Edit: Most of the actors knew they were in a shit-burger, so nobody signed a multi-film deal. Characters and arcs had to abandoned when they refused to come back
Wesker and Claire comeback for the final, but that’s it im afraid. They either couldn’t get the rest due to scheduling conflicts (Ada Wong). Or the actors wanted to do it, but never got the call to show. (Jill)
So here we are at Resident Evil The final chapter...... This is definitely the worst movie in the franchise. Especially when it comes to continuity, as up until this point the series had relatively consistent character motivations and a decent timeline. The Camera, editing and fight Choreography has taken a dive in quality too. That’s not to say there aren’t neat looking fights or concepts in this movie. It still has a little imagination and spunk, but we are going from the clear cut fights of Retribution into Bourne identity shaky cam territory. It does give some form of closure to Alice’s story, but man was this a shitty rush job ending to this franchise.
Remember that awesome fight teased at the end of retribution? Completely skipped. We do at least get to see the destruction porn after everything’s said and done. But it doesn’t even dignify us with an opening teaser like afterlife did. Complete fucking cop out. Leon Jill and Ada are nowhere to be seen, as Alice is the only one left standing. The movie’s narration is mercifully vague, but the novels attempt to fill in the blanks by saying that everybody was fucking killed by Wesker. I choose not to believe this, because it’s absolutely retarded. (Deaf clone daughter is fine in the book though, because sure.)
And this brings us to the two most maligned characters in the movie. Wesker and the Red Queen.
Wesker has got the worst of it. Up until this movie he was presented as either the ultimate big bad or somebody working to be humanity’s new ruler. Here? He’s playing second fiddle to the “real” leader of umbrella. Which is just something game Wesker wouldn’t fucking do. He’s the ultimate backstabber and doesn’t really work for anyone but himself. The worst part is when the film outright retcons the ending of retribution.
According to Alice he only pretended to give her powers back… What kind of retardation is this!? More than anything else this was the most unbelievable bullshit in the movie. The idea that Wesker would just break Alice out of umbrella’s prison, unite all of humanity under his rule. And then just decide to go fuck it and kill everybody to be somebody else’s underling. I mean correct me if im wrong but isn’t this basically his wet dream in RE5? To lead the remnants of humanity in a world that has mostly been cleansed by zombies or plagas shit? I mean granted nobody has super virus powers but him and Alice, but that could have been the central conflict of the movie. Between Wesker’s desire to create a new human race, and Alice’s to restore humanity. Wasted opportunity for an enemy mine situation. It’s also such a cheap half assed excuse to not have her using Jedi powers too. I honestly missed that shit from the first trilogy. Yes it was stupid, but it was AWESOMELY stupid. (And in hindsight, better executed then Disney star wars.)
And then there’s the red queen.. hoo boy. They make her a good girl in this. Despite being evil as shit in retribution.
Granted it’s a bit easier to buy sense she’s a computer program, but it really just expects you to pretend she wasn’t going all Skynet in the last film with a fucking handwave that she was ordered to do it. If we only take the first movie into account, this makes sense. As her methods, while extreme were designed to prevent an outbreak at any cost and preserve lives. However in retribution she oversaw and managed an entire facility designed to use clones as cannon fodder for zombies. There was no signs of remorse or any kind of hesitation. Her role in this would have been far better suited to the nicer White Queen introduced in Extinction, but the writers completely forgot about her.
She’s also being played by Milla Jovovich’s daughter, so there’s a bit of nepotism involved. She does a good job acting . I just wish her lines and character were better implemented.
So anyway… Alice starts driving a military jeep around before getting into a tussle with one of the winged monsters from retribution. Kinda looks like a zerg from starcraft.
She runs it over and kills it with a claymore mine.
The red queen then contacts Alice after she fights some zombies that look like they wandered out of The Hills Have Eyes. Saying she wants Alice to stop her and that she knows of an airborne antivirus that can kill all the T virus zombies. (I am still salty that the Alice blood cure plotline was forgotten… Oh wow I just realized! All the fucking zombies have las plagas now so that T virus shit shouldn’t work! Lol )
This virus is conveniently located in the underground hive from the first movie. She has about 48 hours or so to get there and release it, before the Red Queen is ordered to kill all remaining 4500 survivors on earth. No pressure
So Alice makes her way there before hitting a roadblock and getting into one of the few decent fights of the movie.
Then she tries to steal an umbrella bike and gets shocked unconscious. When she wakes she comes face to face with the true villain of the franchise. Dr Isaac!
Im not gonna lie, this guy was legit one of the few bright spots in this movie. You may remember him as generic evil mad scientist man from the 2nd and 3rd films. Well it turns out Alice killed a clone and he’s come back with more Ham and cheese than ever before. They’ve retconned him in the beginning narration to be the head of umbrella, who killed his business partner and forcibly co-owned the company with said partners daughter. This is stupid, but I can roll with it.
He shows up in this armored vehicle covered with crosses, a bunch of people in cages and severed Alice clone heads, prancing around like he’s this antichrist coming to wash the world of its sins. It almost made me forget this was a shitty movie.
We have a fun scene where Alice is tied to the back of his vehicle and made to run from zombies before escaping, killing a couple guys and cutting off Isaacs hand to ride the motorcycle to safety.
