Film / Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

Evil comes home.

"My name is Alice, and this is my story—the end... of my story."

— Alice, from the international trailer

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is the sixth and, according to writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson, final installment of the Resident Evil Film Series. Anderson returns to the director's chair for the fourth time in the series, and Milla Jovovich returns as Alice, the central character of the series.

After the events of Retribution, Alice and a handful of fellow survivors have become humanity's last hope of survival. And that hope is running dim, as the Umbrella Corporation plans to wipe out whatever life is left on Earth. Alice's only chance to stop Umbrella once and for all lies in the heart of the company's last remaining stronghold: The Hive, still operational beneath the ruins of Raccoon City.

The film also stars Iain Glen as Dr. Alexander Isaacs, Ali Larter as Claire Redfield, Shawn Roberts as Albert Wesker, Eoin Macken as Doc, Ruby Rose as Abigail and William Levy as Christian.

The film was released in Japan in December 2016 and the United States in January 2017.

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Resident Evil: The Final Chapter provides examples of:

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Alice chops off the clone Isaacs' left hand with a combat knife in a single clean cut while clinging to the side of a tank. You'd be hard-pressed to do that with an axe under ideal conditions.
• Action Girl: Alice, of course. There's also Claire, Cobalt and Abigail.
• Actually a Doombot: Dr. Isaacs was in cryostasis, so the Isaacs that died in Extinction and the one pursuing Alice in this film were mere clones.
• Adaptational Heroism: Like the games, The Final Chapter reveals one of the co-founders of the Umbrella Corporation was James Marcus, who was killed by his business partner about a decade before the Raccoon City Incident in a move to seize control of the company. However, whereas in the games he was a Mad Scientist and the Big Bad of Resident Evil 0, here he's a fairly idealistic figure who was opposed to Dr. Isaacs' plan to militarize their research and whose primary plot importance is being Alicia Marcus/Alice's father.
• Adaptational Villainy: Umbrella as whole gets this treatment with the reveal that they knowingly started a T-virus pandemic in order to reshape the world in their image, something they would never go for in the original games. In fact, in the games the whole world reshaping thing was just a delusion of one person, right before Wesker killed him.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Unfortunately they are rigged with trapdoors and a Deadly Rotary Fan.
• After the End: Ten years after the release of the T-Virus, the world has become a graveyard of ruined cities with no unmutated flora or fauna left, and mankind numbers less than 5,000 survivors spread out across the globe. Never before in the entire series have things looked so bleak.
• All Asians Know Martial Arts: The Mook Lieutenant who gives Alice the most difficulty in a one-on-one fight happens to be Asian.
• All There in the Manual: The novelization of the film by Tim Waggoner attempts to address all the plot holes and inconsistencies from the movie:
  • The apparent retcon of Charles Ashford's creation of the T-Virus being passed to James Marcus is explained as not being the same thing. Isaacs and Marcus developed the Progenitor Cell, which Dr. Ashford later refined into the T-Virus.
  • The whole "last stand" in Washington, D.C. was all a trick by Wesker to gather everyone powerful enough to be a threat to Isaacs's plan, including the remains of the U.S. military, together in one place to wipe them out. The injection Wesker gave Alice also contained a delayed substance that would remove her powers again once she killed the Umbrella commander leading the attack, Dania Cardoza, whom Wesker considered to be a rival to be eliminated. Wesker was flat out lying when he said the Red Queen was leading the attack in Retribution.
  • The novel shows the battle in D.C. on page and reveals the fate of Retribution's final cast. Leon and Ada are eaten by a giant blob monster called the Melange, Jill is stabbed by Wesker through her eye with a tentacle, which shows why Alice is so quick to seize an opportunity to get revenge on him when the Red Queen offers it, and Becky is revealed to have survived the ordeal in a safe room prior to the battle. The novelization adds an extended ending in which Alice goes back to the White House ruins to get Becky after the film's events.
  • Claire mentions that Chris was taken away from Arcadia on a different helicopter than her, and hopefully states that he's still out there somewhere. K-Mart is not mentioned, making possibly true the past official statements that she might have died in the ship's assault.
