Review of Resident Evil Retribution

I am not a fan of the horror genre nor have I played the X Box games yet nevertheless the film series appealed to me. I enjoyed the fantasy of one hero – a woman no less, to subvert the stereotype – standing up against a powerful organisation, being strong in a crumbling, apocalyptic world full of zombies.  The fifth instalment, Resident Evil Retribution, continues to show Alice as a bad-ass, leather-clad fighter as she guns her way out of ‘the belly of the beast’, the heart of the Umbrella Corporation.

Whilst Alice is a prisoner, the audience are taken back to the end of the previous film in a flash back that is uniquely presented; slow motion, rewinding action and 3D glasses make the opening aesthetically awesome. The scene then jumps to an alternate Alice, a clone, in a suburban lifestyle, where she has soft brown hair and a deaf daughter who appears ironically as the Red Queen who is a hologram manipulating the biological fallout of the T virus. The contrast between the maternal Alice and the violent Alice just goes to prove women are capable of everything! The mission is very much the same as the mission from the first resident evil movie: our heroes are trapped in an underground, isolated facility (this time under the ice), with one exit on the other side of an army of zombies, with a timer ticking down to an explosion. Despite how this could have been repetitive, I thought it served as a nostalgic reminder of what Resident Evil is really about.

Alice’s escape is aided by five handsome men, one of whom is a friendly face, and though it could be said this only forces Alice into the role of a damsel, the group are slowly killed off and in fact need her help to fight off skeleton-like zombies. I didn’t like how they unconventionally used guns as I believe that should be past their capabilities.

Very much like a computer game, Alice and her friends reach checkpoints by fighting their way through three environments, realistic models of Tokyo, New York and Moscow, which were originally created as testing areas to show the effects of the T virus. Zombies and mutant-monsters are the Red Queen’s obstacles. Spider-robots force Alice’s former friends to hunt her. However, Alice has survived so far with the weight of the world on her shoulders; being the Umbrella Corporation’s personal lab rat, she has the power and the motivation to rebel. Humanity needs a saviour but is it too late?  

Perhaps not a revolutionary production, I still found this an enjoyable film, especially in 3D. There were jumpy moments, plenty of action and touching emotional scenes. I can’t wait to discover what else is in store for Project Alice and, more significantly, what she has in store for us.