Film / Resident Evil Film Series

aka: Resident Evil

The Resident Evil Film Series is a series of live-action Action Horror films based on the video games of the same name. Most of them were directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, and they all star Milla Jovovich (who married Anderson sometime after the first film). It includes the following films:

• Resident Evil (2002)
• Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
• Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
• Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
• Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
• Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2017)

These films shouldn't be confused with the animated films Resident Evil: Degeneration, Resident Evil: Damnation, and Resident Evil: Vendetta. Degeneration, Damnation, and Vendetta explicitly follow the canon of the games; these live-action films integrate parts of the video game canon, but follow their own unique continuity.

A Continuity Reboot of the films, titled Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, was released in 2021. The film also takes place in its own continuity separate from the games, but is said to be Truer to the Text by specifically being a direct adaptation of the stories of the first two games.

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This movie series contains examples of:

• Adaptational Curves:
  • Inverted for Chris Redfield in Resident Evil: Afterlife. While Wentworth Miller is obviously no beanpole, by this point in the games Chris had gained what can best be described as a "boulder punching physique" that his film counterpart lacks.
  • Also inverted for Jill, Claire, and Ada, who aren't as curvaceous in the films as they are in the games.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse:
    • The film turns game villain Nicholai Ginovaef into a good guy.
    • Nemesis from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis was basically The Terminator: merciless, unkillable, and hell-bent on killing Jill, and with Combat Tentacles and a nasty case of chapped lip to sweeten the deal. Here, Nemesis was once Matt Addisen, pulls a Heel–Face Turn and has a Heroic Sacrifice when Alice gets through to him.
  • In Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Dr. James Marcus only developed the T-Virus to treat his daughter, and as soon as things went wrong he wanted to shut it all down. In the games, Dr. Marcus was obsessed with his research and he had no issues using unwilling test subjects for his experiments.
• After the End: Starting from Extinction, the world has become a hellscape infested by T-Virus and ran amok by mutants and zombies. Not only had the infrastructure collapsed completely, but strangely enough, lakes and rivers dried out as well, transforming nealy an entire planet into a desert devoid of life.
• Air-Vent Passageway:
  • In Resident Evil, after leaving the Red Queen's chamber the 2nd time, at one point the surviving team members go through air vents to evade the zombies.
  • In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Alice escapes Nemesis via a random spacious disposal chute.
  • In Resident Evil: Extinction, one of the Alice clones jumps into an air vent to escape a replica of the Laser Grid deathtrap from the first movie.
• Anyone Can Die: The films just as bad as the video games. By the end of Resident Evil: Extinction, the only important characters still alive are Alice, Claire, and Wesker. And then Wesker died at the end of Afterlife. He got better somehow, but still. He's finally put down for good in The Final Chapter, though the movie novelization hints at his possible survival.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • In Resident Evil, the Red Queen explains that zombification works by exploiting the cellular activity that continues after death, supporting the idea by stating that hair and nails continue to grow after death. No, they don't.
  • When Major Cain tries to persuade Alice to cooperate with Umbrella in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, she calls herself a freak. Cain's reply? "No. You're not mutation, you're evolution!". If Alice were to breed and pass on her mutation, then it would be evolution.
  • Resident: Evil Extinction goes so far as to have most of the world's water supplies go dry due to a virus. It apparently infected and killed the water. For your own sake, don't try thinking too hard about this.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • Resident Evil:
    • Subverted when one of the soldiers is trapped by the zombies and considers killing himself to avoid becoming a zombie. However, he instead decides to keep fighting, escapes, and eventually saves the rest of the group.
    • Near the end when Rain Ocampo asks Alice to kill her rather than let her turn into a zombie. She then appears to die and Alice prepares to shoot her...only for the still alive Rain to snatch the gun away "I'm not dead yet." Ultimately, no one gets the chance to shoot her and she does become a zombie.
  • Subverted in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, where the Corrupt Corporate Executive villain is cornered by zombies — he tries to shoot his way out, and when that fails, he puts his gun to his head... to find that it's empty. Cue ghastliness.
• Big Bad: The Umbrella Corporation is the source of everything bad that happens, with each movie having an individual main antagonist working for Umbrella:
• Company Town: Raccoon City was this in the films, built and owned by the Umbrella Corporation.