  • Wesker doesn't use his powers after being crushed by the bulkhead by the Red Queen because his enhancements are unstable and trying to use them after losing so much genetic material (blood) would kill him. In fact, crushing him to immobilize him until he bleeds out is pretty much the only way to kill him, as he's shown to be able to regenerate lost body parts up to and including having his head blown off. He says he's distributed his brain throughout his entire body so he doesn't have a weak point. When Wesker asks for help, Alicia brushes him off and reveals that Wesker will devour anyone at the first opportunity to break free (and, judging by Wesker's reaction at hearing such words, it's more or less true). However, the novel includes an epilogue where it is hinted that Wesker is still alive after all.
  • Instead of using the Pineapple Surprise to blow up Isaacs while he's still holding the antivirus vial, which seems extremely careless, Alice instead swaps the antivirus vial for a grenade when Isaacs isn't looking, and blows him up that way.
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: The Japanese release of the film uses "Don't Be Afraid" by L'arc-en-Ciel as its theme song.
• And the Adventure Continues: The antivirus cures Alice of the T-Virus instead of killing her, which leaves her free to wander the Fallen States of America. Noting that the airborne antivirus will take years to spread across the globe, she intends to speed things up and kill the remaining infected where it hasn't reached. First stop: New York.
• Apocalypse How: Class 3a. Umbrella deliberately unleashed the virus to leave Earth's infrastructure and resources intact.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: Raccoon City was nuked a decade ago, yet no one seems to have any concerns about radiation and no one exhibits radiation sickness, even after swimming in a lake that has formed in the crater of the blast. For comparison's sake, there is a lake in Russia that was formed by a nuke test in the mid-1960s that is still uninhabitably radioactive a half century later. Comparison with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both of which were thriving and radiation-free cities within a decade, is difficult as the Raccoon City blast was larger and delivered differently.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Dr. Isaacs, both versions of him, turns out to be a pretty damn good fighter and gives Alice quite a fight. This is particularly notable in the case of the clone Dr. Isaacs as there's no indication he's been enhanced by Umbrella in any way, making him the only Badass Normal in the series to give Alice major trouble in a fight.
• Awesome by Analysis: Both Alice and Dr. Isaacs do this thanks to their bio implants.
• Back from the Dead: Dr. Isaacs, last seen in Extinction, was sliced apart by lasers after becoming a T-Virus mutant. He returns in this film as one of Alice's primary antagonists, due to the previous Isaacs being a clone.
• Badass Boast:
  • Alice to the real Isaacs, after he's just delivered a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to her:
    Alice: Is that all you've got? Because if it is, I'm going to have to kill you.
  • She uses more or less the same line with some mooks earlier in the film.
• Bad Boss: The clone Isaacs kills one of his tank's crew for disobeying his orders — so far, so good. He later also slaughters the rest of them for reasons.
• Bash Brothers: The final fight has Alice and Claire double-teaming against Isaacs.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted for Alice who gets progressively more bruised and bloodied over the course of the movie, but played straight for just about everyone else; especially the women. Ten years into the worldwide Zombie Apocalypse, the world in ruins, mankind reduced to a couple thousand survivors, yet Claire for instance still has flawless skin, flawless teeth, flawless hair, and stylish, flawless clothes. Nothing she suffers before the credits roll changes anything of note about that. The sole female Red Shirt we get to see continues to look awesome even after she got chewed on by zombies and shot herself in the head.
• Behind the Black: Alice takes the antivirus up to the surface and runs about a hundred yards out into the open. She pauses for a few seconds, then drops the vial to the ground. Somehow, Isaacs is there to catch it, meaning that he was able, while severely wounded, to follow her up there, completely soundlessly and just a few seconds behind her, without her having any idea.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: A female red shirt immediately opts for a self-inflicted Boom, Headshot! instead of turning into a zombie after she's been bitten.
• Big Bad: Dr. Isaacs returns and is revealed to be the primary villain of the entire film franchise.
• Bittersweet Ending: Umbrella is finally defeated for good and the antivirus has been released. In a few years, all the mutants will be Deader than Dead. However, the planet's biosphere and ecosystems are still irrevocably destroyed, there are still a lot of lethal mutants at large for years to come, and — worst of all — there're only about 4,500 human survivors left on the whole of Earth.
• Blood from the Mouth: Wesker get this from his legs being cut off, for some reason.
• Book Ends: Alice finally returns to where the T-Virus apocalypse began: Raccoon City and the Hive. This is lampshaded in the second trailer. The movie also begins and ends with Alice narrating stuff and getting harassed by a Giant Flyer.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Alice comes across an Umbrella-branded Cool Bike that detects that she isn't Umbrella staff and zaps her. The second time she finds one, she chops off Isaac's hand and uses that on it; she immediately loses the hand, as a zombie is seen snacking on it, so she evidently figures out a workaround.
