[COLUMN] In Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil, the Undead 1990s Stalk the 21st Century | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: With the looming release of Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil next weekend, it felt like a good time to revisit the Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich Resident Evil films. I’ve talked about this before, but Anderson has always been a filmmaker that I respect more than I like - a director with a clear stylistic sensibility and set of interests who communicates those clearly through his work, but whose style I find overwhelming and occasionally incoherent. I do love Event Horizon, though.

This piece will contain spoilers for his Resident Evil movies, which are a decade old now and which I find more fascinating than actively good. That said, they really aren’t plot-delivery mechanisms, but consider yourself warned. Enjoy! 

Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich’s Resident Evil franchise is a deeply fascinating object.

The series spans six films, all written and produced by Anderson and all starring Jovovich, with the first instalment and the final three entries also directed by Anderson. It ran for 15 years between 2002 and 2017, from the early Bush years to the start of the Trump era. It is a film franchise that is inseparable from the creative vision behind. It is not so much Resident Evil as it is Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich’s take on Resident Evil.

Anderson has been canonized in the past decade as a “vulgar auteur” a term applied to schlocky pulpy directors who rarely get showered with awards or cited as masters of the medium, but who retain a distinct style and aesthetic. Anderson is counted alongside Michael Bay or Tony Scott in that subcategory. Anderson is, in particular, largely defined by his collaborations with Jovovich that extend beyond the Resident Evil franchise, making him action cinema’s preeminent “wife guy.”

The Anderson-Jovovich Resident Evil films are extremely loose adaptations of the eponymous video games, outside of occasionally including a character who shares a name with a figure from the games, or referencing a costume design, or folding in a familiar monster here and there. They are not defined by their faithfulness to the source material, beyond the very basic concept that the evil Umbrella Corporation has unleashed a host of genetically modified monsters upon the world.

Revisited today, nearly a decade after the release of The Final Chapter, the films feel like a time capsule. They are undeniably of their moment. Anderson was a filmmaker who emerged during the 1990s, with his independent film Shoplifters and his adaptation of Mortal Kombat, which remains one of the better theatrical video game adaptations. Across the decade-and-a-half of their production, the Resident Evil films kept at least one foot firmly in the aesthetics of the 1990s.

The films took their cues from the Hong Kong action that influenced The Matrix, featuring copious amounts of slow motion and gun-fu. Even Anderson’s use of 3D in Afterlife and Retribution feels anchored in the aesthetics of the 1990s, with slow motion bullets, clips and pistols flying directly at the audience. The soundtrack is saturated with a heady mix of trippy dance music and heavy metal, Anderson liberally borrowing Alice in Wonderland imagery from The Matrix.

Part of what is so strangely compelling about these series of films is that, though they feel defined by the 1990s, they were never a product of that decade. Although it was primarily filmed during eleven weeks of principle photography starting in March 2001, Anderson’s Resident Evil was released in March 2002, six months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, six months after “the 21st century began in earnest, at least in the western mind.” The 1990s were well and truly over.

The Resident Evil films were in conversation with the War on Terror. The original film was subtitled Ground Zero before the attacks, with the subtitle dropped in their wake. The first two films’ depiction of a major American city swept in apocalyptic panic made the comparisons tough to avoid. The third film, Resident Evil: Extinction, brings the comparisons to the fore, following a military convoy through a desert wasteland, evoking the imagery of American foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is perhaps too much to try to parse any coherent ideology from this nightmare imagery. Extinction features Oded Fehr as the heroic Carlos Oliveira. Fehr is an Israeli actor, but has a long career playing characters coded as Middle Eastern in films like The Mummy and shows like Sleeper Cell. To buy his allies a chance to escape, Oliveira turns his oil tanker into a heroic suicide bomb, wiping out hordes of zombies and allowing Alice (Jovovich) an opportunity to get where she needs to go.

By their nature, zombie films spoke to the post-9/11 moment, most overtly in films like 28 Weeks Later or shows like The Walking Dead, but even in the later George A. Romero films like Land of the Dead. Zombies were a suitable expression for the anxieties simmering through the contemporary American psyche, as demonstrated by Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. It is little wonder that the genre underwent something of a renaissance in the early years of the new millennium.