• The Computer Is Your Friend:
  • The supercomputer Red Queen from Resident Evil tries to shut down the laboratory to stop the t-Virus outbreak by locking everyone inside to prevent escape (as well as flooding the laboratories, stopping the elevators and killing everyone with Halon gas, and releasing a nerve gas that led the heroine to develop amnesia). Although one could take this as being The Extremist Was Right, the fact that she knew there was a 50% chance of an anti-virus curing the infection, not warning the researchers of the outbreak, who could have cultivated the anti-virus and saved everyone, and not reporting to Umbrella who themselves wouldn't have sent in the research team which inadvertently led to the virus being released into the outside world leading to several more horrible sequels, makes this a moot point. In addition, her attempts to kill all the researchers rather than isolate them somewhere in the facility only served to spread the infection further. It also doesn't help that her holographic avatar is a fuzzy red-tinted Creepy Child and that her name, Red Queen is a mistaken reference to the Queen of Hearts (not the Red Queen from "Through The Looking Glass"), whose impulsive and demanding behavior leads to the detriment of her followers.
  • However, this is completely averted by the White Queen in the sequel who lacks the cold malevolent nature of her red counterpart, and tries to impede the Big Bad Wannabe's progress despite previously assisting him in monitoring Alice and her clones to gain control of the situation.
• Cure for Cancer: The T-Virus was created to fix nerve damage, regenerate limbs and cure diseases. Unfortunately, it worked a little too well, causing those infected to continue moving long after death.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: The MegaCorp Umbrella Corporation should have been making enough legitimate profit as the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world to not need to take the risk of creating bioweapons. One of the films tries to justify the zombie creation virus by saying that Umbrella Corporation was working on a skin creme that reanimated dead skin cells (as a beauty treatment)... except when they tested it, it turned the test subjects into zombies. Instead of scrapping the research, they kicked it to bioweapons, and thus... zombies as weapons. By the time later sequels roll around, Umbrella's business model has taken a hard swing into full-blown Stupid Evil, spending untold billions upon billions of dollars on exact replicas of major cities, stocked with perfect clones of people implanted with false memories, for the sake of unleashing their bioweapons on them and showing footage of the destruction to potential buyers. Not only could any of these technological wonders have made them fantastically wealthy on its own, but by this point in the story there's not enough political and economic stability in the world for any possible buyers to even exist anymore. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter makes it clear that the higher-ups of the Corporation, just like their video game counterparts, were just looking to become god-like all along and the world-wide extinction-level Zombie Apocalypse was the means to an end (they were even cryogenically frozen while it all happened). Still doesn't excuse the Stupid Evil of the people on lower levels such as the clone of Dr. Isaacs, though.
• Cyborg: Alice appears to be this, post-Resident Evil: Apocalypse, at once point in Resident Evil: Extinction being remotely shut down. Nemesis also appears to be some sort of cyborg, with his POV being shown in a blue-tinted robo-vision.
• Decomposite Character:
  • The films splits Big Bad Albert Wesker’s role from the games up, while Wesker himself keeps his Smug Super qualities all the actual Evil Genius attributes are given to Dr Alexander Isaacs the real antagonist while Wesker is Demoted to Dragon.
  • Also while Canon Foreigner Alice was a Composite Character character of Jill and Claire originally, the latter two appear in later films, making them examples of this. Jill and Claire’s story importance and Action Girl moments are given to Alice (who even gets superpowers like Jill) while they become Adaptational Wimps and are Demoted to Extra.
• Demoted to Extra: The films end up doing this to most game characters in favor of their own. At best, they end up as sidekicks (Jill Valentine is still a semi-main character in Resident Evil: Apocalypse) and at worst, they're truly reduced to extras (Badass Normals Carlos and Nicholai each get a bridge dropped on them, in the case of the latter with absolutely no fanfare).
• Devoured by the Horde:
  • Subverted in Resident Evil. At one point J.D. (one of the Umbrella commandos) is pulled into an elevator and attacked by a group of zombies. However, when he turns up later on as a zombie he is almost completely whole, so the zombies just infected him with the T-virus and didn't eat him.
  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse:
    • When sent to find a child named Angela in a school full of infected children and dogs, Terri runs into an infected child and she's quickly surrounded by the other children and she's eaten alive.
