Resident Evil is a fun, campy mess that feels nothing like the games

Another Resident Evil adaptation is here. At this point, fans of this longtime survival horror game franchise are more likely to approach a new television show or movie set in the RE universe with trepidation than excitement. We’ve been through it so many times before, from the run of Milla Jovovich movies to various animated films and last year’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Some are decent, some are horrible, and many lie somewhere in between.

At this point, any adaptation bearing the Resident Evil name is fighting an uphill battle to convince fans that it’ll be any good. So how did Netflix’s latest swing at the franchise, aptly titled Resident Evil, fare?

It depends on what you were looking for, I guess. If you want a campy, chaotic horror series that features some cool creature set pieces, there’ll be something for you to enjoy here. But if you wanted a Resident Evil series that feels even remotely linked to the games, prepare to be disappointed.

There will be some very mild SPOILERS ahead for the series.

Resident Evil series review

The story of Resident Evil is told in two separate timelines: one in 2036 after a T-Virus apocalypse has wiped out most of the world; and one in 2022, just before the apocalypse started. There are some enjoyable things about both of these plots. The post-apocalypse timeline has tons of campy horror, from enormous virus-infested caterpillars to chainsaw bloodbaths and appearances by some of Resident Evil’s most iconic monsters. The show is at its strongest when it leans into those elements, following Jade Wesker (Ella Balinska) on her quest to research the outbreak and stay alive.

However, in the back half of the season, the 2036 storyline starts to stray a little more toward The Walking Dead-style societal contemplation, exploring how different people react to the post-apocalypse…and honestly, it never quite clicks. The show is better leaving those type of big brain stories to shows that actually take the time to examine them thoroughly. Resident Evil is best when it sticks to its horror roots.

The present-day story is even less straightforward. It follows teenage sisters Jade and Billie Wesker (Tamara Smart and Siena Agudong) as they move to New Raccoon City with their father Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick). Wesker is a name that any Resident Evil game fan will know; he was one of the main villains of the series. Reddick’s Wesker is a bit different, a family man who is also an overworked scientist for the shady pharmaceutical giant the Umbrella Corporation. He’s a very different character than we saw in the games, but we’ll talk about the implications for the gamer crowd shortly.

The biggest issue to me with the 2022 plotline is that it gets extremely bogged down in the teenage drama of it all. Yes, Jade and Billie are unraveling a corporate conspiracy and are at the center of a story that will lead to the viral outbreak that basically ends the world, but Resident Evil spends at least as much time exploring how they navigate high school and relationships with other teens as it does introducing us to big bad scary monsters. Even if you can divorce this show entirely from its source material in your mind, or have never played the games, the teenage angle still feels weird. It’s kind of like DeGrassi meets Outbreak, intercut with the 28 Days Later-style horror of 2036.

This type of conflicting tone…eh, I guess if you want a teenage-drama zombie show, you will love Resident Evil. It combines those two types of stories in a way I haven’t seen done before. But if you are hoping for something that will really blow you away, or explore its relationship to the games in a meaningful way, this isn’t it.

You don’t mess with Lance Reddick

Now, I’ve done a lot of complaining about Resident Evil and there’s more to come, but we need to touch on what I think is easily the show’s strongest suit: its actors. Lance Reddick plays Albert Wesker, and yes, this is a different Wesker than the one we know from the games. I wasn’t totally satisfied with how the show explains Wesker’s changed personality, but they at least did give it a shot.

Reddick, however, is as brilliant as ever. He is totally riveting whenever he’s on screen, and really does capture the duality of Wesker as someone who can be likable one moment and terrifying the next. There’s a particular standout scene near the beginning of the series where Wesker dresses down another parent whose kid has been causing problems with Billie at school, and Reddick’s delivery is nothing short of amazing.

He’s not the only actor doing great work on Resident Evil. Paola Núñez plays Evelyn Marcus, the de facto leader of the Umbrella Corporation, and she’s ridiculously charismatic in the role. Both Siena Agudong and Tamara Smart do a great job with the material they’re given, and Ella Balinska is also solid as the older version of Jade, especially when she’s in the thick of the show’s bigger horror set pieces.

Speaking of those set pieces, the special effects definitely deserve a nod. The practical effects for many of the zombies are pretty gnarly, and some of the other creatures manage to leave quite an impression as well. When people or zombies get chainsawed, it is just as brutal, bloody, and outrageously campy as you’d hope.

For the gamers

Okay, so now that we’ve talked a bit about the show, we need to talk about how it relates to the games. If you’re not interested in such things, feel free to skim down to the final verdict. But I grew up loving these games, so I can’t not touch on it.

To me, the only way a fan of the Resident Evil games can really enjoy this new show is to totally divorce it in your mind from the source material. It’s a little disappointing, considering that one of the most exciting selling points of the series is that it treats the games as canon; everything that happened to Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Leon Kennedy, and Claire Redfield still happened in the show’s continuity. It’s set after Resident Evil Village, which means that it had a lot of opportunities to tie back to the games.

And it does link to them in a couple of interesting ways; Raccoon City is referenced a lot, there’s a very brief scene involving Lisa Trevor, and Wesker’s appearance is explained despite the fact that he got blown up in a volcano in Resident Evil 5 (in a lamer way than I expected, but still). There are also some moments that feel like they tap into the survival horror spirit in just the right way, such as a zombie dog attack early in the season.

Despite those things, it feels like Resident Evil just doesn’t get the games it’s based on. The teenage plotline feels completely out of place tonally, as does the post-apocalypse setting. We’re now more than eight mainline games deep into the Resident Evil series, and the world still hasn’t ended. Those games almost always revolve around some kind of corporate cover-up of calamitous events; it’s a part of the series’ DNA, and one of the things that sets RE apart from the countless other zombie stories out there. Resident Evil (the show) nods to this a few times, yet the story still goes into full blown apocalypse territory, trying to be something that, frankly, just feels at odds with the games. (And yes, I know the Jovovich movies made this choice too. It felt dissonant there too, whatever those movies’ charms.)

Instead, we get a slew of nods to the games that feel so on the nose they’re almost cringe-worthy, from an Umbrella middle-management guy proclaiming himself “the master of unlocking,” to a chainsaw-wielding goon wearing a burlap sack over his head, and more. Some of those nods are fun (after I finished groaning at the burlap sack, the rest of the scene is a blast), but if our only real connection to the game are little nods here and there, I don’t know that Resident Evil is succeeding as a sequel to the game series.

Verdict

Resident Evil is a decent campy horror show; it’s not quite good or awful, but somewhere in the uncomfortable middle. It has some fun sequences and a few truly standout moments, but is muddled by a variety of disparate tones and ideas that don’t mesh together. Which is a shame, because the actors and effects work on the show are actually pretty great.

Somewhere in her mountain holdfast, Milla Jovovich smirks to herself, knowing that she still holds the title for best Resident Evil screen adaptation.

Series Grade: C

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