Although Netflix’s ‘Resident Evil’ can have a few drawbacks, something must be recognized: manages to normalize to extremes never seen before a franchise that has always had a reputation for indomitable. Or to put it another way: until now, we believed that it was impossible to approach the story and its characters without getting into a spiral of extravagance. From Capcom’s own sequels (which are already experimenting with swampy folk horror and Central European vampire mythologies) to the unclassifiable movies by Paul WS Anderson.
But Netflix has done it. The normalizing roller has passed the franchise and now we have a series that focuses on the lowest common denominator of the saga: Umbrella as an evil corporation that experiments on people and that condemns Humanity to a zombie plague that literally leaves the planet on the brink of the apocalypse.
In fact, the series takes advantage of its abundance of hours of footage to continuously jump between two eras: the moment in which the T-Virus leaves the Umbrella facility in 2022 and a world already destroyed in 2036 by zombies, and where they face the company’s paramilitary forces and a handful of survivors trying to reorganize society. Something that the franchise had not tried until now, usually focused on single protagonists or very close in time.
It is not the best idea in the world, because ‘Resident Evil’ is not exactly a prodigy of originality, and its greatness comes more from the approaches and details than from some master lines that usually drink unapologetically from the tropes of horror and science B-series fiction. And it means that this vision from Netflix doesn’t particularly stand out: it’s neat, it’s fun, it’s full of action, suspense and cliffhangers, but it doesn’t have the memorable unpredictability of the movies.
The ‘Resident Evil’ movies, the Rosetta Stone of dementia
A few weeks ago we entertained ourselves by ordering the Resident Evil movies from worst to best, and the criteria were very clear: the more they forget conventionalisms such as argument, coherence and plausibility, better. That’s why we put the fifth installment at the top, ‘Revenge’, the recent and commercially unsuccessful reboot of the saga and the also wonderful ‘Utratumba’. And proposals such as ‘Extinction’, a nice imitation of ‘Mad Max’ that tried to normalize the saga, went to the queue.
Because if this new vision of Netflix is useful for something, it is for us to realize that ‘Resident Evil’ does not need broken families or the umpteenth story about how the transformation of someone into a monster holds possibilities to tell an intimate tragedy. What ‘Resident Evil’ asks for are visionaries like Paul WS Anderson, who respect nothing (starting with Capcom) and who contribute their own recipe for hot sauce to take the franchise to unknown lands.
To be fair, there is something of that in the final stretch of this series, a couple of unexpected plot episodes that delve into the terrain of macabre comedy. In them, Lance Reddick, whom we have seen very content in the first episodes, goes wild and gives us the best nod to the original franchise, in a very curious meta moment. As in the best moments of the adaptations of the saga, it is impossible to know if Netflix has reached that tone voluntarily or the madness has taken over the tone when nobody was paying attention.
Unfortunately, to get there we have to go through a few episodes brimming with narrative conventions and second-hand ideas. ‘Resident Evil’ is not a bad series, certainly not by Netflix standards, but it would have needed a little more mambo. Luckily, for those purposes we still have the excellent movies and the always unpredictable drifts towards the madness of an inexhaustible video game saga.
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