    • Cain puts his gun to his head when he's surrounded by the zombies. Unfortunately for him, he's out of ammo and he gets eaten alive, among the zombies includes Dr. Ashford who Cain killed earlier and he gets the first bite.
• Easy Amnesia:
  • In Resident Evil, both Alice and Spence Parks lose their memories of their past lives as a side effect of being rendered unconscious by sleep gas. They regain at least some of their memories by the end of the movie.
  • In Resident Evil: Afterlife, Clair now has amnesia but is slowly regaining memories as the plot advances. Presumably everybody fitted with the control bug also don't have a clue who they are, were they are, or what's going on.
• Elaborate Underground Base:
  • Resident Evil takes place in a massive laboratory hidden underneath Raccoon City. To help with the claustrophobia the walls have a city skyline on them and are covered by blinds.
  • In Resident Evil: Extinction, Umbrella has moved all their staff to secured underground facilities due to the Zombie Apocalypse.
• Escaped from the Lab: Alice wakes up in a lab at the end of the first film and escapes without too much difficulty due to a Zombie Apocalypse having taken place while she was comatose. Later in the film series, she breaks into an Umbrella Corp lab so she can suit up an army of Alice clones.
• Evil, Inc.: Umbrella Corporation. Never one to miss a chance to accidentally unleash a Zombie Apocalypse, Umbrella can always be counted to pick the most dickish of dick moves over anything else. Then the final movie reveals that they intentionally unleashed the T-virus, so that they could rule the post-apocalyptic world after the rest of humanity is decimated.
• Evilutionary Biologist: The Umbrella Corporation has shades of this. They started out as just making biological weapons, but upon discovering the zombies the virus created may have useful properties they began conducting super soldier experiments with the same virus. One of the scientists becomes infected himself, overdoses on the vaccine, and turns into a zombie/human/something else hybrid and declares himself the next evolutionary step.
• Eye Scream:
  • Resident Evil had the laser trap room when the laser turns into a grid showing an extreme close up of a guy's eye followed by a delayed Diagonal Cut through it as he falls apart into cubed chunks.
  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse, subverts this near the end, after the movie's main plot ends. Alice is taken back by the Umbrella scientists and seems to have no memory, so one of the scientists condescends and shows Alice how his pen works. Alice then regains her memory in a flash and nearly gouges out the eye of one scientist with the pen. But instead of actually gouging out his eye, she merely beats the crap out of him instead.
  • In Resident Evil: Extinction, the villain, The Tyrant, uses his mutant arm to gouge out both eyes of one of the lab coat mooks who just realised the good villain was turning mutie.
• Fan Disservice:
  • Towards the end of Resident Evil, Matt finally loses his shirt. He has a vest on underneath but still looks damn good in it. Immediately afterwards, however, he is mauled by the Licker and the resulting wounds... would've looked much less gross if he'd kept the shirt on.
  • In Resident Evil: Extinction: L.J is attacked by a female infected zombie, who had an exposed rotting breast.
• Fast-Roping:
  • In Resident Evil, the soldiers do this while entering the mansion (smashing through the windows as they do so). It's in the trailer here, at about 0:40. Why they decided to go up on the roof first is never explained, but it was clearly Rule of Cool.
  • Umbrella soldiers in the Action Prologue of Resident Evil: Retribution rappel out of Osprey tilt-rotors onto the deck of the Aurora, looking especially cool as they're wearing Badass Longcoats and are led by Jill Valentine firing Guns Akimbo machine-pistols.
• Fetal Position Rebirth: Alice in the first three movies. In the first one, it's where she's knocked out when fumes come into the shower. In the second film she's being resurrected (or cloned, hard to tell) at the end. In the third one, there's hundreds of clones of her, all in the fetal position in water bubble suspension things. Naturally, she's bare-ass naked in all of these, and while her hands do hide her bits, she always moves them by the time the scene is over.
• Fingore:
  • In Resident Evil, one of the minor characters gets part of his hand (including fingers) sliced off by a deadly laser trap.
  • In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Alice breaks her finger and has to snap it back into place.
• Guns Akimbo:
  • Alice wields almost everything akimbo. Over the course of the series, she wields semi-auto handguns, revolvers, sub-machine guns, and even sawed-off shotguns akimbo (she does have enhanced strength though). Even when forced into melee combat, she swaps over to Dual Wielding fighting batons or kukri knives!