• Call-Back: As befits a Grand Finale, they pile up the references to all the past movies;
  • From the first movie, not only the signature laser hallway (the Hive is the primary location once again), but the phial of airborne antivirus is the exact same design as the one that caused all this in the first place.
  • From the second movie, Raccoon City post-nuking forms the setting of this movie, and we learn that Ashford wasn't the only doctor father ready to do anything for his daughter. Turns out Ashford was following up on Marcus's research for nearly the same reasons.
  • From the third movie, the Mad Max-like environment complete with heavy vehicles, and the return of Isaacs. And the fact that Alice can be cloned is a plot point.
  • From the fourth movie, Claire returns, the survivors holed up in a rundown Raccoon City mimic the survivors in that movie, and the fate of Arcadia is acknowledged.
  • And from the fifth movie, the fact that anyone could unknowingly be a clone is a plot point, and Umbrella is revealed to have even more elaborate underground bases unknown to our heroes, just like the Hive's hidden level.
• Car Fu: Alice's weapon in her battle against the Giant Flyer in the D.C. ruins is a surprisingly intact and fueled Humvee. That is, until she crashes it into the beast and detonates a claymore mine in its face.
• Chain Pain: Alice deals a little of this out while fighting a mutant in the Hive.
• Chase Stops at Water: Everyone jumps into a lake to escape a pack of Cerberus, and the few that fall in with them can't swim, apparently because their decayed bodies lack natural buoyancy. However, the rest of the pack just run around the edge and attack once they climb out the other side.
• Chekhov's Gun: One all the way from the first movie, with the bag of weapons and explosives left behind by the Umbrella team that responded to the original crisis being put to use by Alice.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: It's made clear from the start of the movie that Wesker betrayed Alice during their team up in D.C.
• Cliffhanger Cop Out: The previous film ended with Wesker giving Alice her powers back and her ready to fight a horde of zombies attacking D.C. alongside Ada, Leon, and Jill. This movie opens simply with the line of Wesker faking giving her powers back. He then betrayed her. Meanwhile, neither Ada, Leon, nor Jill are anywhere to be seen, and their fates go unremarked upon, with only the novelisation informing the audience that they were Killed Offscreen.
• Clone Angst: The reason Alice woke up in the first movie with no memory of who she was is because she's a clone of the real Alice. At the end of the movie, the real Alice transfers her childhood memories to Alice. Likewise the Isaacs that Alice met previously are all clones, made to think they are the original so they will have the same drive to succeed.
• Combat Tentacles: The Giant Flyer Alice fights in D.C. breaks out a whole bunch of them when it realizes it can't reach its prey with its huge pincer tail.
• Company Town: It may be a nuclear crater, but what is left of Raccoon City still falls under the control of Umbrella.
• Cool Shades: Wesker, of course.
• Crapsack World: Even moreso that in the previous films. There are less than 4,500 humans still alive on the planet as whole. Umbrella plans on wiping out all remaining settlements across the planet by sending armored vehicles to take down their defenses and their trailing armies of zombies to finish them off, and the clock is ticking. Said clock turns out to be a bluff however.
• Cyborg: The real Dr. Isaacs has computer-controlled "bio implants" to enhance his physical capabilities and reflexes. He's only slightly stronger than a Badass Normal and isn't quite at the superhuman level of Wesker or Plagas!Rain, but does have the upper hand in a fight with Claire and a de-powered Alice. He's even able to keep going after taking a grenade to the chest, but the implants don't actually "heal" him and being stabbed in the chest by his clone is enough to finish him off.
• Dead Man's Switch: Alice creates one of these during the climax, putting the armed detonator for the bombs she planted in the Hive in the hand of a dying Wesker, so his death will wipe out Umbrella for good.
  Alice: As long as you hold this, your dream of Umbrella's survival stays alive.
• Deadly Rotary Fan: Wesker uses one of these to kill the group. This results in Abigail getting shredded to Ludicrous Gibs.
• Death by Adaptation: According to the novelization, Jill, Leon and Ada, who are still alive in the games continuity, have all been killed during the D.C. siege.
• Demoted to Dragon: Even that's a stretch for Wesker for whom only his amount of screentime averts a full-blown demotion to extra. He does precisely nothing in the film except for doling out some orders from the safety of the Hive's command center and looking cool in the process.
