To paraphrase an aphorism I really have no place paraphrasing, “A Resident Evil movie is a terrible thing to waste.”
Even though time would prove that Resident Evil would somehow become Hollywood’s most prolific video game adaptation franchise, it’s not hard to put yourself in the 2002 headspace of someone seeing Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil, a movie whose relationship to the source material can only be described as “cordial,” and feeling like it blew the chance to take the cool settings and characters from the games and adapt them.
Alack! We wasted a Resident Evil movie!
But, hey. Maybe not all is lost. It performed well at the box office, and we’re getting a sequel. A sequel that’s promising to stick closer to the source material and adapt (albeit loosely) Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, complete with fan-favorite characters Jill Valentine, Carlos Oliveira, the titular Nemesis, and Alice (I’m the fan, in this case).
That’s great! Does it work?
Good question. Compare Super Mario Bros. (1993) to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026). The former is a fever dream inspired by Mario iconography in the same way that I’m inspired by Gordon Ramsey to Doordash buffalo wings from the scary biker bar down the road. The latter? Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V art and music from the games in such a way that Chris Pratt’s zero-artistry voice acting almost seems like a deliberate choice.The difference is, one of those movies is good, and it’s not the one that made a billion dollars at the box office.
And speaking of good movies, I’ll say it! Resident Evil: Apocalypse rules. It avoids the trap of just becoming a reference-fest (looking at you, Welcome to Raccoon City), and while I don’t think anyone would look at this version of Jill as the definitive Jill, there’s enough juice to the movie that I, a fan of the games, am glad that she’s there without feeling like keys are being jangled in front of me (see: whatever’s going on with Leon in Resident Evil: Retribution). I think it basically improves on the first movie in just about every way (the one knock being that there’s no laser hallway, but I digress), and takes the good energy from the entry #1 and grafts it onto settings and characters that are more propulsive.
Gone are the jackbooted military red shirts from the first movie; now we’ve got Mike Epps as LJ! The dark tunnels and cramped offices are replaced with a wider variety of places for dumb shit to happen. Open streets, a movie theater facade, a school, a bridge, another bridge, etc. You get the picture.
This is a movie about watching people be cool and do cool things. Carlos jumps out of a helicopter dual-wielding pistols and domes a dozen zombies with perfect accuracy. Alice crashes a motorcycle through a stained glass window, runs said motorcycle into a licker, and shoots the gas tank, creating the world’s biggest fireball. Jill Valentine is introduced shooting up a police station, and no one gets mad at her.
Both literally and metatextually, everyone knows what movie they’re in. Jill’s partner, Peyton, gets bit early and turns into the classic zombie movie time bomb. We know he’ll succumb, but when? And when that happens, we expect the classic scene where Jill, I dunno, caresses him and tearfully tells him not to give up, Peyton dies, opens his eyes zombie-style, and then gets mercifully knifed in the head or something. Wrong! Idiot! Before that ever happens, Nemesis airholes him. Yeah, he comes back as a zombie for a brief scene, but it’s all about the action, and not about wasting time trying to graft real emotions onto the action figures making up the cast.
But what of Alice?
Obviously, Milla Jovovich’s Alice is the heart of these movies, and I think Apocalypse is the one where she starts to make the case why. No longer the Jason Bourne riff of the first one, she’s basically halfway to being a superhero. The T-Virus gives her the power of being cool in a movie, and she wields it to great effect. The motorcycle thing in the church, sprinting down the side of a skyscraper, cucking Jill’s moment with the gas explosion in the kitchen, making eyes at Oded Fehr; all of these things a compelling action hero make. But I think the real sauce here is the melodrama. Over the course of this series, Alice makes friends, loses them, finds kids, loses them, gains humanity, and, guess what, loses it. She’s a lab experiment gone wrong/right, and her struggle with all of that somehow, SOMEHOW, grounds these batshit action movies with an emotional core. It’s basically the only reason Resident Evil: The Final Chapter works, and the seeds of that are planted here.
And sure, I know I’m painting this as the perfect movie, but there are a few failings along the way I feel I should mention, and most of them have to do with Umbrella. Dr. Evilgerman is no Wesker, and Jared Harris, a great actor giving a good performance, isn’t in the same movie as Jovovich. Umbrella is a cartoon company whose main product line is being Unethical, but here they feel a little neutered. That’s maybe because the intended focus here is on Nemesis (who should be in more of the movie), rather than the scientists behind him, but you never quite feel the urgency or mania behind the decision to nuke Raccoon City that you want. In the games, Umbrella is scary. In the first movie, Umbrella has a laser hallway operated by an AI that’s mad at you. Here, Umbrella’s sorta just The Bad Guy in The Movie.
Apocalypse isn’t my favorite of the Resident Evil movies, but it is one I hold in high regard. And while it’s not at the top of my list, I do think it’s the one movie in the Alice series that scratches any sort of itch of wanting to see a specific game adapted, and in my estimation, that’s far from a waste.