Team Chuckles. Alice kills them with her brain, but collapses afterwards.
Dr Issacs is doing stuff that a massive douche called Wesker doesn’t want him to do. Umbrella uses a ‘magic detecting’ satellite to locate Alice and sends out a horde of zombies to retrieve her. When this doesn’t work, they try to just turn her off. She fights the urge to take a forced nap and continues to re-kill zombies. Team Chuckles get to the Umbrella facility, Alice puts all the non-main characters into a chopper, and they piss off out of the movie, presumably to Arcadia.
Creepy sister of the creepy AI girl from the first film tells Alice she has special magic blood, and Alice finds a clone that seems to die of shock.
Alice fights the horrifically mutated Dr Issacs, because of fan service, it takes them to the laser hallway from the first film, but Alice just escapes dogfoodification when her clone turns it off. Issacs isn’t that lucky.
In Tokyo, Wesker tells a group of shadowy assholes that the North American facility has been lost. Alice telecommutes into the meeting to tell them that she will attack them with clones.
Resident Evil: Afterlife 2010

In Tokyo, lots and lots of Alice clones in tight black Lycra kill a bunch of grunts, Wesker does a runner in a chopper, but the real Alice is in there with him; he injects her with some Juju Juice that makes her human again, they crash, she walks away without a scratch, like a human would.
Later, Alice flies to Alaska – looking for Arcadia – but only finds a mind-controlled homeless woman in a plane graveyard who tries to kill her. It’s just Claire, so Alice removes the mind-control device, and they fly to LA, where they land on the roof of a former prison.
There’s a handful of good guys and a Sleazebag who tells Alice that Arcadia is not a place, it’s a ship!
Oh Shit! The zombies look like Cthulhu now and can dig tunnels, apparently!
Claire’s brother, Chris, is in a solitary cell in the basement, and a big sod who is immune to headshots – rude – wants to come into the prison to show everyone his axe crossed with an anvil.
Sleazebag murders one of the good guys, GTA’s Alice’s plane and GTFOs to the boat.
Big sod breaks in, and Alice and Claire fight it till it stops moving. The good guys escape through the sewers and make it to the ship and find it’s a trap – which sucks – but, holy shit, K-mart and the others are here in suspended animation – which is awesome! Sleazebag is working for Wesker now, who thinks he is Neo. He eventually ends up with more holes in him than the plot, but he gets better and gets away. However, there is a bomb on the chopper. Bye-bye Wesker.
Because we can’t have anything nice, the Umbrella Corp sends in a massive fleet of choppers. The good guys are fucked.
Resident Evil: Retribution 2012

Jill is evil now and attacks The Arcadia. Alice gets knocked out and has a weird head trip where she is a suburban MILF fighting zombies in a fresh outbreak. She saves her daughter but gets nailed by a zombie, wakes back up wearing a small hanky in a sensory deprivation cell, and Evil Jill sonically tortures her.
Someone hacks the base and opens her cell, also opens the drawer her clothes are in. Alice runs from a laser grid and into a simulation of Tokyo. Pretty soon, a whole bunch of zombies are let loose, and Alice rekills them. She gets away and tools up when she meets Ada, a kick-ass lady who used to work for Umbrella but swapped sides when her boss, Wesker (Surprise! Not dead!), went rogue. The A.I from the first film has taken Umbrella over and decided to just fucking murder everyone, everywhere. They info dump a load of stuff, they are in a secret base deep underground in Russia with a whole load of different test environments set up.
Team Boy-Band have been sent in to extract them but run into zombies with guns, while Alice is speed tracking and adoption they fight off the zombies and meet the mother-of-all-lickers, Alice fights some old friends and makes it to Russia to rescue them in style, the MOAL takes a LOT of killing and stanches Beccy, Alice goes to rescue her, it soon stays dead.
They meet back up with the others and get stopped by Evil Jill and clone Rayne, who gets injected with Juju juice and does an impression of a colander. Evil Jill is neutralised, and clone Rayne gets fed to the zombies under the ice.
Team awesome go to see Wesker, who is POTUS now! This is gonna be epic…
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter 2016

…Or maybe not. Alice wanders DC, fighting monsters and salvaging where she can. The Red Queen tells Alice to get to Racoon City in 48 hours so she can call off the last of the umbrella strikes and release the antivirus.
On her way, she crashes her car, kills a bunch of goons, gets picked up by Dr Issacs, who is a bible thumper now. Alice and Holy Issacs knock the snot out of each other on top of an armoured vehicle, but Alice has places to be, so GTFOs
Claire finds Alice, Alice warns them that Holy Issacs is on his way with a metric-fuck-ton of zombies. Team Last Hope fend off Holy Issacs and make their way into The Hive. On the way, they run into some zombie dog monsters. They make it into The Hive, but are out of ammo.
In a flashback, we learn that Issacs started the apocalypse on purpose to ‘cleanse the world’ so he and his rich mates could survive.
Alice carries on into the hive, one of them gets sucked into a big fan – gets mushed – and the rest get split up.
Wesker has been trying to kill them all this time, wakes up the frozen Umbrella executives. The real Issacs is among them.
Alice and Doc find some kit left over from the first film. Real Issacs is waiting for them and gives them a big old villain monologue. Doc is a traitor.
Issacs tells Alice she is a clone, which we knew, but of Alicia Marcus, the daughter of Umbrella’s co-founder. Alicia fires Wesker, Red Queen squishes him, Doc’s gun is empty – bye Doc.
Alice fights Issacs, beats him and gets to the surface. Holy Issacs kills Issacs.
Umbrella high command go boom
Antivirus gets out.
Good guys win.
Done!
Summery
The Resident Evil franchise is not a good set of films, far, far from it. They are dumb, poorly thought-out, ridiculously overwrought, and just about the worst adaptation of a beloved video game franchise since the original Super Mario Brothers in 1993. The entire sequence is basically an excuse to make Milla Jovovich wear sexy outfits, and, although I’m not about to complain about that, I will say that, for the central figure of the hexalogy, Alice is probably the least interesting thing about them. She straight up forgets that she was a clone at one point, and she is just the very essence of a Mary Sue, but I would say they are not bad, the worst thing you could say about them is that they are merely anodyne, just a movie off of the production line, they are not horror movies, they are not even horror adjacent because Alice isn’t a final girl, she is the only girl, no other characters are allowed to shine in the films, and she isn’t even that compelling of a character in the first place.

Put it this way, I have seen all of them at least three times, but I had to re-watch all of them (with the exception of the first) so I could do this brutally brief review, they don’t stick around in the mind, have it on the background while you have a few beers with your buddies or if you just want something dumb to unwind with but don’t expect a coherent retelling of the plot from the Resident Evil games, or even a coherent story in and of itself.
Peace, Love, Corn syrup.
RBD