• Did Not Think This Through: Umbrella's big masterplan is completely unfeasible by the time of the movie. They released the T-Virus to kill off humanity without damaging the infrastructure so they could Take Over the World once the storm blows over. As we were shown many times during this installment and the preceding ones, Earth's cities and factories are in ruins, the biosphere is completely destroyed, and the billions of undead monsters the virus created are perpetual-motion monsters that won't just go away no matter how long they wait, though presumably that's what they developed the antivirus for. Umbrella's top brass would've awoken in a deathworld utterly inimical to human life, and no amount of high-tech and cloning could alleviate the simple fact that they're far too few in numbers to found a new civilization.
• The Dragon: Wesker turns out to be this to Dr. Isaacs.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Wesker, who's been built up as the Big Bad of the series, ends up being upstaged by Marcus, incapacitated by an extremely mundane injury he should have been able to easily avoid with his powers, which he never even uses for some reason, and gets killed off in an extremely anticlimactic manner, without even a fight scene.
• Dutch Angle: Used briefly in the very beginning to emphasize Alice's disorientation after she crawls from the ruins of the White House where the human survivors had gathered for their Last Stand at the end of Retribution.
• Dwindling Party: Happens just like all the previous movies. Alice is able to figure out who The Mole is because of the fact that they were still alive.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The Hive, of course. But we find out it was even more elaborate than initially thought, with an entire sub-level not seen in the original movie, where Issacs, Alicia, and the rest of Umbrella's leadership is sleeping through the apocalypse.
• Enemy Mine: The Red Queen teams up with Alice to prevent the complete extinction of the human race, since her programming values the survival of the human race over the goals of Umbrella. Luckily for the Red Queen, Alice is eager to take out Umbrella for good.
• Every Bullet is a Tracer: When it's fired from a minigun, it certainly is. Averted otherwise.
• Evil Wears Black: You didn't expect Umbrella personnel to wear anything else, did you?
• Exact Time to Failure: The Red Queen synchronises Alice's watch to show the countdown till the last remaining human enclaves have been wiped out by Umbrella military forces; she has that long to get hold of a Magic Antidote that will destroy the T-Virus. This is played entirely straight even though the attack on the enclave at Racoon City takes place during the course of the movie, rather than waiting to attack at that particular time. It's somewhat justified as once the Big Bad has been killed he's no longer in a position to countermand the Red Queen's order to stop the attacks.
• Expy:
  • The Final Chapter makes the original Dr. Isaacs out to be one for Oswell E. Spencer, being the founder of Umbrella and a megalomaniac with a god complex who wants to remake the world in his image, but he gets much closer to accomplishing the goal unlike the latter. Isaacs also incorporates elements of Wesker's motivations from Resident Evil 5, being a Straw Nihilist who comes up with an elaborate plan to destroy mankind before man's wars and pollution end up doing it anyway, in order to build a better world for his chosen few to populate.
  • In a surprisingly case of Shown Their Work, Doc is essentially Neil Fisher from Resident Evil: Revelations 2, being a Reasonable Authority Figure humanitarian doctor and (as indicated in the novel) love interest of Claire's who turns out to be in league with the bad guys. Doc even looks exactly like Neil.
• Eye Scream: One of the three options for killing Isaacs Alice analyses in his office involves stabbing him in the eye with a fountain pen.
• Face Death with Dignity:
  • Alicia, who closes her eyes as the bomb on Wesker goes off and destroys the entire Hive.
  • Alice herself, who does the same when she finally drops the antivirus phial that she thinks will kill her, too.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Somehow, Alice manages to overlook the big ass bear trap Umbrella set up during their ambush under the bridge.
  • Isaacs fails to notice the weight and bulk of a very large grenade Alice just stuffed into his pocket.
• Fallen States of America: We see D.C. lying in ruins.
• False Reassurance: Alice tells The Mole she's not going to kill them. She then stands aside to reveal a pissed-off Claire.
• Fingore: Happens no less than three times:
  • First, the clone Isaacs loses not just his fingers but his entire hand.
  • Later, one of Alice's companions falls to his death when a closing grate severs all his fingers.
  • Finally, Alice herself. She cut off the clone Isaac's left hand in order to use a fingerprint to start up an Umbrella-owned motor bike, but later on, the real Isaacs holds out Alice's left hand to allow the laser grid to slice her fingers off.
