“Survive the Horror”
Resident Evil| Written and Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
The first movie! It’s relatively grounded, especially considering how the series turned out.
We open with a narration telling us how grotesquely rich and powerful the Umbrella Corporation is. But what the average Joe doesn’t know is that their putrid profits actually originate in the field of viral weaponry.
I always thought that the vials containing the virus looked cool.
Someone (James Purefoy) threw one of the containers away carelessly, releasing the virus deep within the Hive, an underground lab. An employee complains about another bumping into him. Suddenly, an alarm goes off, and rooms being to automatically seal. Everyone thinks that it’s just a fire drill. They’re quite wrong.
For some reason, the sprinkler system triggers in one of the experiment rooms, causing it to rapidly fill up with water. One of the scientists tries to break through the door, to no avail.
Meanwhile, some poor bastards are trapped in an elevator. They see the other elevator rapidly descend. In another room, the security system gasses everyone inside, killing them.
One of the employees stuck in the elevator tries to squeeze through the ajar door. The security system almost crashes her face into the floor, but stops just in time, only to reverse. The scene cuts away before we can see what happens to her. I think that this is a pretty effective scare.
Meanwhile, Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up in a bathtub. She was taking a shower when gas knocked her out.
She puts on a robe and finds a note: “Today all your dreams come true”. She tries to copy the note, but her handwriting doesn’t match it.
She looks for some clothes and also finds a drawer full of guns, to her shock. She puts on a red dress and finds a framed photo of herself and her husband on their wedding day. The gas messed with her memory.
She’s in a large and empty mansion alone until a guy (Eric Mabius) grabs her and some commandos break through the windows. The guy insists that he’s a cop.
The leader of the commandos tells Alice to report, but she has no idea what he means. The supposed cop, Matthew, isn’t on file. He says that he’s new.
In the mansion, there’s a loading area where Umbrella trains can drop off their cargo. The commandos, Alice, and Matthew plan to use the lift to get down into the Hive and determine what happened.
The commandos realize that the power is down, so one of them, Rain (Michelle Rodriguez), starts trying to fix it. They get on the train and enter the facility.
A door on the train was sealed shut, so one of the commandos yanks it open. A guy falls on him – Alice’s husband. She realizes that her wedding ring was made by Umbrella.
Alice’s husband doesn’t remember who he is, either.
They soon arrive at the facility. Alice finally demands to know what’s going on. The team leader tells her that she works security for Umbrella, protecting the mansion that’s the entrance to the Hive. Her marriage is a sham, cover for… something. I guess it’s “unbecoming” or something for a young woman to live in a mansion by herself?
The team has less than three hours to complete their mission.
The team leader tells Alice’s husband that nerve gas knocked them out, and that temporary memory loss is one of many potential side effects.
There’s a weird scar on Alice’s left shoulder.
The security system that controls the Hive is known as the Red Queen. The team has to get to her and shut her down, but they have to go through the labs first.
Alice’s husband gives her his jacket. It triggers a memory of them sleeping together, so their marriage had a physical aspect that was real, at the very least.
They passed by the lab that was flooded earlier. “Poor bastards”, says Rain, as they leave. The corpse floating in the water opens her eyes.
They enter what was supposed to be a dining area, but was full of strange chambers. Alice looks in one, and sees a grotesque body with wires hooked up throughout. It makes a vague breathing sound.
Rain, JD, and Matt stay behind as the others enter a room that leads to the Red Queen’s mainframe. But there’s a strange, mirrored hallway. The captain and three others enter the hallway to deploy the EMP, but the door closes behind them. Lasers start cutting through them as the team hacker, Kaplan, desperately tries to shut the weapons system down. It seems like the captain will survive because his great physicality, allowing him to avoid the nearly ceiling-level laser – but then, the lasers deploy in a crossways pattern. Alice sees it all through the window in the doors. She has to look away when the captain’s body falls to pieces.
The survivors reluctantly enter the mainframe after Kaplan shuts down the weapons system. Alice helps him attach the EMP to the mainframe. A hologram of the Red Queen appears as a little British girl, pleading with them to keep her active. Kaplan says that the hologram was modeled after the programmer’s daughter. The hologram is CGI, and one of the more dated visual effects.
Just before they shut the Red Queen down, she says, “You’re all going to die down here”.
