Resident Evil Review: A Promising Journey With a Disappointing End

Resident Evil Review – 「Listen to it」

Spoiler Warning

Before I begin, I'd like to say that the following contains spoilers, so if you want to watch the movie, I insist that you don't read any further. Even so, I’ll do my best to omit some major events so I don’t totally ruin the experience for anyone who wants to see it anyway.

The Outbreak Begins

Austin Abrams stars as a regular guy who loves gaming and works as a medical courier. As he’s making a delivery while driving through the snow, he hits a woman. While some would've just kept going, he checks to see if the woman is okay. Seeing that she's still alive, he takes her into his car, hoping to bring her somewhere for help. He gets stopped and, somehow, it culminates into him shooting the zombie-looking woman to escape—or so he thinks. Hoping to get help, he stumbles upon a farmhouse and battles the owner’s mutated dog. Afterwards, thinking it’s safe, he makes himself at home. He relaxes and finds some cereal to enjoy.

Then, just as a sense of normalcy returns for a moment, he looks out a window and realizes that the zombie woman is running toward the house. After the ordeal, he escapes and makes a run for it, ramming through the fence with the homeowner's car.

While making a run for it, he comes across an ominous trailer settlement. Although he's hesitant, he enters and cautiously looks around. As he searches for other people, he encounters a girl who appears to be around 12 years old, I’d say. She, too, is hypermutating. Because he’s so trusting, he lets his guard down and falls victim to the infected girl. Unfortunately, she bites him, exposing him to the agent that will eventually turn him into a monster. He realizes that he’ll eventually turn into a zombie as well. After escaping the girl, he meets two employees from the Umbrella Corporation, the main company or organization responsible for the outbreak, and learns more about what’s really happening. He discovers that the package he was hired to carry contains the missing formula for an antidote.

Why the Ending Disappointed Me

My disappointment with the movie isn’t the action or the character, but the fact that, in the end, the movie feels pointless. Throughout the movie, we follow this ordinary guy, cheer for him, and care about his journey, only for him to fail in the end. He turns into a monster. It doesn’t even matter if there’s going to be a plot twist in a second part. At that point, I just couldn’t help but think: Why in the world did I watch this?

The Warning Behind Hypermutation

This movie, though, has a clear warning. If humans try to change something too quickly, there’s no telling what it could do to nature. Hypermutation is actually real, and scientists are experimenting with it, although not at the level depicted in the movie. Instead, they focus on targeted genes in areas such as directed evolution, antibody research, and synthetic biology. Still, it’s pretty crazy that it actually exists. Hypermutation research is real. The movie uses hyper-evolution, but we just can’t ignore the similarities between the two.