• Flipping the Bird: Abigail does this to an obviously active camera in the bowels of the Hive, and by extension to Wesker who's watching on the other end of the wire. He takes offense and exacts Disproportionate Retribution.
• Forgot About His Powers: Wesker fails to use his super speed/reflexes to dodge a trap that shouldn't have been able to catch him, fails to use his super strength to stop said trap from crushing him, and fails to use his healing factor to stop said trap from killing him.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: It's hard to notice this on the first attempt, but the zombie that bites first into clone Isaacs before devouring him with the rest of the horde is his own Mook Lieutenant who was last seen chained to the tank and used to lead away hordes of zombies earlier.
• The Fundamentalist: The clone Isaacs, and to a lesser extent the original, see the T-Virus as a divine cleansing of the Earth, so that "the chosen", namely Umbrella's leadership and allies, can reclaim the world afterwards. Rather ironic given that he pitched fundamentalists as one of the threats to their megacorporation.
• Gatling Good: Umbrella's tanks carry two minigun turrets on their upper hull.
• Genre Blindness:
  • Wesker never sees his end coming.
    Wesker: I should've killed you in Washington.
    Alice: ... Yeah.
  • Alice herself has quite a lot of stupid moments, often acting like she's a complete newbie to the Zombie Apocalypse instead of having fought in it from the very beginning.
  • Isaacs takes Alicia under his wing right after he had her father killed in front of her. It ends poorly for the bad guys.
• Giant Flyer: The quad-winged T-mutant Alice fights in D.C. is easily one of the largest monsters in the movie series.
• Gone Horribly Right: In an idealistic sense, from Umbrella's point of view. They wanted to restart the world with the right people, and that's what happens by the end of the film.
• Good All Along: The Red Queen turns out to be this, correctly pointing out that in the first film she was only trying to kill everyone to prevent them from carrying the T-Virus out of the Hive and infecting the rest of the world. And the whole thing in Retribution where Wesker claims she was gathering an army of undead to wipe out humanity? C'mon, did you really believe anything Wesker had to say?
• Gotta Kill Them All: This is Alice's plan for handling the T-Virus monsters and what is left of Umbrella. Plotwise, every character in The Final Chapter except for Alice, Claire, and the Red Queen are dead by the end of the movie. This is possibly subverted in that there are a large number of survivors holed up in Raccoon City who don't accompany Alice's team to the Hive and presumably survive, especially since Dr. Issacs' clone diverts the zombie attack meant to kill them in an attempt to kill Alice instead. Wesker is also implied to have survived in the novelization.
• Grand Finale: As if the title wasn't obvious enough, this film concludes the Resident Evil film series.
• Guns Akimbo: Done with double-barrelled automatics, no less, when Alice shoots the toothy monster in the Creepy Basement.
• The Hecate Sisters: The three incarnations of Alice/Alicia Marcus in this film; the child-like Red Queen, the young woman Alice, and the elderly Alicia Marcus. Dr. Isaacs even references this and refers to them as "the grand trinity of bitches".
• Heel–Face Turn: The Red Queen enlists Alice's help to retrieve the cure to the T-Virus, found in the depths of the Hive, and assists her directly when she gets there. Current co-owner of Umbrella, Alicia Marcus, teams up with her younger cloned counterpart (Alice) and virtual counterpart (the Red Queen) to take down Isaacs and Wesker. This one is debatable as Alicia had been working behind the scenes to try and undermine Isaacs' plans, primarily through the creation of her clone, Alice.
• Heel–Face Turn: The Red Queen finally decides where she stands and turns against Umbrella.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Wesker is set up as the primary antagonist of the film, until he calls on the original Dr. Isaacs for help.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Isaacs is killed by his own clone, who is subsequently Devoured by the Horde he brought along to kill Alice with.
• Hope Spot:
  • A brief one during the Deadly Rotary Fan scene. When the thing gets going again, both Alice and Abigail, after some struggling, manage to get their feet on the ground once more, enough to evoke hope that everyone who's still alive by that point might yet stay that way after all. It doesn't last long, and Abigail gets turned into red mist by the blades seconds later.
  • One of the characters falls into a glass container (amongst others whose occupants have apparently starved to death) but uses her last bullet to break the glass. However Wesker is waiting outside for her.
