Resident Evil as a film series has been around for over a decade now, and it’s supposedly getting its sixth installment in 2014.
How did it all begin, though? Resident Evil was based on the video game series of the same name, and remains the most successful film of them all. The first film tried to retain much of the claustrophobic atmosphere of the video games it was based on, but that was about where the similarities ended as the main character Alice (Milla Jovovich) had never been in the games. The outbreak which triggered this particular zombie apocalypse started when someone sabotaged the facility where a viral weapon was being developed, and the security system went out of its way to stop the infection , which meant locking its last remaining security team in with the zombies that were now running rampant.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse followed Alice’s discovery that the outbreak was more widespread than she’d been led to believe, as she found Raccoon City already in ruins by the time she escaped. This movie was where she went head to head with Nemesis and a new “licker” creature. She barely escaped the city alive as a nuclear explosion meant to wipe out the zombies knocked the whole group of survivors out of the air.
Resident Evil: Extinction had Alice basically pulling a Mad Max, wandering alone until she came across a caravan looking for supplies across the wastelands of the Western US. It was this film that showed us she had been part of a cloning project and was the only one to survive.
Resident Evil: Afterlife was where director Paul W. S. Anderson had decided to start pushing the 3D visuals, and the film suffered for it in almost every way as the story made next to no sense. The team finally reached Alaska, only to find out that the survivors were being kept on a boat and experimented on, and the rest were stuck in a prison. Also, we learned Alice had special powers that had never been explained before.
Resident Evil: Retribution seemingly resurrected several characters under the guise of cloning, and then gave us a story about a secret underground facility constructed entirely for the purpose of selling chemical weapons and an antidote to countries around the world.
The next film will supposedly be a last stand for the fate of humanity. A lot of moviegoers are hoping the next Resident Evil will also be the last movie in the series.