  • In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Carlos wields a pair of Desert Eagles, LJ wields a pair of gold-plated Desert Eagles, and Jill Valentine uses guns akimbo briefly as well. These are all trumped however by the monstrous Nemesis, who wields a chaingun and rocket launcher akimbo.
  • In Resident Evil: Retribution, Jill Valentine fires two Skorpion machine pistols while Fast-Roping out the back of an Osprey gunship, which leaves one wondering how she manages to brake her descent.
• I Own This Town: The Umbrella Corporation owns Raccoon City and has so much clout that it's able to completely block the town off and then nuke it without any repercussions. It's only after our heroes expose them that their influence wanes but by then it's The End of the World as We Know It.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The films follow a standard naming convention, with the film's title followed by a one-word subtitle (beginning with the second movie). Each subtitle actually seems to follow from the previous one in some way: Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife and Retribution.
• Just Desserts:
  • In Resident Evil, the male security operative who released the T-virus inside the facility is killed and partially eaten by the Licker monster.
  • The Big Bad of Resident Evil: Apocalypse gets devoured alive by a bunch of zombies.
  • In Resident Evil: Afterlife, Bennet is eaten by Wesker.
  • In Resident Evil: Retribution, Alice feeds Bad!Rain to the zombies during the climax.
• Leg Focus: In the first film, the camera is down low on Alice's body to view her legs. In the second film, in Jill Valentine's introduction, we get a very nice close-up on her legs. In the fifth film, we have Ada. Leon couldn't even resist putting his hand on her leg.
• May Contain Evil: The "Regenerate" product seen in the adverts for the films, being made by the giant evil organization.
• Mood Motif: The films tend to invoke electric guitar when Alice is kicking ass.
• Nebulous Evil Organisation: The Umbrella Corporation seem to do little more than make Super-Soldier zombies for no apparent reason... even After the End. The final film reveals that they're deliberately trying to scour the Earth clear so they and their rich allies can inherit the world for themselves.
• No Zombie Cannibals: The manual states that zombies chew on the living because they hunger for life, rather than flesh. They last for decades before decaying, with food or without.
• Not a Zombie:
  • Resident Evil:
    • There's an entire sequence where the Umbrella soldiers confront a horde of zombies, who they think are just survivors gone crazy; while most of the zombies look perfectly normal outside the shambling, there are a few with clearly broken bones and blatantly gaping wounds. One of the soldiers encounters a single zombie beforehand and gives several warnings before firing.
      Soldier: Stay down. I'm warning you, stay down! Come any closer, and I'll fire. I mean it! [shoots the zombie 5 times]
    • There's a scene where a guy turns round and sees his sister. At first glance, she looks just a bit worse for wear... until she tries to chomp on his neck.
  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse takes it to its logical extreme. When the city itself finally gets its first wave of zombies, the cops start arresting them getting bitten repeatedly in the process!
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The fims never use the word zombie, instead opting for "infected". This doesn't make much sense because, although the games have a wide variety of non-zombie enemies, the movies only have zombies of various stages (except for Tyrants and Crows).
• Offscreen Teleportation:
  • Every single movie is guilty of this, going as far as having them appear in rooms that have no visible entrance other than the one the character used. Possibly, this could be chalked up as a reference to the games.
  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse is guilty of this. Small mobs of zombies will appear right behind a protagonist where no zombies had been before. It's especially annoying, considering that these zombies cannot move stealthily at all, and one should be able to hear a group of them shuffling, shoving, and moaning as they approach. In addition, good guys and bad guys surprise each other by instantaneously appearing in the cramped confines of the same helicopter at different times, despite the impossibility of sneaking in undetected.
• One Last Smoke:
  • In Resident Evil: Extinction, Carlos's Heroic Sacrifice finishes with him finding a cigarette and lighting up while the camera pans out, showing his vehicle surrounded by zombies.
  • In Resident Evil: Retribution, we have Barry lighting up a cigar right before he gets killed.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Every zombie, as they are plague-bearing and flesh-eating.
• Le Parkour:
  • Alice uses this at times.
  • In Resident Evil: Afterlife, Claire runs up a wall (in a wet bathroom!) to evade the Executioner.
• Phlebotinum Rebel:
  • Firstly Alice falls under this trope. Biogenetically engineered into a supersoldier who then proceeds to turn against Umbrella.
