Angst? What Angst?: At the film's prologue, all the survivors from the previous film except by Alice are gone, and all we are told is that Wesker betrayed them. It is even unclear whether they died, were taken as captives by Umbrella or went MIA in the battle at the White House. And yet, Alice passes the rest of the film just as cool as always, not even asking or pondering once about her friends and the surrogate daughter she risked everything to save in Retribution, not even mentioning it to Wesker himself when she reaches him and calls him on his betrayal. The epilogue then finishes this absurdity by having her gladly roam the world to kill the last T-monsters, having apparently moved on from everything and not revealing if she ever searched for or found something about Becky, Jill and the rest. This is the film that revealed Alice was a clone all along, but it could have revealed she was an ice sculpture instead and it would have been the same. This is averted in the novelization where she mourns their explicit deaths, eventually finds Becky alive and it is implied she will help Claire to search for Chris.
Ass Pull: The film's many sweeping retcons to the storylines of the previous installments often stretches any credibility far beyond the breaking point, even for a film series that was already somewhat (in)famous for playing pretty fast and loose with its own internal rules and treating continuity as an afterthought at best, to the point of the setting giving the impression that it takes place in an Alternate Continuity. See its general page.
Captain Obvious Reveal: Alicia being revealed as the real Alice would've been much less obvious if their names weren't so similar.
Complete Monster: Dr. Alexander Isaacs, The Chessmaster of the entire series, is an Evil Genius who murdered his kindhearted colleague Dr. Marcus for the T-Virus when he realized its potential as a weapon. Isaacs ran simulated outbreaks with sapient clones in order to sell the virus to superpowers. Later gaining delusions of godhood, Isaacs opted to release the Virus at large while freezing himself and the few "chosen" in cryogenic hibernation in order to later rebuild the world in his image. The end result was a mass extinction event of the world and the death of most of humanity. Isaacs leaves his own clones and Albert Wesker to clean up, aiming to exterminate any survivors. When he awakens, Isaacs attacks the heroine Alicia "Alice" Marcus, tauntingly revealing that she's a clone and slicing off her fingers before trying to murder her, intent on maintaining the ultimate power he's betrayed and murdered to achieve.
Critical Dissonance: The Final Chapter is the franchise's highest ranked installment on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic,note it's scored a "35%" and "49 out of 100", respectively making this somewhat of a good conclusion by the series's standards. On the other hand, it has the lowest user score on most sites, meaning that, even by its own standards, it's also a weak conclusion for the franchise. It really doesn't help that the film seems not to give a crap about continuity, seeing how it constantly retcons and contradicts central plot points from the previous installments left and right.
Designated Hero: Alice upon blowing up all the cryo-frozen Umbrella workers. Yeah, there were probably a few evil masterminds among them, but given their sheer numbers, there should surely also be workers' families and people who might not know about Umbrella's plan. And yet, even although she has no need of it, she kills them all without flinching.
Alice stops Umbrella and spreads an airborne cure across the world. However, human civilization is virtually destroyed, a huge part of the Earth's biosphere has been turned into desert, and there is stated to be less that 4,500 surviving humans left on Earth, probably spread across various settlements across the globe. It will take centuries for the planet to get over Scavenger World status and for human society to rebuild itself if it ever does. It becomes even worse in the novelization, as Wesker is alive and will return some day, probably with all of his T-Virus powers, to get revenge on Alice and/or resume Umbrella's plans. And it might take several years, decades or even centuries for Wesker to resurface, meaning that Alice might not even be around to stop him next time.
Alice receiving Alicia's memories so she can have a happy lifetime in her mind. This sounds good except for the little fact that Alicia didn't have a very happy life given that she had to see her father get killed by Wesker, her father's work being taken over by the devious Isaacs and her own body being plagued by progeria. For that matter, it would almost be better for Alice to keep only her own memories, given that they are only filled up with badassery and utter indifference towards all her personal tragedies.
Fanon Discontinuity: It is uncommon to find anyone who accepts this film as the Grand Finale to the mainline series considering its copious amount of flat out absurd Retcons and the revelation that everybody from the previous film died offscreen for nothing. Those who do acknowledge The Final Chapter usually pretend it to take place in an Alternate Continuity and the cliffhanger of Retribution to have a more satisfying conclusion.
Fight Scene Failure: The movie in general is edited very differently (read: more poorly) than its predecessors, but the fight scenes in particular stand out as nigh-unwatchable. In addition to the ludicrous number of cuts, with some scenes featuring multiple cuts in a single second,note It's the kind of editing films like Requiem for a Dream use intentionally in order to be disorienting or even nausea-inducing they also make liberal use of Jitter Cam and insert shots from slightly-different-but-not-quite-different-enough angles, and many viewers report being simply unable to follow the action beat-for-beat. It almost makes one yearn for the indulgent slow-motion fight scenes of the previous entries.
