6 / 10
4 / 10
4 / 10
4 / 10
4 / 10
4 / 10
The Resident Evil series is all over the place. The 2002 original is a decent locked-in horror film and gets a 6. The five that follow average about a 4, and I’ve seen them anyway, because Milla Jovovich is in all of them and she’s worth watching in anything. Paul W.S. Anderson wrote all six and directed four. Jovovich plays Alice across every one, starting as a security operative with no memory and ending as something closer to a superhero. Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, Sienna Guillory and Ali Larter come and go around her.
The original is the only one I’d call good. The rest frustrate me, because Anderson clearly knows how to stage action and keeps spending it on stories he’ll throw away in the next film. What I’ll give every one of them is Jovovich, who plays each scene as if it matters more than the script does. Together the six made about $1.2 billion, and that made this the most successful video game film series ever until the Sonic and Mario films arrived. None of it has much to do with the games.
Resident Evil (2002): 6/10
The first film is the one that works. Alice wakes in a mansion with no memory. A team of Umbrella commandos arrives, and they all go down into the Hive, an underground research facility where the computer has already killed everyone to contain a viral outbreak.
It’s a haunted house picture with a countdown. The corridor of lasers, where the computer cuts a squad apart one at a time, is the best sequence in the whole series. The Red Queen, a hologram of a dead child running the facility, is properly creepy.
That laser corridor is the scene I’d show anyone who doubts Anderson can direct. It’s cruel and clean and easy to follow, and it scares me more than all five sequels put together. Michelle Rodriguez is excellent as Rain, the film keeps its geography clear, and the budget of about $33 million against $102 million made everything that followed inevitable. It’s a 6: a decent, contained horror film with a good hook.
Apocalypse, Extinction and the Drift: 4/10
Apocalypse in 2004 moves to the streets of Raccoon City and adds Jill Valentine and Nemesis from the games. It’s louder and sillier, and Alice starts developing powers.
Extinction in 2007 goes to the Nevada desert with a convoy of survivors, a good idea handled roughly, and introduces the cloning that lets the series produce as many Alices as it wants. By that point the pattern is set. Each film ends on a cliffhanger, each one resets the situation, and Alice gets stronger while the stories get thinner. Both are 4s: watchable, forgettable, held together by their lead.
Milla Jovovich
She’s the reason any of this exists. Jovovich does her own fighting, takes the falls, and plays every one of these films completely straight no matter how ridiculous the script gets. She never looks embarrassed, and she never coasts. That’s rarer than it sounds. Plenty of actors signal to the audience that they know the film is beneath them. She doesn’t, and the effect is that Alice stays a real presence even when the world around her turns into a video game cutscene.
She married Anderson during the run, and the two of them have made seven films together including Monster Hunter. She’s the throughline. Whatever is wrong with any given entry, she’s worth the ticket.
For Writers
Six films survived thin scripts and changing directors because one performer took the material seriously every time. A committed central presence can carry work that fails in other ways. When you write a series, invest everything you have in the one character readers come back for, and make sure that character never becomes a joke to you. Ask what your protagonist gives the reader that nothing else in the book does. Protect that, even when you’re cutting everything else. Series die when the lead becomes furniture.
Paul W.S. Anderson’s Run
Anderson has built a career on video game films that critics dismiss and audiences keep paying for: Mortal Kombat in 1995, this series, Monster Hunter in 2020. He works fast, shoots clean action and never apologizes for the material.
His strength is geography. Even in the weaker entries here, you can usually tell where everyone is standing and what the plan is. That’s more than most modern action films manage.
His weakness is story. The plots reset every film, characters return from the dead without explanation, and Alice gains and loses powers as the next set piece requires.
The worst habit of the sequels is simple. Characters come back from the dead with no explanation, and I stop caring whether anyone dies because I know the next film will undo it anyway.
For Writers
Anderson’s action is easy to follow even when his plots aren’t, because he never loses the reader’s sense of where people are. Clarity is a craft skill separate from storytelling, and you can be strong in one and weak in the other. When you revise, check your action scenes and your plot logic separately, since a reader forgives a thin plot far sooner than a scene they can’t picture. Read a fight scene and sketch the room from your own words. If you can’t, the reader can’t either.
Afterlife and Retribution: 4/10
Afterlife in 2010 was shot with the 3D rigs James Cameron developed for Avatar, and it’s the best-looking film in the series. The slow-motion fights and the Tokyo opening are terrific. The story is nothing: a ship called Arcadia, a villain named Wesker, and another cliffhanger.
Retribution in 2012 takes place almost entirely inside an Umbrella testing facility where simulated cities let Anderson stage the same fights in Tokyo, Moscow and suburban America. It’s the most video-game-like of the six, and that isn’t the compliment it sounds like.
Both look expensive and mean nothing. 4s. By this point Alice has telekinesis, clone armies and unlimited ammunition, and nothing she does costs her anything.
The Final Chapter (2016): 4/10
The last film sends Alice back to Raccoon City and down into the Hive, closing the loop with the Red Queen and a cure for the virus. There’s a good instinct in that, returning to the one setting that worked. The execution is the problem. The editing is so fast that individual punches are impossible to follow, the opposite of what Anderson usually does well, and the reveals about Alice’s origin arrive too late to matter.
The editing in The Final Chapter is the part I can’t forgive. Anderson’s one real gift is clear action, and here he chops the fights into confetti, so the finale of a six-film series is the one where I can’t tell who’s hitting whom. It made the most money of the six and it’s still a 4. The series ends where it began and never explains why it took six films.
For Writers
Every entry in this series ends on a cliffhanger that the next film mostly ignores, so the audience learns that nothing carries over. A promise your next installment doesn’t keep costs you the reader’s attention for all the ones after it. When you write a series, make sure each book’s ending sets up something the following book delivers. List every hook you’ve planted. Cross off the ones you have no plan for, and cut them from the manuscript. An unpaid hook is a debt the reader remembers.
What It Got Wrong About the Games
The games are about scarcity and dread. You have four bullets, a typewriter ribbon to save your progress, and a zombie between you and the door. Fans wanted that on screen. Anderson made action films instead, with an original character who isn’t in the games and powers no game protagonist has. Capcom’s own 2021 reboot, Welcome to Raccoon City, tried the faithful approach and satisfied nobody either. That’s the short summary of the series: bad adaptations, moderately entertaining films, one very good first entry, and a lead who never once let the audience down.
Craft Note
Craft Note
This series keeps working commercially with thin scripts because one performer is fully committed in every frame. Jovovich never signals that the material is beneath her, and the audience follows her through six films on that alone. Whatever else is weak in your story, give the reader one person worth staying with.
Are the Resident Evil films worth watching?
The 2002 original is, and it’s a 6: a tight underground horror film with a great laser sequence and a clear head. The other five average a 4 and are pure popcorn. The 6 goes to the original for the laser corridor, the Red Queen and a plot that knows where it’s going. The 4s are for five films that look expensive, forget their own cliffhangers and leave their star doing all the work, and I think Jovovich deserved a series that worked as hard as she did.