Back in the dining hall, JD and Matt hear a strange noise, so Rain foolishly goes in to check it out alone. She finds a woman who bites her hand. JD shoots the biter in the leg, to no avail, so both he and Rain unload on her. But her body disappears as they discuss what happened. Matt notices that the woman’s blood was coagulated, which doesn’t happen unless the person is dead.
Alice, her husband, and Kaplan rejoin them as they’re beset upon by multiple zombies. The commandos unload upon them, but they don’t die. In the chaos, a tank is shot and explodes, throwing Alice to the floor, triggering another memory. She met a woman in a cemetery, and promised to get her the “T-Virus”.
JD desperately tries to unlock an elevator with a passcode, but it’s full of zombies. He gets dragged into the elevator and eaten.
As Alice and Matt try to flee the dining hall, a licker bursts out of a damaged chamber.
Rain (who isn’t doing very well) tells Kaplan that he let the zombies out when the door unlocked due to shutting the Red Queen down.
Alice is wandering aimlessly for some reason, and passes through the kennel that they had down here for… experimentation, most likely. Rat bastards. She’s soon menaced by a skin-challenged dog. She shuts a door on it, but there’s a zombie in the room. Alice instinctively uses hand-to-hand techniques to defeat him. She remembers what the captain said about her being a security officer.
She finds a gun and enters another room with many more dogs inside, but she puts most of them down with expert aim, then kicks the last one away.
Matt is wandering around, too. He finds the ID card of the woman that Alice promised to get the T-Virus for: Lisa. As Matt looks around in some papers, Lisa appears. She seems to recognize him at first, but attacks him. Alice kills her, and Matt reveals that she was his sister. He is basically a part of a resistance movement against Umbrella. Considering how batshit insane Umbrella turned out to be in this series, the resistance was right.
Matt doesn’t realize that he’s talking to Lisa’s contact inside Umbrella.
Everyone is basically trapped in the Queen’s chamber. Rain reveals that the countdown is for when they’ll be sealed within the Hive. Alice takes charge by reactivating the Queen. “Things, I gather, have gone out of control.”
She explains that the T-Virus reanimates the dead, citing that hair and fingernails continue to grow and that the brain retains an electric charge. The former isn’t true; what happens is that the skin around the nails and hair follicles tighten, creating the illusion of growth. Anyway, she further explains how best to kill the zombies and why she took such drastic measures to kill the Hive’s employees. She also says that she can’t let anyone who’s infected out.
The Queen leads them through utility tunnels, but there are zombies throughout. Alive breaks a zombie’s neck between her thighs. Awesome.
Jill would do something similar in Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, which retold the stories of Resident Evil 0 – 3.
Kaplan gets bit, and Rain get bitten twice, first by a random zombie, and then again by a zombified JD.
They flee into an open part of the tunnels. Kaplan indulges in some doomsaying by stating that the Queen was right: they are all going to die down here. But Alice says that they’re going to make it.
They try to walk across some pipes or something like that, but Kaplan gets grabbed. Alice tells Rain to help him, but she can’t focus well enough to get a good shot, so Alice shoots the zombie instead. Kaplan yells at Alice to leave him behind, and she reluctantly does. He puts a gun in his mouth, and they cut away as we hear a gunshot. We see – a zombie rolling away. Kaplan says that they’re gonna have to work for their meal. I actually like this scene, and I still think about it sometimes. It has to be one of my favorite scenes of the film.
As our dwindling party climbs through a vent, Matt helps a weakened Rain through, and she vomits. Then, she says this: “When I get outta here, think I’m gonna get laid.”
Alice remembers seeing scientists work in one of the labs. They developed an antivirus as well. Alice tells Rain that she’s gonna be OK. “I was beginning to worry.”
Alice confesses to Matt that she was Lisa’s contact, but Alice can’t remember if she betrayed Lisa or not.
The antivirus wasn’t where Alice thought it was. Suddenly, her husband, Spence, remembered listening in on her and Lisa’s secret conversation. Alice would only give Lisa the virus if she promised to take Umbrella down.
Spence left the note for Alice and released the virus within the Hive. He was the one that bumped into the poor shmuck at the beginning of the film. Spence steals Alice’s gun and tries to convince her that they can leave the Hive and get paid obscene amounts of money for the virus, but she wants no part of it. Spence says that people like Matt will never change anything.
A zombie rises up behind Spence, but none of the others say anything after he tells them that the antivirus was on the train. The zombie bites him, and he kills it. He shoots the lock on the lab door, says that he’s missing Alice already, and leaves. But the Queen says that she’s “been a bad girl”.
