- Resident Evil
- Apocalypse
- Extinction
- Afterlife
- Retribution
- Final Chapter
The long-lived horror/science fiction series is finally concluded. To the writer’s credit, we find out about Alice’s past, her real relationship with Umbrella Corporation, and she survives. I felt like I could finally walk away from the character. From that standpoint the story was much more satisfying than many good and unusual series I’ve come across over the years, among them Buffy and Angel, Dark Angel, Firefly, and Stargate Universe.
I even enjoyed the return of the two biggest villains for this finale, and deeply relished watching them get put down. It’s rare that the nature of a universe allows for the same character to be killed multiple times, but I think engineering the metamorphosis of the human race into zombies made this exception perfectly acceptable.
That said, the movie did have its flaws. I didn’t much like how the story dealt with the supporting cast. A monologue at the beginning of the film says that the survivors of Retribution had all been killed by a human subterfuge that wasn’t even hinted at in that movie. Whereas that might be a convenient way to explain away actor unavailability (there was a five year interval between movies due to Milla Jovovich’s pregnancy) it just doesn’t play from a dramatic standpoint. Two of those characters (Leon and Ada) had survived the worst attacks of all the movies, additionally Jill had been recovered from an earlier installment. The way it concluded had suggested that the survivors (Claire, Kmart, and Chris) of the previous films might somehow or other be around for the finale. Sure I expected that not all of them would survive, but to have them all simply written off in the preface monologue was difficult to accept. I still don’t want to accept it.
And yet we were treated to one of the previous survivors, Claire. Alice comes across her in moving toward her finale with the Umbrella Corporation. The backstory sucked, that she’d been captured at the end of Afterlife to be used for experiments but had been misplaced in transport and found her way to a haven of humans safely. Still, she did provide a little of the missing continuity to the other films.
Which generally plagued this movie. The plot of Retribution laid out a three-way war between a computer whose aim was the total annihilation of the human race into zombies, the bad guys from the previous movies now allying with Alice to save humanity, and Alice along with any other human who had managed to survive so far. But at the beginning of The Final Chapter the computer is firmly under the control of the bad guys while doing everything in its power to circumvent their orders, and those orders will lead to the death of all humans but the governing body of Umbrella. No explanation was given for that.
Overall, I liked the movie. It wrapped up the Alice character, the T-virus, and the Umbrella Corporation. Sadly though, as long as it took to get this to the screen I think it would have benefited from a little more script editing. I sincerely hope that some of the deleted scenes in the DVD explain a little more about what happened.
Cian Beirdd 