Lowest Common Denominator Zombies

Resident Evil is a bad parable for our bad times.

Earlier this week I wrote about The Girl With All the Gifts, a lyrical, melancholy exercise in bittersweet hope which gracefully extended the zombie film’s emotional and thematic range. The walking dead, it showed, do not have to be brainless.

So as a pallet cleanser, I figured I’d watch Resident Evil (2002) a movie which resurrects the old flesh but dumber and less nuanced than ever before. Still, there is a certain blunt honesty in the film’s remorseless self-consumption, as it blankly chews up its own soul, leaving its dead eyes reflecting the impressive vacuousness of bland corporate anti corporate default.

The plot, if you want to call it that, is a bunged together collection of old tropes arranged loosely around stale video game challenges. The evil Umbrella corporation developed a T-virus which turns people into zombies. Someone stole it and released it in the underground laboratory, the Hive, prompting the semi-evil security AI to murder everyone down there in order to prevent infection. A security team is sent in to figure out what went wrong; into this highly dangerous situation they decide to drag along a random prisoner (what? why would you do that?) and also a couple of superspies who have amnesia caused by nerve gas .

“Wouldn’t you leave the injured behind?” you might ask. Or at least dress the woman superspy in something a bit more practical than a cocktail dress? And how can nerve gas cause amnesia anyway?

Good questions which will never be answered. Instead, our intrepid heroes, led by amnesia-and-cocktail-dress-wearing Alice (Milla Jovovich) traipse through the Hive dodging AI traps, zombies, mutants, double-agents, and plot holes, not necessarily in that order. The moral is supposed to be that corporations are inhumane and evil soul-suckers which consume and drive us all to consume. But it all feels more than a little hollow given the utter genericness of the supposed protagonists. That especially applies to Jovovich, who has less expressive range than your average corpse. But it also, alas, includes actors Michelle Rodriguez and Martin Crewes, who struggle valiantly but futilely against the fatal plague that is the script.

If that doesn’t sound much fun to watch—well, yeah, it’s not a lot of fun to watch, even if you just go in to see some grotesque kills and root for everyone to die. There is, though, a kind of empty, tedious poetry in watching empty, tedious protagonists fight empty, tedious antagonists inside the great empty, tedious bowels of the Hive and of the film itself.

Alice—without memory, without expression, without motivation, without character—wanders through vaguely pulsing hallways, registering a minimal flicker of surprise whenever the plot pushes her in predictable directions by throwing zombie Dobermans at her to reawaken her kick-fighting skills or reminding her with mini-flashbacks of her nobility so she can do heroic stuff. The corporate conspiracy in the film makes no sense because the corporate conspiracy that is big-budget Hollywood couldn’t be bothered to come up with a consistent rationale or narrative.

The anti-establishment anti-corporate dialogue is as disconnected from meaning or principle as the anti-establishment T&A, or the anti-establishment gore. Romero’s zombie films were actually critiques of racism, consumerism, and militarism; but this is a zombie critique of capitalism, staggering through catacombs and bumping into walls with its cortex fried and wearing the skin and skull of something vaguely living. The Umbrella Corporation’s cynicism and carelessness is the cynicism and carelessness of Resident Evil itself.

The fact that the film can be read as a metaphor for its own callous lobotomized greed doesn’t change the fact that it is a vacuous cash-grab. It’s difficult to believe this beginning spawned a whole series of sequels—but then again, zombies do not need much in the way of beauty or even sentience in order to proliferate. Resident Evil is a reminder that corporations rarely require super-secret conspiracies to spread their filth. All you need is inattention, low standards, and bad actors to set that shuffling, brainless apocalypse on its way.