The Posthumanism of Resident Evil

“Lean and mean and tight” is how director Zach Cregger described his upcoming Resident Evil reboot, noting how it emulates the survival mechanics and oppressive atmosphere of the popular video game franchise. The original live-action film series, by contrast, is sprawling and stylistically varied, spanning years of story time, multiple continents, and a colorful assortment of narrative and aesthetic devices – wirework, CGI, 3D effects, and dei ex machina appear in spades. In terms of fidelity to the source material, these movies rank pretty low among film adaptations of video games. That said, the series succeeds as a ​“video game adaptation” in a different sense: it incorporates the logic of video games into its narrative and filmmaking, drawing on it to craft an arresting posthuman vision.

The story follows Alice (Milla Jovovich), a former security operative for the Umbrella Corporation, a pharmaceutical and biotech company whose technological, economic, and political clout means that it functionally rules the world. After a viral outbreak turns most of the earth’s population into zombies, Alice and her allies attempt to evade and thwart Umbrella’s ongoing machinations, culminating with a mission to obtain an antivirus from the corporation’s headquarters.

Before we meet any human characters, however, we meet the ​“system.” The inaugural film, 2002’s Resident Evil, opens with a video game-style loadout screen that delivers a ​“confidential report” on Umbrella’s history. This kind of digital-readout-as-expository-device is nothing new. It does, however, represent a machinic ​“system’s perspective” that remains dominant throughout the series, framing and circumscribing the maneuverings of the human characters. In the very next scene, various security-cam views place us in the proverbial shoes of Umbrella’s AI security apparatus (the ​“Red Queen”) as it slaughters an entire facility of workers – the high-tech, spatially distributed equivalent of a slasher POV shot. In lieu of conventional establishing shots, scenes often begin with wireframe digital renderings of the space, populated by moving markers to show where characters are located. Such aesthetic choices embed narrative events within a vast surveillance grid, which continually monitors, modulates, and gathers data on what the characters do. 

In his book Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, media theorist Alexander Galloway notes how, unlike other media that “[assume] the form of a physical object,” video games depend on the actions of both the player and the machine which encompasses the game’s hardware and software. Often, the machine keeps running in the background even when the player steps away, comprising what Galloway calls an ​“ambience act.” The Resident Evil movies echo this phenomenon, their visual and narrative focus on digital models, simulations, and surveillance technologies generating a similar sense of ​“ambient” machinic influence.

The gamic resonances extend even further: like an avatar, Alice repeatedly wakes up in new environments with no memory of how she got there, her actions guided by her immediate surroundings. Characters’ attributes often seem arbitrary: memories and abilities are wiped and restored at the screenwriter’s whim, costumes and allegiances swapping in and out like customizable skins within a loadout menu. Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), a brunette police officer in the series’ second instalment, Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), returns three movies later as a blonde, mind-controlled, upper-echelon Umbrella officer in a purple bodysuit. Dr. Alexander Isaacs (Iain Glen) shifts from being an Umbrella employee who mutates into a tentacled creature at the end of Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), to being Umbrella’s very co-founder and CEO in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016), equipped with high-tech ocular implants that make him skilled in hand-to-hand combat.

This shift in Isaacs’ characterization is partially explained by the revelation that the first Isaacs was actually a clone. Cloning is first introduced in the third entry, Extinction, which opens with a surreal, nearly shot-by-shot recreation of Alice’s character introduction from the first film. As she walks, she suddenly ends up in the hospital where she finds herself at the end of the 2002 film, the blending of disparate spaces evoking the experience of dreaming – or perhaps, the act of toggling between different video game maps. We soon discover that she’s a clone who is violently killed and dumped in a mass grave alongside other Alice duplicates. The sequence unfolds via eerily restricted narration: we think we’re seeing ​“our” Alice, only for the rug to be pulled out from under us. 

With Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) and Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), the plot point of cloning – which imagines the human body as programmable, copyable code – is matched by an insistently artificial style. Countering Hollywood’s propensity for photorealism, Afterlife embraces green-screen aesthetics: characters run, jump, and somersault in front of murky digital backdrops, the impression of real-world friction and exertion minimized. This synthetic look extends to non-CGI elements: the color grading is flat, the performances stiff, the action sequences posey and ​“cool,” sometimes to the point of camp. In one scene, a character executes a slow-motion backflip off of a window ledge, curtains of water from burst piping drenching the stunt in mythic atmosphere. 

A feature-length riff on Extinction​’s opening, Retribution takes place in an Umbrella training facility run by the Red Queen, sans any human overseer. An nth degree realization of Galloway’s ambience act – the machine now self-sustaining and all-enveloping – the facility possesses the capacity to resurrect past characters and story spaces in the form of simulations. Hauntingly evoked in an opening sequence that unfolds in reverse, the film expands the concepts of ​“reanimation” and ​“the undead” into metaphorical territory, envisioning a postmodern world in which history itself has been flattened into a potentially endless, reiterative present. 

Imagined as a database whose contents can be cherry-picked à la random access memory, the past loses its existential weight. It’s a dystopian premise that slyly nods to the franchise-obsessed churn of contemporary pop culture, which compulsively recycles past IP at the expense of creating new art – a sardonic streak Trojan-horsed into a series that, in some ways, is such a franchise itself. But there’s an upside. Leaning into its artifice, the series’ visual style projects a sense of plasticity. With Alice being her biggest role to date, it makes sense that Jovovich has become a queer icon in some circles – further cemented with her recent casting in the second season of Heated Rivalry – her androgynous star image dovetailing with the series’ vision of malleable selves within a malleable world.

This becomes especially pronounced when we discover that Alice is herself a clone; her life essentially began with her first scene in Resident Evil. And yet, over the course of six movies, she has accumulated experiences that are real to her, specific to her. In Retribution, the ​“daughter” (Aryana Engineer) of one of the (other) Alice clones attaches herself to our Alice, thinking she’s her mother. When the pair stumble upon a massive factory packed with Alice clones, the shaken girl asks, ​“You’re my mommy, aren’t you?” To which our Alice responds, ​“I am now.” 

The ​“now” – in contrast to the ​“then” of origins and telos, and reminiscent of gameplay’s action-oriented, present-tense immediacy – is the guiding aesthetic principle of The Final Chapter, which departs from previous entries in its blistering editing. Images whip by so fast that we can barely process them, viscerally reinforcing the idea that being and identity are mutable, dynamically made and remade along the leading edge of a continuously unfolding present. 

“My work is not done,” says Alice in voiceover as she motorbikes down a desert highway in the final scene. And then the famous words, recited across multiple films: ​“My name is Alice.” Ongoingness and identity, invoked in tandem; at the series’ close, the road lies open.