Rain told Alice that her boyfriend was a real asshole.
The Queen led the licker to the loading bay where Spence tried to cure himself. However, the Queen says that, since the licker has fed on living tissue, it will mutate. The Queen will give Alice and Matt the code to get out – if theykill Rain, even though the antivirus is right there on the platform.
The licker tries to break through the lab and Rain begs Alice to kill her, but she refuses.
Suddenly, the power goes down, because Kaplan fried the Queen – again. Absolute legend.
They return to the platform, where Spence’s body reanimates with a hideous gasp. Alice says that she’s missing him already, and kills him with an axe. Finally, she drops her wedding ring. Marriage over
Kaplan gets the train running, and everyone boards. As Alice injects Rain, she says that she’ll never be one of those things walking around without a soul. She asks Alice to kill her if she turns, and gives her the watch that she had. It was counting down to the Hive’s lockdown.
Rain stops moving, so Alice grabs the gun, but Rain takes it away. “I’m not dead yet.”Alice says that she could kiss her.
Abruptly, the licker slashes through the wall of the train, nicking Matt’s shoulder as he barely dodges in time. As he and Alice try to get the licker off of the train, a reanimated Rain attacks him, so he shoots her, and her body depresses the button that opens the bay. The licker rolls away onto the tracks in a fireball.
The licker killed Kaplan, also.
Matt and Alice retreat into the mansion.
“I failed,” laments Alice. “All of them. I failed.”
Matt tries to console her, but something’s wrong. He muscle fibers squirm out of his wounded shoulder. Alice scrambles to administer the antivirus to him, but some Umbrella goons grab him and restrain her. One of the scientists says that they want Matt for the “Nemesis program”, and Alice is quarantined and tested for infection – in Raccoon City.
She wakes up in a sterile white room, naked save for some sort of medical cloth draped over her, horrified to discover wires hooked up to her. She removes them, and crawls under the table that she was on. She screams to get someone’s attention, but no one was around. Using a syringe, she shorts out the card scanner and escapes the lab. It leads to the Raccoon City Hospital. The streets are abandoned. A newspaper bears the headline, “The Dead Walk!”
She grabs a shotgun from an abandoned cop car and cocks it.
Final Thoughts
I would argue that the first film has aged very well, despite its critical bashing. It has a decent and dense plot and a good hook for the ending (which admittedly most of the RE movies did – it was following up on them that they largely failed at). It’s also probably the only remotely scary entry in the entire series. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve rewatched the later movies more that is partially responsible for my greater appreciation for the first film. I recommend checking it out if you want a stylish, sci-fi/horror flick to watch. I recommend it even if you hate the later movies.
Trivia
Y’all may want to buckle up for some of these factoids, because they are hilarious within the context of the rest of the series.
Notoriously, George A. Romero wrote a screenplay adapting the first game, and was set to direct as well, but it was thrown out when Capcom felt it wasn’t faithful enough to the games. They also felt that newcomers to the franchise wouldn’t like the changes that Romero would have made, either, and there was a fear that his take would have gotten an NC-17 rating. Anderson had to fight for his movie to be rated R instead of (ew!) PG-13.
The movie didn’t actually get off of the ground until Anderson started writing a script for a film inspired by RE. So there you have it: a concrete explanation for why the series indulges in several fanfiction tropes as it goes on. It started off as fanfic! As for why Capcom allowed Anderson’s films to drift lazily away more and more from the game’s storyline… we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, though you can guess the reason why Capcom let Anderson get away with it for as long as he did.
Actor trivia: Jovovich became attached to the project because she let her younger brother, Marco, pick her next role. As for Rodriguez, I remember reading in an EGM interview that she wanted to be in the film because the premise reminded her of Parasite Eve, but TV Tropes claims that she informed her agent to get her any role in an RE film as soon as it was greenlit. Alas, Jovovich almost quit the film because she felt that Rodriguez’s character stole action scenes from her. As it is, Alice was originally going to be more of a damsel in distress character, but Jovovich convinced Anderson to tweak her considerably.
When it came to casting actors as zombies, they fell short on extras, so several Capcom executives and producers agreed to play some of them, which is pretty fun.
The film was initially subtitled Ground Zero, but 9/11 put the kibosh on that.
The film’s success led to the greenlighting of some other R-rated video game movies, such as the ones based on Doom (which I really should review some day; it’s a trip) and Silent Hill. It’s blatantly obvious that the first RE movie heavily influenced Doom…
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