Resident Evil (film)

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Hmmm, that resident evil is a looker.

Resident Evil is a film series based loosely on the video games of the same name.

Alice (Milla Jovovich) awakens to find the house she is in empty, with no signs of life. Her memory is utterly blank of past events. After soldiers burst through the doors she discovers the unspeakable secret of Umbrella... a secret that may well result in the death of everyone in Raccoon City. Or even the world...

The series was developed by Paul W.S. Anderson and is often decried by fans of the game series.

The films are:

• Resident Evil (2002)
• Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
• Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
• Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
• Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

None of these films should be confused with Resident Evil: Degeneration, which is explicitly set in the canon of the videogames and is a CGI piece instead of live-action.

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The first movie contains examples of:

• Abandoned Hospital Awakening: Alice does this at the end of the movie.
• Action Girl: Alice is the standout example, but there's also Rain.
• AI Is a Crapshoot: Subverted. It looks like Red Queen has gone homicidally insane, but it's her job to contain outbreaks, which she did perfectly. Umbrella (who built the Red Queen) responds by inexplicably breaking quarantine and releasing the virus.
• Air Vent Passageway: At one point the surviving team members go through air vents to evade the zombies.
• Alice Allusion: Alice, the Red Queen, and in later movies, the White Queen.
• Amnesia tropes that apply to Alice and Spence Parks:
  • Easy Amnesia
  • Identity Amnesia
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia
• Bald Black Leader Guy: One, the leader of the soldiers.
• Big Red Button: Opens and closes the subway car's floor door.
• Black Dude Dies First: Subverted.
• Bloodless Carnage: When the commandos are sliced to pieces by the Laser Hallway.
• Blown Across the Room: Rain Ocampo's machine gun fire sends a zombie flying about 20 feet.
• Bottomless Magazines: Bullets run out only when the film demands it. Otherwise even the REVOLVERS can shoot non-stop with no need to reload whatsoever.
• Canon Immigrant: The Red Queen evidently.
• Doing It for the Art: Paul W.S. Anderson wrote the script for the first film specifically because he wanted to ensure that Resident Evil got a decent cinematic adaptation, and the films are loaded with winking little references to the games.
• Dwindling Party
• Dueling Hackers: Kaplan has a hacking duel with the Red Queen AI to bypass her defenses.
• Dying Like Animals: A possible explanation for how everyone died.
• Expositron 9000: The Red Queen.
• Fast Roping: The soldiers engage in this trope when they enter the mansion. Why they went on the roof first, or why they simply didn't just go in through the open front door is never explained, but it's probably Rule of Cool.
• Hand Signals: Rain Ocampo and the team leader.
• Hologram: The Red Queen's projected image.
• Idiot Ball:
  • As Cracked notes above, the highly-trained tactical team spends twenty minutes somehow not landing a headshot on the zombies. They hit the walls, the floor, and the locks on the containment units.

[They] shoot so badly they actually increase the number of zombies.

• • • Speaking of said locks, they are designed to contain some of the most dangerous viruses known to man. Which, when damaged, unlocks instead of staying shut. There's no kind of manual lock backup, like actual biohazard vaults might have in addition to the electronics. Who designed that syst- oh, right, Umbrella.
• It Gets Worse: Every film has more than a few examples. For example, the team shut down the Red Queen, only to release what she was trying to keep locked up.
• Laser Hallway: The Red Queen's main defense. It takes down several of Umbrella's elite investigation squad before being shut down
• Mega Corp: Umbrella Corporation.
• Mortal Wound Reveal: Two of the commandos' deaths in the Laser Hallway.
• Murderous Thighs: Alice does a Neck Snap of a zombie this way.
• Necessarily Evil: The Red Queen qualifies big-time. Yes, she did murder the entire Umbrella research facility staff but she was only following her main directive to prevent a T-Virus outbreak. In all fairness, her actions are probably the most sensible out of anyone in the entire series in containing the outbreak. Her actions are brutal but effective at least until Umbrella unseals the facility and lets all the zombies loose.
• Neck Snap: Rain Ocampo and Alice to zombies.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Averted when Kaplan tells the rest of the party to keep going after he's cut off from them by zombies. Then he makes it out alive and comes back to save everyone. Then he dies at the last minute anyway.
• Oh Crap: The famous last word of One, right before he gets sliced into chunks by the Laser Hallway trap: "Shit".
• Pull the IV: At the end of the first film and start of the second.
• Refuge in Cool: Don't just turn your brain off to enjoy this series; take it out and store it somewhere safe, because these movies will punish it harshly for trying to apply logic to anything you see in them.
• Rule of Cool: Liberally invoked throughout the series, but special notice goes to the laser hallway in the first movie. No real reason why it couldn't have just killed everyone right away by using the "laser grid" on its first pass, other than because watching it adapt to the victims' attempts to avoid it and take them down one by one makes for a much more awesome scene.
• Sequel Hook: Alice walks out of the hospital to find that she's in a deserted (except for zombies) Raccoon City.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Spence shoots out the lock on the lab door.
• Sinister Scraping Sound: The first zombie limps in dragging an axe across the floor.
• Slow Electricity: When the Red Queen (and the power) are shut down and restarted.
• Stab the Scorpion
• Stat-O-Vision: How the Red Queen sees the world.
• Surprisingly-Sudden Death: Happens four times. Once in the laser trap scene, once with the "dining room" attack scene, and twice with the Licker.
• Take My Hand: Rain Ocampo to J.D. It... doesn't work so well.
• Tempting Fate: J.D. after entering the door code.
• Third Option Adaptation
• Vasquez Always Dies: Played straight with Michelle Rodriguez
• Villain Ball: The UBCS team sent to investigate The Hive reveal that there is a timer running from the Red Queen, and given that The Virus broke loose and infected everything, when the timer hits 0, every entrance into The Hive will be permanently sealed below Raccoon City. nothing gets in. nothing gets out. Seems pretty smart so far. Umbrella does not agree with this. Not only is there a built in override for said system, but the team sent to do so contains 5 people. 5. Guess what happens when they override the containment system.
• Wall Crawl: The Licker.
• Wall Slump
• Xanatos Gambit: The Red Queen, you know, being that she's a terrifyingly intelligent supercomputer, pulls one when the protagonists are trying to escape the labs to get out of the Hive before it seals, trapping them. In addition, a Licker is at the window of the lab slowly breaking through. The choice? Kill Rain, thereby invoking Vasquez Always Dies, who was infected with the T-virus insuring zombification or let her live and be trapped in the lab and be killed by the Licker. Either way the Queen wins as the virus is contained regardless. At least until Kaplan takes option three by frying the Red Queen, unlocking the door and allowing everyone to escape. This goes badly.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Duh
• Zombie Gait: Averted, subverted, inverted, played straight, played for laughs and everywhere inbetween.