Memetic Loser: The fact that Albert Wesker dies by his leg getting crushed by a door has made him a source of derision among fans for the ridiculous circumstances and being put down without even having a fight.
Clone!Isaacs letting out an awkward scream while looking at the sky for some reason after Alice cuts off his hand. The face he makes while doing so doesn't help either.
Wesker getting his leg crushed by a door, getting Blood from the Mouth for some reason as result, and then dying because of such wound, is also incredibly hard to take seriously.
Nausea Fuel: The notoriously poorly-edited fight scenes are so frenetic and feature so many different shots in such quick succession that merely trying to follow them and track the action can and has made a lot of viewers feel ill.
Nightmare Fuel: Say what you want about the film itself, but the cable car scene in the Cold Open is terrifying. Imagine a fellow student suddenly having a stroke and collapsing, then your teacher tries to revive him - only to receive a bite on his neck (or lips in the novelization). The worst thing is that the cable car is still in the air and locked so there is nothing you can do to escape once more people start turning into zombies. It then cuts off to a guard sitting in his room and finding the cable car's glass drenched with blood... and then a bloody hand presses against it.
Sequelitis: This is considered by many to be the worst film of the Resident Evil series. Everything about it just screams this, from the cop-out opening towards what Retribution set up in its ending to the utter inconsistency of its writing, and just its mean-spirited tone overall. It's little wonder it bombed at the box office when it was released.
Special Effects Failure: Aside from being narratively incoherent, Wesker's death by door to the leg is badly choreographed. He is away from the door by a good four feet before the latter falls, suddenly teleporting there when it does, and even then, it still looks like he drops to the ground by himself while sticking his leg on the threshold before the door hits him there. Worse, it clearly looks like the door neatly sliced his leg by the ankle instead of merely crushing it, so superhuman or not, he should not have remained trapped there as he does.
By this point, Jill, Ada, Becky, Leon, K-Mart and Chris from the previous installments either died offscreen or are just plain absent, negating any possibility for them to receive some closure for their character arcs, though somewhat less so in the film's novelization, where Becky shows up alive and Chris might still be around as well. In Ada's case, it was due to Real Life Writes the Plot, as her actress, Li Bingbing, had to leave production due to other commitments, but none of the others was ever considered in the first place, with Jill's actress, Sienna Guillory, revealing she wasn't even approached for a return despite her wishes to do so.
Wesker really gets the shaft in this film. After spending two films being built up as the series' Big Bad and one as a Big Good, here he is reduced to being Isaacs' right-hand man and does very little, if any, fighting. And just to twist the knife in further, he ends up dying in the most incoherent and anticlimactic way possible, by having his leg cut off with a door despite his T-Virus powers. Perhaps appropriately, the novelization hints he survived and will make his return some day.
Why the Red Queen is now good is a point that some believe should have been more explored. While the novelization makes it clear Red Queen was controlled by Wesker during Retribution and was aiming at preventing Isaacs' plan from going global back during the Hive incident, the movie itself does not really bother to bring up an explanation.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The previous film ended with what even detractors described as a promising finale, that is, Alice, Ada, Leon, Jill and Wesker in the White House staring down an army of undead creatures sent by the Red Queen to exterminate humanity. However, this film basically erases all of this: not only does it pick up after that war finished, disposing of it entirely offscreen, but it also starts a new storyline while offering little to no context on what happened. The only real way of getting any of that is by reading the novelization, which tries to untangle some of the problems a bit with further retcons and Hand Waves. In any case, the general impression is that Retribution paved the way for an outstanding conclusion to the franchise only for The Final Chapter to backpedal awkwardly from it and turn it all into an uneventful "Shaggy Dog" Story for everybody but Alice.
Andoni Garrido: What seemed to be the best thing in the f*** saga turns out to have happened offscreen, and to compensate it we get... a crappy fight against a bat from StarCraft?
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Firstly, Jill, Ada and Leon are all missing (and outright killed off in the novelization), Alice is depowered and has to face Wesker and his monsters, and Dr. Alexander Isaacs was alive all along. Then, one of Alice and Claire's new friends betrays them and Alice learns her life was even more of a lie than she thought, as she happens to be a clone of a rather morally ambiguous heir. Finally, although Alice manages to destroy the leads of Umbrella and end the T-Virus plague, the world is still destroyed and it will be difficult to rebuild it. In sum, the film is so relentlessly dark that the average viewer might feel cheated after just some minutes.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Given that we never find out if she was forced to, Alicia was apparently fully willing to go along with Umbrella's plan to wipe out humanity with a zombie apocalypse, as she is never shown or mentioned trying to stop it and was among the rest of the Umbrella elite cryogenically frozen in the Hive. This makes the Secret Test of Character she and the Red Queen put Alice through look really hypocritical.
by L'arc-en-Ciel.