Still, the Resident Evil movies feel haunted by a psychic hangover of the 1990s, as if that decade is somehow undead, an uncanny mockery of itself shuffling awkwardly across the ruins of the emerging 21st century. The Resident Evil movies are an interesting holdover of a strange period in mainstream blockbuster filmmaking, falling between the big auteur-driven blockbusters of the 1990s like Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Jurassic Park and the proper superhero boom of the 2000s.

Obviously, while the first three films in the six-film series predate Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and so exist in the space before superhero films really dominated the culture, the Resident Evil movies continue on in parallel with the superhero explosion. Afterlife was released the same year as Iron Man 2, Retribution came out the same year as The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, and The Final Chapter hit cinemas the same year as Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 and Thor: Ragnarok.

It makes sense that Resident Evil should feel like something of a zombie franchise, the hollow shell of a certain kind of filmmaking stalking a landscape that had long moved past the aesthetic of slow motion, heavy metal and gun-fu. There is a sense in series that the world ended after the very first film, and the next five entries are drifting through the wreckage of that fallen world rather than existing in the context of any new world order that might possibly have emerged from it.

In particular, there is something of the philosopher Jean Baudrillard in these Resident Evil movies, in particular his theory of simulacra and simulation. There is an uncanny quality to the films, which feels in some ways in step with so much of the media of the late 1990s, from The Matrix to Dark City to The Truman Show to Harsh Realm to The Thirteenth Floor. There is constant questioning of what is real, and what is instead a simulation of reality. It is unreal now, but was it ever real?

Baudrillard opened his thesis on the subject, Simulation and Simulacra, by stating that, “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.  The simulacrum is true.” Baudrillard attributed the quote to the Book of Ecclesiastes, but there is no such quote. Baudrillard’s writing reflected a world where symbols and images were increasingly being divorced from meaning, context and reality.

This is reflected in the films’ production. Though Raccoon City is canonically American, located somewhere in the midwest, Resident Evil was shot in Berlin and Toronto, lending the environment an uncanny quality. The films arrived at an early point in the evolution of computer-generated imagery, and when practical sets and effects were still in use, and were shot on a modest enough budget, so the film’s integration of digital monstrosities always has a weird disconcerting and unnatural texture.

More than that, this uncanniness is baked into the narrative of the films. In Extinction, Dr. Alexander Isaacs (Iain Glen) arrives to a board meeting with Albert Wesker (Jason O'Mara), only for the scene to end with the revelation that every board member there was a hologram – despite the decision to place glasses of water in front of them. In Retribution, Umbrella has converted abandoned Soviet submarine pens into perfect replicas of urban environments like New York, Moscow and Tokyo.

Befitting the anxiety around cloning breakthroughs during the 1990s concerning Dolly the Sheep, the Resident Evil films are preoccupied with clones and copies. The Umbrella Corporation mass produces key employees, like James Shade (Colin Salmon) and Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodriguez). These clones are frequently conditioned and placed in simulations, living alternate lives in these fake worlds. “A day ago, she was a blank slate,” Ada Wong (Li Bingbing) warns Alice about her daughter Becky (Aryana Engineer). “l could show you a dozen just like her in cold storage.”

While Anderson doesn’t necessarily pay attention to the specific plotting of the video games, one of the more interesting aspects of his Resident Evil franchise is how it uses the language of video games as part of this thematic tableau. The clones are effectively replicating the mechanic of “lives” in video games. The simulated environments are “levels.” There is an additional level of the uncanny to Retribution, with Li Bingbing dubbed by video game actor Sally Cahill to disorienting effect.

Even the programmed replicas wandering around these environments are NPCs. As Ada explains, the company is constrained in manufacturing these scenarios by the limited number of character options available, noting that Alice is “one of the fifty basic models.” Even the incongruous fan-service-y elements like Ada’s highly impractical video-game accurate costume plays into the broader sense of unreality of the world that Alice is navigating.

There is a sense in Anderson’s Resident Evil movies of reality collapsing into itself. Alice is a copy of a copy of a copy, trapped in an endless loop. No matter what she does, she is always back fighting monsters in the next film. “You’re all going to die down here,” the Red Queen (Megan Charpentier) warns her in Retribution, repeating a threat from the first film. Alice replies, “I’ve heard that before.” Alice is constantly confronted with clones and copies of herself and of people she knows.

There is something evocative in this. In Extinction, Alice stumbles across an open mass grave, of the kind that occupied international consciousness in the 1990s thanks to atrocities in places like Rwanda or Bosnia, but which also evokes more historical horrors like Cambodia or the Holocaust. However, that mass grave is just filled with clones of her. It is an atrocity perpetrated upon a single person. She later finds a laboratory packed with clones. In Retribution, her clones hang from meat hooks.