  • Also Nemesis follows the same path in Resident Evil: Apocalypse after almost being killed by Alice. He rediscovers his former humanity and also fights back against Umbrella.
• Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Umbrella Corporation decides to quarantine Raccoon City as the T-Virus escapes the Hive. As a priority, they evacuate Umbrella VIPs when the zombies reach the blockade, then start shooting everything in sight. In the first film, The Hive's security instantly locks down the entire facility and kills everyone inside to contain the T-Virus... Even though a self-contained, sealed air circulation system could have done the same thing with a far smaller losses of personnel and equipment (Umbrella is infamously Stupid Evil in both the movie and video game continuities, but are even worse about it in the films).
• Restart the World: This turns out to be Umbrella's plan: use the T-Virus to wipe out humanity while their chosen survivors ride it out in cold sleep, then re-emerge to rebuild the world in their image.
• Safe Zone Hope Spot:
  • In Resident Evil: Extinction, the plot is partially driven by Alice finding an old notebook that indicates that the virus that killed off the planet itself is unable to travel north to Alaska. Claire Redfield takes the remaining survivors in a helicopter in that direction at the end of the film, but it isn't shown whether or not it was true.
  • In Resident Evil: Afterlife, Alice arrives at the aforementioned coordinates in Alaska that she found on Extinction, only to discover that Arcadia, the so-called safe haven where survivors are supposed to have gathered, is in fact a trap laid by the Big Bad.
• Send in the Search Team:
  • Resident Evil featured a team of commandos searching an underground laboratory to find out why the AI in control of the facility killed everyone.
  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse saw Umbrella send in a second team to find out what happened to the first team. That went so badly it kicked off a zombie apocalypse within five minutes.
• Sequel Escalation: In the first movie, the T virus was confined to the Hive. In the second movie, it had spread to all of Raccoon City. In the third movie, it infected the entire world, and there are tougher and faster Super Undead.
• Sequel Hook:
  • Resident Evil ends as Alice wakes up to find Raccoon City ravaged by a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse ends on the prospect of Dr. Isaacs having control over her similar to the Nemesis.
  • Resident Evil: Extinction shows Alice waking up an army of clones and vowing revenge on Umbrella.
  • Resident Evil: Afterlife has Jill, in her battlesuit, along with a squadrop of Umbrella VTOLs.
  • Resident Evil: Retribution ends with Wesker injecting the T-Virus back into Alice, and Wesker tells Alice, Jill, Ada, and Leon that the Red Queen has declared an all-out war on humanity, and that this is the last stand.
• Sequel Non-Entity:
  • At the end of Apocalypse, Jill, Carlos, L.J., and Angela rescue Alice before driving away from the Umbrella facility. In Extinction, Alice, Carlos, and L.J. return, but not Jill and Angela, whose whereabouts are unknown. That is, unless you read the novelization, where it is revealed that a mind-controlled Alice was forced to kill Angela by Umbrella. Jill finally returns in The Stinger of Afterlife and becomes a major player in Retribution.
  • K-Mart and Chris and Claire Redfield were there in the ending of Afterlife but are completely absent from Retribution. Even though both movies end and start with the same showdown on the battleship Arcadia, the reverse-action in the opening scene glosses over it enough to hope you don't notice, and no-one seems to mention them again. Claire eventually returns in the final film, The Final Chapter, but she doesn't say anything about Chris or K-Mart. The novelization states that Claire lost contact with Chris because he was taken in a different helicopter during the attack on the Arcadia, though she believes that he is still alive. K-Mart, though, seems to have disappeared from the faces of the earth.
  • In fact, The Final Chapter only features Alice and Claire among the returning characters last seen alive. The badass Last Stand that the characters from the games were about to make in the ending of Retribution is quickly resolved in the sixth film, which opens with a ruined Washington D.C.. Again, this is explained in the novelization: Jill, Leon, and Ada all bit the dust during the last stand, while Alice managed to save Becky and take her to a safe place.
• Shot Guns Are Just Better: The survivors make liberal use of shotguns and any other weapons to combat the Zombie Apocalypse.
  • In Resident Evil: Afterlife, Alice wields two shotguns that use quarters as ammo. They pretty much shred anything they shoot.
  • In Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Alice wields a powerful triple-barreled shotgun, a homage to the Hydra from the video games.