• Human Popsicle: Umbrella's rich and powerful are kept in cryogenic stasis deep within the Hive, ready to reclaim the world once the apocalypse blows over.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: The Mook Lieutenant in the tank is an obvious honor graduate, given how he manages to not hit shit with two miniguns and a Macross Missile Massacre all firing at once. Granted, a fleeing motorbike is a small target, but his targeting computer and the sheer amount of More Dakka alone should have guaranteed at least a couple of lucky hits.
• Instant Cooldown: Zigzagged; when Alice drops the vial of Magic Antidote the vast horde of zombies charging at her all drop dead on the spot. However it's mentioned at the end that the anti-virus will take years to disperse worldwide as it's conveyed by winds, so Alice's work fighting zombie monsters is still not done.
• Ironic Echo: Coming from the Red Queen herself:
  Red Queen: Dr. Isaacs. You and the top executives... You're all going to die down here.
• Jitter Cam: The film makes extreme use of this, to the point it's hard to tell what's going on in a lot of the action scenes.
• Kill It with Fire: Used extensively during Umbrella's siege on the Racoon City survivors. Their hastily improvised fire weapons do quite a good job against the zombie army, and even a tank if they fail to close the hatches or air intakes.
• Killed Offscreen: According to the novelization, Leon, Jill, and Ada don't survive the battle in D.C. thanks to Wesker's backstabbing them.
• Laser Hallway: This time Alice and Isaacs fight each other while it's operating! Notably however the 'grid' version never appears to put a permanent end to their fun.
• Loophole Abuse: The Red Queen is under direct orders not to harm any employee of Umbrella. Alicia Marcus reminds everyone that she is still co-owner of the company. As soon as she fires Wesker from her employ, the Red Queen's self-defense systems crushes him under a bulkhead.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Abigail, after she gets shredded by the Deadly Rotary Fan.
• Made of Explodium: Everything, apparently. Whenever something explosive detonates near something else, chances are that second something will contribute to the boom by expanding the fireball to dimensions beyond anything the initial charge could've produced.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Isaacs not only survives a grenade going off in his jacket's pocket, he even remains standing instead of getting blown off his feet. He then has enough energy left to exchange some banter with Alice before he finally keels over.
• MegaCorp: Umbrella is the world's last major corporation, or as much of one as it can be, given the state of the world as of The Final Chapter.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: None of the male cast make it to the end of the film while three women survive, one of which is an A.I. Even moreso in the novelization, where it adds Becky and a female White House caretaker to the survivor count, though it is also implied Wesker is at least still alive.
• The Mole: Isaac indicates early on that there is "an informant" in the Raccoon City settlement. The Red Queen later tells Alice in a for-her-ears-only conversation that there's a good chance that one of her teammates is working for Umbrella. Alice had already figured out who it is by the time of The Reveal:
  Doc: How'd you know?
  Alice: You're still alive.
• More Dakka: We not only get to have fun with cool tanks armed with twin miniguns, missile batteries and retractable twin cannons, no — we also have a Jerkass guy going Guns Akimbo with double-barreled pistols and Alice's triple-barreled sawed-off shotgun.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Every mutant creature that isn't a basic human zombie, but especially the thing Alice fights in the Hive's gore-stained dungeons.
• Mythology Gag: Claire hands Alice a shotgun with three side-by-side barrels, which is obviously a homage to the "Hydra" shotgun from Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Alice ends up on the receiving end of several vicious ones. Claire also suffers one courtesy of Isaacs.
• Obvious Trap: Sure, Alice, that immaculate motorbike between scores of decayed car wrecks on the highway is certainly just standing there, waiting for you...
• Off with His Head!: The fate of several zombies, delivered by various survivors in variously gruesome ways.
• Once More, with Clarity: That submachine gun Alice handed to Doc? It Works Better with Bullets, as a flashback reveals Alice surreptiously emptying the magazine before handing it to him, having guessed that he's The Mole.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: The clone Isaacs' Mook Lieutenant ends up chained behind a tank like the one he piloted before as bait for the zombies.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: The T-Virus really does a damn good job at keeping tissue alive no matter what. We get to see a couple of zombies that are little more than skeletons with a few shreds of desiccated flesh left on their limbs, yet they still continue to move and attack anything that comes within reach.
• Pineapple Surprise: How Alice manages to temporarily incapaciate the real Isaacs the Hive fight sequence.
• Race Against the Clock: The Red Queen warns Alice at the start of the film that she has 48 hours to stop Umbrella from wiping out what's left of humanity.