In that film, the characters navigate a series of simulations from American suburbia to Red Square. The facility itself is a relic of the Cold War. “This facility is located in the straits of Kamchatka, Northern Russia,” explains Wesker (now played by Shawn Roberts, styled and moving like a video game model). “The old Soviet Union built submarine pens here in the '80s. After the Cold War ended, the Umbrella Corporation expanded them and built the testing floor.”

Umbrella is a monster of the long 1990s, the “end of history.” The real monster of the Resident Evil movies is unchecked capitalism, the ideology that emerged triumphant at the end of the Cold War, having vanquished communism. Retribution features an action beat set against a simulation of Moscow, featuring an army of undead communists, in a former Soviet military institution reconfigured to serve the needs of “the largest and most powerful commercial entity in the world.”

This is the underlying logic of the world of Anderson’s Resident Evil. Isaacs notes of the creatures haunting the wasteland, “Well, we now know conclusively that they have no real need for sustenance. They hunger for flesh but do not require it.” They consume for the sake of consumption. Isaacs plans to “domesticate” the zombies to “provide the basis for a docile workforce.” Effectively embracing that most base horrors of capitalism: slavery of a group deemed subhuman.

As much as Anderson’s Resident Evil embraces the language of video games to reinforce the unreality of their world, these dynamics are also an expression of the monstrosity of late-stage capitalism. Human beings are robbed of agency and identity to serve as the protagonists of dangerous missions, clones are rendered as non-player characters in elaborate simulations staged as many times as necessary, and there is an endless customizable array of human beings to be selected and deployed.

These themes of simulation and late capitalism collide and intersect throughout the series. In Extinction, Alice joins with a convoy pressing west, perhaps looking for America’s beginning at its end. In need of supplies, a visit to Las Vegas is their “only bet.” The survivors journey into the ruins of Las Vegas, a somewhat unconvincing replica of the city, which has been half-buried in the sand. “Desert must have taken it back,” Alice muses. “Five years. Nothing to keep the sand back.”

However, enough of the city remains to underscore its uncanny nature. A replica of the Eiffel Tower juts out from the sand, a copy of a copy of a real-life wonder that exists half-the-world away, turned into a gaudy tourist trap. Professor Jeremy Bassetti has described Las Vegas as “a spectacle of stimulation and simulation where one can find anything.” It contains facsimiles of wonders from around the globe, such as Venetian canals or Egyptian pyramids, all built on America’s shifting sands.

Writer Jordan Poletti observed that Las Vegas “existed beyond America, a universe unto itself, no longer representing a world but becoming one. It was the only true place in the world, because it cared not for truth, showed there was no truth in the first place, only belief.” In 2007, the same year Alice led her expedition to the constructed illusion of a city of illusion, Stephen Hendee opened Monument to the Simulacrum, a sculpture recreating a natural mountain in the heart of urban Las Vegas.

It feels fitting that Anderson and Jovovich would wrap up their take on Resident Evil just as the Trump Administration accelerated the sense of collapse and decay. If nothing else, the constant simulations and simulacra of the Resident Evil franchise feel like they prefigure the “post-truth” moment and the era of “alternative facts.” Released days after the Trump Inauguration, the opening scenes of The Final Chapter find Alice skulking through the ruins of Washington. In the film’s opening moments, Alice is attacked by a monster lurking in the tainted reflection pool beneath the Washington monument.

It is perhaps folly to look for deeper meaning in Anderson and Jovovich’s Resident Evil films, but that is part of the point that they are making. In their uncanny recreation of a collapsed America, a disorienting hybrid of practical and digital filmmaking in foreign countries with an international cast, the unreality becomes part of the point. The narratives of these films are all dead ends, simulations and clones - copies upon copies upon copies - where the illusion conceals nothing but its own construction and the vast dark capitalist maw underneath. There’s nothing worth reflecting upon but monsters.

Anderson and Jovovich’s Resident Evil movies are not masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, but they are a fascinating application of video game adaptation and zombie movie logic to construct a franchise about the long lingering undeath of the 1990s, and America’s slow slippery descent into the unreality of apocalyptic late capitalism. They are a maximalist meditation on the slow collapse of everything, set to a heavy metal beat.