• Signature Line: "A virus escaped. Everybody died. Trouble was...they didn't stay dead". Starting from the second film onwards, Alice gives a recap of everything that happened in the prior films, and she always drops this or some variant of the line referencing the events of the first film.
• Sinister Scraping Sound:
  • In Resident Evil, the arrival of the first zombie is preceded by the scraping noise made by the fire axe it's dragging along. Watch it here.
• Stab the Scorpion:
  • In Resident Evil, the Red Queen offers to provide a code to let the party escape a lab they're trapped in if they kill Rain Ocampo, who's infected with the T-virus. Rain kneels down and orders the others to accept the deal and kill her by cutting her head off with a fire axe. As she and the Red Queen shout for Alice to do so, Alice raises the axe high in the air and... hits the television monitor the Red Queen is shouting through, cutting her off, and refuses to kill Rain.
  • Used in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, where a STARS sniper with several redneck attributes is shooting zombies from his rooftop position. L.J., a black man, comes into his view and obliviously attempts to open a deserted car, while the sniper takes aim at his head and fires...to hit another zombie directly behind L.J.
• Stupid Evil: The Umbrella Corporation in the film series seems to live and breathe this. The company's actions are geared entirely towards nothing more than propagating the existence of a deadly, uncontrollable virus that has no discernible practical applications.
  • Particularly by the third film, wherein the whole planet has been reduced to an arid desert by the Zombie Apocalypse (somehow) and money no longer matters to the roving bands of survivors. Yet Umbrella keeps making new strains of the T-Virus to sell to… actually, the films never explain who they hope will buy the damn thing. It could at least be shakily justified in the previous films by concluding that, as in the games, Umbrella planned to sell the virus to bioterrorists, insurrectionists, or even warring nations, but who's left at this point? And even if such parties did still exist, who would want to Take Over the World in its current state? They do explain at one point that they intend to refine the virus so that it can turn those that are already zombies into something resembling domesticated workhorses and stop them from eating people, which makes some sense. However, they are far too incompetent to ever pull that off.
  • In a film series full of evil Umbrella leaders, Dr. Isaacs probably takes the cake in terms of this Trope. His obsession with Alice leads to him disobeying direct orders from Wesker to leave her be and falsifying orders of his own to release (already pretty scarce, both because of general wasting and his lousy experimentation method) resources in order to hunt her down, which leads eventually to the destruction of the only other Umbrella facility in North America (and to not mention constantly cloning Alice and leading the clones into an endless massacre of a Death Course, which not only provides an immense number of cadavers that (being improperly disposed of) leads to the Umbrella facility being surrounded by a humongous swarm of zombies but doesn't really seems to be of any use other than Isaacs' sick amusement). When the original Dr. Isaacs appears in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, he turns out to be both this (because he's the one leading the little plot twist mentioned below) and a Smug Super, to boot. This also gets him killed — he decides to keep his entire focus on Alice without thinking what the clone Isaacs he just told is an Expendable Clone would do as a response to that bombshell being dropped on him.
  • The premise of Resident Evil: Retribution involves Umbrella perfectly recreating sections of major cities in underground facilities, cloning large numbers of humans, and implanting them with false memories of living in a real city — all for the sake of infecting the mini-city with the T-Virus and showing the footage to potential buyers. Not only would all three of the steps taken cost Umbrella more money to pull off than they could ever hope to make off selling the virus, but any one of these innovations would make Umbrella rich if they didn't waste them on furthering their T-Virus initiative. And again, it's worth reminding they're still running these experiments and demonstrations for no clear reason.
  • And then it turns out in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter that, not unlike the original game series, they produced the T-Virus and funded all of the crazy stuff that had appeared throughout the series (genocidal Artificial Intelligences, a virus with the capacity to destroy the world, cloning technology, cryogenics) in an attempt to take out mankind and have it be reborn for the corporation's executives to lord over as "gods." Considering how much crazy tech they had going around, they could have probably managed to rule as gods over a populated Earth instead of a Death World. Their plan also involves freezing themselves in a place that could very easily be turned into zombie chow. It says a lot that Umbrella's CEO (who was the woman that Alice was cloned from) was not OK with the plan at all, so they froze her unwillingly so they would have free reign to execute it, and she accepted Alice's Roaring Rampage of Revenge as justice even if it meant getting killed herself.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome:
  • Resident Evil: Extinction did this twice. First, LJ gets bitten by zombie and eventually turns and gets killed by Carlos. Carlos, however, gets bitten by LJ before killing him, and he later performs one hell of a Heroic Sacrifice so he doesn't turn into a zombie.