Then she meets up with a bunch of survivors led by Claire, who conveniently crash landed outside the outskirts of raccoon city after Afterlife and set up shop. Don’t worry about the nuclear radiation guys, it’s totally fine.
Claire’s party of survivors are even more forgettable then the ones from Afterlife, but at least they are not as annoying. There’s sword man, black guy, plucky girl and Claire’s boyfriend.
Chris is pleased
They have an obligatory zombie siege that was kinda fun. Although he editing and lighting is all over the place, so much so that at one point I thought Claire got killed in the confusion, before realizing it was just some random chick.
Alice gets a tri shotgun because rule of the cool
Then they burn the shit out of the zombies by luring them into a skyscraper and creating a river of fire.
Then Alice gets into a kung fu fight.
Isaac gets away of course, but they managed to clear out the zombies and assemble a redshirt strike team to go into the hive.
There’s a legitimately good sequence that reminded me of the opening of RE1, where they are running the hell away from big ass plagas dogs
Finally they manage to get inside and make contact with the Red queen. She starts providing exposition on Isaac and shows a chilling in hindsight video of him explaining his rationale for wiping out all human life on earth.
Man with a better script this movie really could have worked.
So it turns out one of them is a traitor, yada yada ya. They all start getting picked off one by one. Alice fights a monster that looks like it came out of dead space and after a bunch of forgettable shit I can’t remember she eventually manages to make her way towards Wesker and the red queen.
You’re probably wondering what Wesker has been doing this whole time. Well he’s just been standing around in the mainframe of the hive, activating security features like some kind of dungeon master villain. It’s quite a step down I must say. Eventually he decides that he needs to wake someone.
Here I was hoping we get something cool like.. say a tyrant. But NOPE. It’s another Isaac!
This time he’s the real one, but he’s so augmented out the ass he’s practically a terminator.
Alice manages to make it to him with Claire’s boyfriend, but it turns out he was traitor for no reason.
GODDAMIT
Alice starts flashing of ways to kill Isaac, but he counters with his own flashes of killing her. All an obvious rip off of the ending of Sherlock homes.
Then it’s revelations time! As he clarifies that Alice is a clone of that umbrella co-founder's daughter!
This pissed off a lot of people, but I actually don’t mind her being a clone. Even from the beginning of this franchise, her backstory was vague enough that I had her pegged as some kind of test tube creation. It’s just that they’ve dropped this little revelation with the grace and subtlety of an elephant. For whatever reason Issac kept the real Alice (who is an old woman due to some kind of aging disease) just so she could conveniently confirm and explain the situation to clone Alice.
No she is not turning into a zombie.
Then old real Alice pulls a Robocop on Wesker and… oh mannn it’s so hilariously shit.
He gets killed by a door. Wesker gets his fucking leg caught in an elevator door and lies down like a bitch for the rest of the movie.
Traitor boyfriend realizes Alice stole the bullets to his gun and gets wasted by Claire.
Then we have a badly cut end fight with Alice, Claire and Isaac. It actually gets a little competent at the end, but man… I hope you like 7 cuts a second.
Finally she beats his ass, gets the anti virus and…… walks out side to simply break it open. No dispersal system. No mass production. Just one throw the vial of ooze on the ground and virus be gone! Man this is stupid.
But not before Real Isaac tries to stop her, before getting killed by religious clone Issac, who is promptly devoured by zombies….
Im tired of describing how needlessly complex this movie is.
Finally she throws this thing to the ground. All the zombies next to her die, The Nest gets blown up. (Which contains a bunch of cryogenically frozen umbrella employees, A substantial number of which are probably innocent civilians.) And the world is kinda, sorta saved. The film isn’t stupid enough to say this gas is gonna cover every corner of the earth immediately. So now Alice has to go wander from place to place exterminating monsters for all her days. cue the credits and happy music!
I am a charitable man, and I tried to overlook the glaring flaws of continuity, but this is such a underwhelming and sad end to a fairly enjoyable popcorn franchise. There were moments of promise here and there. Moments that could have worked if they rearranged certain aspects and followed up more on the previous film. But you can tell the energy just isn’t there anymore. There’s no longer the same driver behind the wheel. Even Milla Jovovich feels like she’s just kinda going through the motions. She’s not bad or anything, but she was lacking… passion.
I think I know why. This movie ended up seriously harming 2 people in its production. One crew member was killed by being run over by a jeep and Milla’s stuntwoman hit a camera crane and lost an arm due to negligence from stunt coordinators. I would imagine that cast a shadow over the entire production depending on when it happened, as those scenes happen early on in the movie. Such a dam shame.
Details on what happened production wise are scarce, Anderson was supposed to film the final chapter in late 2013 after finishing up his Pompeii movie, before it got pushed back two years. It’s possible that film fucked up his schedule, I dunno. There’s a special feature that describes how the hills have eyes zombie suits had to made in 3 days, so they were clearly rushing this.
They really should have ended this franchise at Afterlife. Anderson didn’t want cliffhanger at the end of that movie, but he was sadly overruled by executives. I dont regret this ride along. It was fun while it lasted, but they just couldn't stick the landing.
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