The ‘Resident Evil’ Film Franchise, Ranked
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City arrived in cinemas over Thanksgiving weekend. It’s the newest variant in the zombie infection franchise that originally afflicted audiences from 2002 to 2017. Based on the video game series of the same name, the movie saga inhabits the game’s universe, run by the corrupt corporation Umbrella, whose capitalistic grip on world health, tech and governance makes way for infectious bio-terrorism (via the un-deadly T-virus) in the name of elitist gain. However, the films, all written and mostly directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, star an original character: the almighty Alice (Milla Jovovich). Torn between trajectories of self-discovery and saving the world, Alice’s sci-fi action odyssey of badassery earned over $1 billion during its fifteen year run.
Viewing the pre-Avengers franchise in an age of interdependent films and cinematic universes, the Resident Evil series is a headache of inconsistent storytelling, plot holes and abandoned character arcs. While sci-fi/horror fans salivate over its grandiose action sequences and bombastic visual flair, one inevitably comes out of a franchise marathon in a mental state closer to the film’s undead than its sentient hero. This month’s reboot poses a thrilling opportunity to resurrect Resident Evil, uniting the past films’ gonzo filmmaking with today’s eye for rewarding viewers.
In anticipation of Welcome to Raccoon City, I rank the six original Resident Evil films:
1. Resident Evil (2002)
The first entry in the Resident Evil film franchise is by far the most fun. It’s also the only film in the franchise that one can confidently and objectively describe as good. Unencumbered by the ever-complexifying mythos that develops in the following films, this stand-alone rager is packed with electrifying action, both zombie-induced and through a series of deadly tech puzzles. Thanks to Anderson’s superbly concise script, in which Alice and a small crew must survive a reconnaissance mission to survey the initial T-virus contamination in an underground lab, Alice’s struggle with her ever-decreasing humanity is the most compelling here, pre-superhero-ification, and Jovovich’s wide-eyed vaults between fear and heroics ground this would-be camp death-fest with gripping pathos. Does the CGI look good? No, but as the franchise’s iconic Licker creature scurried across my screen like it had jumped straight from the video game, I said aloud, “That’s pretty impressive for 2002!”
2. Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
The series’ second film endeavors to capture the chaos of panic and uncertainty that accompanies the initial T-virus outbreak in Raccoon City, made worse by Umbrella’s corporate grip on America’s dystopian political system. The resultant film? Chaotic. Alexander Witt’s action sequences cut so quickly and rely so heavily on stylish close-ups of lunging creatures or fighters’ faces that it’s difficult to decipher any real order of events before someone or something lies bleeding on the ground. The film expands its cast and attempts to weave the threads of multiple disparate groups as they try to flee the city, but is unable to juggle its own balls. Characters crash into one another’s battles and some just appear in brief, transitional cut scenes as if to remind the audience they still exist. The resultant rag-tag team of fighters has hardly any standouts. Even Alice, now souped up with vague bio-tech powers, has lost any shred of empathy that Jovovich so masterfully performed in the first film. The standout is Sienna Guillory’s Jill Valentine, a sassy special-ops cop who apparently wears strapless corsets and miniskirts to work. Valentine’s combination of boundless compassion for the dying people of Raccoon City, level-headed assessment of each obstacle and growing fury at the capitalist mechanisms that caused the mass murder make her the best conduit for viewers. After almost two years of surviving our own deadly pandemic, one would think viewing Apocalypse in 2021 would be ripe for empathy, but the only thing that struck an emotional chord was the end kicker, which tackled its own spin on fake news with eerie foresight. For first-timers, the first sequel in the Resident Evil series seems a deranged mess, but gleams as a vibrant and thrilling entry for those looking back after a series binge.
3. Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
Retribution begins by falling victim to the series’ most disheartening trend: immediately trashing the story arc established in the previous film. Alice abandons the action teased in the kicker of Afterlife and finds herself in a Siberian Umbrella outpost. She spends the rest of the movie simply escaping, battling clones of past franchise characters, like Michelle Rodriguez’s Rain from the first film, through underground replicas of New York City, Moscow and “Suburbia.” In addition to popcorn-gobbler action, the style of Retribution is extravagant as the film’s femme fatales don cartoonishly fetishistic costumes, like Alice’s black unitard with a strappy black corset and matching thigh-high boots or Jill Valentine’s (finally reappearring for the first time since Apocalypse) blue bodysuit unzipped past her sternum. Alice’s new companion, Ada Wong (Bingbing Li, who wears a red dress slit all the way to the hip), is introduced with brain-rot exposition, winsning the award for sloppiest dialogue in the history of film. The film is nonsensically clumsy not just in its script, but also its craft. Alice’s attachments to new and old characters are unexplained and established on what seem to be the filmmaker’s assumptions of fans’ attachments to them rather than Alice’s. Perplexing cuts and time jumps leave sense-seekers out in the cold. While the film remains a marvel of stylish action fun, particularly as zombies are suddenly capable of wielding guns and driving cars, Retribution marks a breaking point for the franchise’s frustratingly convoluted complexity, especially its ending, which shatters any understanding of the previous films’ realities and undermines the series’ pillar of a purely capitalist dystopia.
4. Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
If other Resident Evils are guilty of disrupting the continuity of the franchise arc, Afterlife should be sent to death row. The fourth film establishes a timeline that disrupts past films’ notions of chronology and continues the trend of leaving behind the last movie’s cast of characters in exchange for another one, albeit this time with explanation—Umbrella has locked most of the U.S.’s remaining population in test tubes aboard a ship called Arcadia. After continuing her showdown with the Matrix-esque series villain Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who removes Alice’s super powers, and picking up Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), Alice finds a new crew in the city of Los Angeles. What saves Afterlife from falling in line as another confounding and disconnected mess that viewers pop into too late and out of too early is its rediscovery of the franchise’s inherently preposterous fun. The caricatured cast are matched by the plague army they face, which now includes towering executioners with comically large mallets, zombies that would put up good competition on the Olympic swim team and ones that have wormy tentacles that sprout from their mouths. Afterlife minimizes Alice’s brooding thanks to her newfound humanity (although her action acrobatics still verge on super) and sets her to work as the film’s rocket-speed plot requires her in full protector mode, this time with somewhat competent companions. Ultimately, the film finds a far more effective emotional core than Extinction’s focus on survival: Afterlife restores the franchise’s themes of hope and compassion by returning its wandering characters to the battle of good versus evil. The fourth film’s finale is like a fireworks show of over-the-top acrobatics and slo-mo action that, of course, ends with an even larger threat looming for the next film just when Alice and co. thought they’d won.
5. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2017)
The finale of Alice’s saga was released five years after the previous installment, the longest gap by far, and one would hope Anderson and Screen Gems might have planned a finish that unites the epic cast of the Resident Evil saga and coalesces the disparate tendrils of its chapters; however, hope is in shorter supply here than in the apocalyptic world the film depicts. As the films are apt to do, The Final Chapter begins with a bit of dialogue that completely discredits the discoveries of the previous film and begins anew, an infuriating endeavor for a franchise six films deep. Retribution’sefforts to introduce new characters, revive lost fan favorites and continue a semi-romantic arc for its heroine are for naught as none of those characters return in The Final Chapter. Rather, ol’ reliable Claire Redfield happens to be passing through Raccoon City just as Alice arrives to infiltrate Umbrella’s principal facility, steal a suddenly-discovered airborne anti-virus and kill series villain Wesker; however, a previously killed villain reappears with an unprecedented excuse and boldly dethrones Wesker as the final film’s main villain. The Final Chapter attempts to insert intrigue into Alice’s previously inconsequential backstory and lands a few epiphanic moments, but they mostly wash over any binger, surely exhausted from the nonsensical and inconsequential series of events each film builds up and then immediately demolishes. To the film’s credit, the score and action sequences are amped up to appropriate finale proportions, spectacularly showing hordes of zombie scourge obliterated in the franchise’s signature explosion, gunfire and acrobatic stylishness.
6. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
The third film in theResident Evilfranchise is penned by Anderson, but directed by Russell Mulcahy (MTV’sTeen Wolf). To put it bluntly,Extinctionis boring. Set between vast, barren deserts and the subterranean laboratories that dominate the franchise, this film spends its runtime establishing the near-extinction of humanity and the complete death of any piece of green nature. It swings big by attempting to make any viewer care about a barren world when one might be wondering why a small caravan of survivors facing off against an all-powerful corporation might not choose extinction themselves. It drops the supporting cast established inApocalypse(RIP to Jill Valentine, who was reportedly written out due to Sienna Guillory’s shooting conflicts forEragon) and introduces Larter’s Claire Redfield, who steps in as the emotional core of the film as Alice’s super-powered plight becomes increasingly unrelatable. The franchise’s special effects have certainly come a long way since the original, but its storytelling has hit rock bottom inExtinction.