• Restraining Bolt: Umbrella programmed the Red Queen so that it could not harm any Umbrella employees. She asks Alice to do the job instead. During the climax, Alicia fires Wesker, enabling the Red Queen to neutralize him.
• Retcon: The various reveals do this to several past facts, such as Umbrella's founder Dr. Marcus being the creator of the T-Virus and Red Queen (where Apocalypse had previously credited them to Dr. Ashford), Dr. Isaacs being the co-owner of Umbrella and Wesker's superior, and, perhaps most glaring, Umbrella having intentionally engineered the global outbreak (despite the first film clearly depicting that the outbreak happened at the hands of Spence as he tried to steal the virus, and Umbrella actively fighting it in past movies), and the Dr. Issacs from Apocalypse and Extinction being a clone.
• Reverse Polarity: Wesker says this word-for-word when he orders the Red Queen to weaponize a huge set of ventilation fans against the heroes after Abigail gives him the finger on camera.
• Rock Beats Laser: Improvised firebombs beat high-tech Umbrella tanks, specifically.
• Rule of Cool:
  • The laser grid from past Resident Evil films makes a return, and the trailers make sure to show Alice avoiding them in the coolest way possible.
  • The many ridiculously multi-barreled handguns fall firmly under this as well.
• Scenery Gorn: Never before has the utter desolation Earth has become been shown as extensively as in The Final Chapter. On the other hand, if you're into ruins and post-apocalyptic settings, you're in for some gorgeous Scenery Porn instead.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • In the beginning, Alice narrates that Raccoon City was nuked by the government in an attempt to prevent the T-Virus from spreading. This ignores the fact that back in Apocalypse, it was Umbrella itself that ordered to destroy the city, both to try to contain the virus and keep their cover.
  • Alice reveals that Dr. James Marcus was the creator of the T-Virus, who made it to cure his daughter Alicia. Again, this goes against the plot points in Apocalypse, where Dr. Charles Ashford was the one who made the virus in an attempt to cure his daughter, Angie.
  • When the team (or what's left of it) gets to the Hive, they enter a whole new sublevel that was never shown in the 3D map of the Hive in the first movie.
  • The reveal that Umbrella deliberately engineered the apocalypse goes against the first three movies, where they were actually trying to prevent the spread of the T-Virus, going as far as nuking Raccoon City. Most glaringly in this department, perhaps, is the fact that the first film showed the original outbreak to be a complete accident that happened when Spence tried to steal the virus.
  • Red Queen following orders not to harm the Umbrella employees seems to ignore the fact that she massacred a lot of them back in the first movie, even if taking into account her intentions. On that matter, her earlier line that she was created to value human life contradicts the same mass killing from the first movie and especially her actions during Retribution.
• Secret Test of Character: Alice isn't told that she'll actually survive the antivirus, to find out if she's willing to sacrifice herself to save others, as opposed to the Umbrella executives who were willing to sacrifice everyone else to save themselves.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Part of Isaacs' plan to hit the survivors of Raccoon City involves luring zombies to it by dragging live humans behind his armored vehicles. The last one is a woman that he releases, letting her run to the gates, giving Alice and Claire a shot at saving her, so they open the gates and pick off all the zombies behind her as best as they can. Isaacs waits till the gates are open and they've played their hand, whereupon he has the woman shot dead.
• Shout-Out:
  • The triple-barreled sawed-off shotgun Alice is seen using is almost an exact materialization of one of the game series' most legendarily powerful guns: the absurdly strong Hydra shotgun from Resident Evil 5.
  • One of the Big Bad guys getting fired by the company boss so that a programmed entity is no longer prevented from killing them is an almost exact reenactment of the finale of RoboCop.
  • Alice's impossibly acrobatic avoidance of the lasers is a variant on the often-parodied laser avoidance sequence in Entrapment.
• The Siege: The clone Isaacs' troops and the zombie army he brought with him lay siege to the Racoon City survivors' hideout. The latter fight back with lots of Kill It with Fire including a freaking trebuchet their resident Gadgeteer Genius jury-rigged from the building's window washer crane.
• Slow Doors: Combined with The Walls Are Closing In when Alice is forced to stop and fight a zombie as she's running through the doors to the Hive. Incidentally it's not mentioned why Wesker didn't Lock Down the place when he was first told Alice was coming.
