I have a complicated relationship with the Resident Evil film and television adaptations. The animated ones are okay — and at least feature series regulars. But honestly, I’d rather play those stories than watch them. The live-action adaptations should be up my street, then, as they tend to stray from the events and characters of the video game series whilst integrating the broader stuff.
Well, that approach got us the abominable Netflix live-action series. Johannes Roberts almost scooped up the right ingredients for a more faithful adaptation with Welcome to Raccoon City, but stuffed too many Resi events into too little a runtime.
The jewel in the crown — financially at least — is the Alice saga that was kickstarted by Event Horizon director Paul W. S. Anderson. I think the vast majority of them are terrible movies, but I’ve still inexplicably watched multiple times.
The first movie has a great soundtrack, that laser hall sequence, and Milla Jovovich in a star-making role. While it was a disappointing Resident Evil movie, it was still just enough of one to be entertaining. I also really like Resident Evil Extinction — it fully embraces a different kind of Resident Evil with its Mad Max-style zombie apocalypse and Ali Larter as Claire Redfield.
The rest, however, are a pool of annoyances with an ever-degrading grip on logic, consistency, and appreciation for what Resident Evil actually is. Their biggest asset is their biggest problem: Alice.
Alice in Thunder(stealing)land
Milla Jovovich is wonderful, so this isn’t a knock on her — just the character of Alice. As the movie franchise goes on, Alice stifles almost every character taken from the games. The superpowered badass feels a bit more palatable in later films, but the problem with Alice is most apparent in the second movie, Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
Apocalypse takes on elements of Resident Evil 2 and 3 where the zombie apocalypse in Raccoon City has reached a tipping point (even though the end of the first film seemed to suggest any ‘war’ was over). The city is under siege, and Umbrella is coming in for the cleanup. Unlike the first film, several in-game characters feature fairly prominently this time around. Oded Fehr (The Mummy) is Carlos Oliviera, Zack Ward is Nikolai, and Sienna Guillory plays Jill Valentine, who becomes the first game protagonist to feature in a live-action Resident Evil.
And she gets such a great entrance, too. Shown to be capable and whipsmart in a police HQ full of chaos whilst dressed for a night out with the girls at Club Umbrella. The Jill costume is game-accurate, but it’s one of those things that would be fine to change a bit because she has plenty of time to tool up in something more protective than two strips of fabric.
If you’ve played the games, you’ll know that in Resident Evil 3, Jill’s story is all about trying to escape Raccoon City as a zombie outbreak causes chaos in the streets. To top that, shady pharmaceutical company Umbrella has sent out a hulking bioweapon known as Nemesis to eliminate everyone in her S.T.A.R.S. unit.
That much is still present in Apocalypse, but Jill’s story is blocked off by the change in the bioweapon’s origin and its connection to Alice. While its job is to raze the S.T.A.R.S. unit off the face of the map, it’s also got history with Alice. Unfortunately, that’s where the film’s priorities lie.
Jill Sandwich, Hold the Jill.
Jill loses out on her own story, as Alice consistently upstages everything she does. Before long it’s like a gag of trying to push the less popular person out of a picture in favor of the favorite. Sienna Guillory got to return as the character in a later film but honestly, that was another horrendous waste of a different kind.
Nemesis bothers me more. It’s not bad enough to take it away from its original targets for the sake of Super Alice. To add insult to injury, any actual chance for terror and intimidation the character could have instilled is nullified. if the movie hadn’t been pitched as an action movie that happened to have some horror elements in it, maybe we could have had a cool Terminator homage where a largely powerless bunch of officers and civilians are relentlessly pursued by a mass of writhing tissue and tentacles. Instead, we have a Nemesis who requires tissues to dry his teary eyes because it’s sad to be a monster for a minute.
The design of Nemesis is great at least, if a touch too rigid and literally like a walking tank. But it really doesn’t matter how good it looks when it doesn’t act like it should and gets its leatherbound backside handed to it by Milla Jovovich.
Perhaps the treatment of established Resident Evil characters in Apocalypse isn’t any worse compared to later examples (Wentworth Miller as Chris Redfield, Li Bingbing as Ada Wong, and Johann Urb as Leon S. Kennedy come to mind), but it’s inarguably where the bad habit starts.
Still, this — along with many of the films in this franchise — still call to me. I will seek them out time and again, hoping to find something new I like or simply just to pass the time. I fail in the former endlessly, but do sometimes soften on the bad points. Apocalypse is the one I struggle with most though. My feelings have steadfastly remained the same over the last 19 years. An unrelenting disdain that the Nemesis itself would be proud of.
Y’know, if it had feelings or something daft like that?