  • Resident Evil: Afterlife killed off all of the Alice clones found at the end of the third film in the first ten minutes.
  • Resident Evil: The Final Chapter kills everyone besides Alice and Claire Redfield.
• Third-Option Adaptation: Rather than focusing on any of the canon characters from the game series, the films are centred around a new character named Alice. Though she interacts with characters and situations from the games, it's clear that the movies are Alice's show, and the rest are just along for the ride. This allows the movies to take many liberties and diverge significantly from the game canon.
• Unnaturally Blue Lighting: Resident Evil uses a noticeable blue tint, particularly in the "laser corridor" sequence. The sequels use different color filters, but Apocalypse and Extinction both reapply the blue filter for scenes that reference/flash back to the first film.
• We Just Need to Wait for Rescue:
  • In Resident Evil, the group is trapped in a room by the zombies.
    Spence: So we wait. If someone doesn't hear from you, they'll send backup or something. Right? What? What's wrong?
    Rain Ocampo: We don't have much time. You know those blast doors we passed on the way in from the mansion? They seal shut in just under an hour. If we're not out of here by then, we're not getting out.
    Spence: What are you talking about? They can't just bury us alive down here.
    Rain Ocampo: Containing the incident is the only fail-safe plan they had against possible contamination.
  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse has S.T.A.R.S. member Peyton insisting that the survivors should find the most fortified building possible and hunker down to wait for rescue, but Alice shoots it down by mentioning that what Umbrella Corporation will do in response to the outbreak is to perform a ''total sterilization" of the city.
• What a Drag:
  • In Resident Evil, the monster that attacks the heroes in the train falls through a trap door in the floor and is dragged to death by its tongue along an electrified track while bursting into flames.
  • Resident Evil: The Final Chapter:
    • Dr. Isaacs has Alice shackled to the back of his tank and forced to run to keep up with it and avoid the horde of zombies chasing it. She eventually manages to catch up to the tank and jump on, then free herself and escape.
    • Dr. Isaacs does the same thing to another unfortunate woman. She manages to remain running until the tank reaches its destination, but Isaacs sadistically frees her and lets her try to run away from the zombies before shooting her in the back.
    • After the survivors defeat the tank, they shackle a mook behind the tank and force him to run.
• What Happened to Mommy?:
  • Resident Evil had this happen with Rain, who turns at the absolute worst moment. Admittedly, though, in this version there was a cure, and it had been administered on Rain. It was just given to her too late.
  • There was also a priest in Resident Evil: Apocalypse whose sister had been bitten. His solution was tying her up so she couldn't hurt him, and then killing people to feed and nourish her. By the third movie, we find out the bit where he fed her was pointless as zombies don't actually require the meat they devour. Of course, how was he supposed to know that?
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Angela Ashford, the little girl who was at the center of the plot in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, vanishes with nary a mention by the third film.
  • Jill Valentine was also in the same boat as Angela until she reappeared in Resident Evil: Afterlife. However, neither she, Leon, Becky or Ada were worth being spoken about again after the Bolivian Army Ending they were given in Resident Evil: Retribution.
  • Chris, Claire and K-Mart were captured by Umbrella at the end of Resident Evil: Afterlife. Claire was later shown to have escaped in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, but she didn't bother to let anyone know what became of Chris and K-Mart.
• The White House:
  • The novelization of Resident Evil: Extinction has a chapter set in the White House where an angry President threatens to shutdown Umbrella Corporation for good due to the T-virus and Raccoon City's nuclear destruction. The White House Chief of Staff suddenly reanimates before being shot by Secret Service agents. The White House is put on lockdown and we do not hear from them again.
  • In Resident Evil: Retribution, the White House becomes a forward operating base for the remaining U.S. military and Umbrella security forces, all led by Chairman Albert Wesker who has taken residence at the Oval Office. Wesker states that this combined resistance was humanity's Last Stand.
  • In Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Alice awakens in a bombed-out White House right after Wesker's betrayal.

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