• Spanner in the Works: Umbrella co-owner Alicia Marcus has been working to undermine her own company's goal of human extermination; her efforts include the creation of a younger clone of herself to lead a resistance (Alice) and the corruption of the Red Queen's AI to aid humanity before its extinction.
• Spared by the Adaptation: The novelization's epilogue states that some of the T-Virus is still stored beneath the destroyed Hive, implying that Wesker managed to survive the bisection and explosion. Notably, this is absent in the film itself, where it's all but said he is killed off for good.
• The Stinger: Not in the movie, but in the novelization, the final page of which reveals that due to being entombed in the destroyed Hive, Wesker's remains — and more importantly, the T-Virus in his cells — are isolated from the antivirus, leaving at least some of the virus intact (and Wesker himself alive) to one day escape.
• Tae Kwon Door: Wesker gets his leg crushed by the Red Queen's automated door and bleeds out eventually.
• Tank Goodness: The bug-like Umbrella tanks are heavily armed and generally quite awesome.
• This Is My Story: Alice, of course.
• Tomato in the Mirror:
  • Alice is a clone of the co-owner of Umbrella, and is not happy to find out she's just a Human Weapon. However the real Alice thinks of her as something more—the person she never had a chance to be, and arranges for her childhood memories to be transfered to Alice on her death.
  • The Dr. Isaacs Alice met at the start of the movie is actually a clone who thinks he's the original, to give him the exact same drive and motivation. When he meets the real Isaacs he doesn't take it well, and stabs him to death as an "abomination".
• Trailers Always Spoil: Both the American and international trailers give away the identity of one of The Final Chapter's primary villains, Dr. Isaacs, though that's revealed quite early in the movie.
• Trap Door: One of the Hive's many defense mechanisms — simple, proven and lethally effective today just like they were millennia ago.
• Turbine Blender: Our heroes enter the Hive via an air intake, which requires easing themselves between the blades of a giant turbine. The power starts to come on while they are doing this, but surprisingly all of them make it through; however Wesker sees what they are doing on the cameras and reverses the turbine, sucking a Mauve Shirt into the spinning blades before the power goes out again.
• The Unfought: Wesker is never fought in the film.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Short-haired ladette Abigail is shredded to pieces by the Turbine just when Alice's group thought they had made it through safely.
• Walking Spoiler: Most of these entries refer to the The Reveal, which involve Wesker being a bad guy again, the return of Dr. Isaacs, clones, and Alice's origins and fate.
• Wham Line:
  • The Red Queen's Ironic Echo proclamation that Umbrella's top executives... are all going to die down here.
  • "Albert Wesker, you're fired", which is directly proceeded by the Red Queen killing him.
• What a Drag
  • Captives attached to a rope are forced to run behind Umbrella tanks and try to keep up to avoid being devoured by the horde of zombies chasing them, the idea being to draw these zombies to the last human enclaves. After capturing Alice, she's also forced to run behind the tank, but 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 the Mook Lieutenant behind the tank and force him to run to draw the rest of the zombies away.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • The movie opens In Medias Res and the fate of the survivors from the previous film (most notably Jill, Leon, and Ada), as well as Chris, are never elaborated on, not even in passing. This leaves Claire as the only major character from the games who ends up participating in the film series' Grand Finale. Given that Claire survived being kidnapped by Umbrella at the end of Afterlife, it's reasonable to assume Chris did as well. As for the others, their fate is Left Hanging as an Uncertain Doom in the aftermath of the destruction of D.C. Some plot holes are filled in the novelization.
  • The unnamed dark-skinned boy is introduced as a part of Doc's group in the skyscraper and is shown killing the undead during the siege, but he disappears after the battle, with no one acknowledging him afterwards.
  • What happened to Alice's hand? Considering the wounds she suffered during her fight with Isaacs, there's no chance in hell she would ever be capable of driving a bike again, yet she does. The Hive's destruction probably also destroyed the world's last top-tier medical facilities, which makes it even more of a mystery how she got healed.
• Why Am I Ticking?: Alice manages to take down Isaacs temporarily by slipping a grenade on him during their fight.
• You Have Failed Me: The clone Isaac's Mook Lieutenant appears to be set up for this fate when he reports his failure at preventing Alice's escape to his boss, receiving a Death Glare in response before the film switches locations. It's averted as he shows up again later for another go at Alice.
• Zombie Apocalypse: By the end of Retribution and the start of this film, the T-Virus has all but wiped out humanity. The Red Queen mentions that there are less than 4,500 humans left on the entire planet.

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