She’s forced to go the Full Jovovich: She leaps off an impossibly high ledge into a sea of zombies below. It’s their loss: Umbrella unceremoniously lays waste to the entire group, with their head honcho (who looks a bit like a young Peter Jackson, though not quite Dead Alive-era young) cornering Jade. There, they exchange some exposition, take a gander at the zombie hordes just outside their walls, and wait for Umbrella to show up because it turns out Jade has a bounty on her head, and the scavengers are willing to collect. Jade doesn’t escape the beast she’s knocked out, then saved at the last minute by a band of scavengers, who helicopter her from destroyed London to a base they’ve set up in Brighton. He comes across as nerdy - his daughters rattle off a list of his mild-mannered attributes - but he’s a far more refined form of menace than the cartoonish Smith-from- The Matrix form he took in the movies.īack in 2036, Jade has been detected and chased by a horde of zombies before she burns them up with an actual ring of fire - and accidentally awakens a beautiful, horrible, rainbow-colored giant caterpillar-looking creature, resulting in one of those fantastic shots where the camera follows the cracking (or in this case, popping) ground as it pursues a running protagonist. But when Wesker is called in for a conference at the school after Billie is accused of exacting violent revenge against her new bully, he flexes the power of his Umbrella Corporation status, quietly threatening to ruin the life of the bully’s father and extracting a “mental health day” for Billie. The Weskers’ surname will set off alarm bells of whatever Resident Evil series: Albert Wesker is a major villain in both the games and the films, which squares with the fact that the wonderful Lance Reddick is probably better known for genre fare than his work playing sensitive fathers.Īt first, Wesker seems a bit outmatched by his family situation: Jade, the more confrontational of the two sisters, resists everything about their move, while Billie (who shares both her first name and a general sense of style with the current musical superstar) struggles with a checkered past related to her anger issues, which Jade seems determined to goad her into expressing more directly.
The real jolt comes when the premiere first jumps back in time, as a teenage Jade (Jada Smart), her sister Billie (Siena Agudong), and their father, Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick), roll into New Raccoon City, sort of a planned community, bathed in blindingly white tones, built around the South African outpost of the Umbrella Corporation, a pharmaceutical giant working on a drug called Joy.
Nor, come to think of it, have the virus evolutions we’ve experienced so far.) In the meantime, it only takes a single bunny to activate the senses of a rampaging zombie horde.Īs bad as it looks out there, there’s a surprising current of domesticity when Jade video-chats with her family, promising them she’ll be careful out there and head back home soon - a far cry from the hopelessness of the movies. (In past Resident Evils, those evolutions have not been especially lucky. Their brains are “rewired” to feed and spread the virus, and while the COVID-19 echoes here are faint, the clearest one comes in Jade’s spoken hope that “if we’re lucky, it’ll get weaker,” and those infected with the virus will evolve. But she’s actually observing “zeroes,” the major carriers of the T-virus who are not, she later notes, the living dead. She has the dutiful vibe of 12 Monkeys-style sample-collecting on a dead surface, keeping her ear quite literally to the ground to stay aware of her surroundings. Jade (Ella Balinska), like Milla Jovovich’s Alice before her, is a solo traveler through this ruined world, though she never fires two guns while jumping through the air. But most of those movies take place in some wasteland, to the point where the show beginning in 2036, “14 years after the end,” feels reassuringly familiar. In some ways, this isn’t so different from the arc of the movies, which went from a mostly-contained virus outbreak to a poor man’s Mad Max over the course of six films and 15 years.
RESIDENT EVIL TIMELIME SERIES
Apocalypse or post-apocalypse? Prequel or hit the ground running? Action or horror? These are among the questions that the new Resident Evil TV series on Netflix answers with a resounding “why not both?” The zombie-centric video game franchise has been turned into a live-action film series, an animated direct-to-video film series, and some erratically released comics now, it’s attempting something more narratively ambitious than any of the movies, at least, cutting back and forth between 2022, shortly before a worldwide zombie plague decimated humanity, and 2036, when the global population has been vastly reduced–though the zombie population remains robust.
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