Video game movies have a long history of being, well, let’s say, slightly sub-par. There’s a whole ream of explanations for this, from video game narratives being dependent on interaction to games having premises that are frankly dull if transferred to a passive medium like cinema. Then there’s the issue that games characters are often left with blanks, allowing us to project ourselves into them more readily. Sometimes, however, the games can’t take all the blame. Just look at the rancid touchstone that is the first true game-based cinema flop: Super Mario Bros. Despite featuring some top talent in the form of Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper, and trying to take the frankly non-existent story from the franchise and beat it, like cinematic ironmongers, into a cohesive film, it failed horrendously. The number of positive reviews it received, at least from major reviewers, could be counted on one hand. It is singularly atrocious.
The Resident Evil movies? They’re a rare beast in that they started out on the right foot. The first movie is a kind of fun popcorn horror movie; not smart in the least, but certainly not terrible. Then the sequels came. Oh, so many sequels, all more tragic than the last, each one getting more and more desperate, reaching for some kind of cinematic approval in an industry so full of zombie films that the dead almost outnumber the living. In this article, I’m going to take a look at the films’ production, and find surprising secrets that may go some way to explaining their progression into farce.
25 Magical Disappearing Makeup
Earlier we talked about some basic continuity errors with the hair colors of Jill Valentine across the franchise. She’s far from the only character to have experienced these baffling errors though. In the first movie, Alice seems to have…some issues with her makeup. When she’s walking through The Hive, her makeup changes from shot to shot, with the most obvious mistake being the constantly-changing shade of her lipstick. It’s not only the first film that saw the director apparently throw the concept of time out of the window.
In Extinction, Alice can also be seen with lipstick donned while in her red dress, but it disappears in the next scene. Putting on makeup in the apocalypse is to be applauded enough, but why does it keep changing?!
24 Through The Looking Glass
There are quite a few interesting comparisons to be done between the original movie and Alice in Wonderland. The first of many of this undead Dark Side of the Rainbow-style saga is obvious: the main character is called Alice. The first film’s hostile AI is called the Red Queen – in Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen famously shouts “off with her head!” In the movies, the Red Queen uses the laser hallway to cut off, well, more than just a head. Kaplan can be read as the white rabbit, eternally worried about time, while Spence can be seen as the Cheshire Cat, getting Alice into difficult situations.
This comparison seems more than a little intentional too, and is made explicit with the death of Lisa Addison, killed with an Alice in Wonderland paperweight.
23 A Cursed Production
Some films’ productions seem cursed from the off. There’s the notorious case of The Omen, which saw numerous crew injured and even finales, and it seems like Resident Evil: The Final Chapter was one such movie. In one horrific incident, a stuntwoman, Olivia Jackson, lost her left arm after a motorbike chase scene went wrong during filming, and Jackson was hit in the face by a camera while traveling at high speed. Later in production, another crew member, Ricardo Cornelius, was killed in another tragic accident. Cornelius was standing near a Humvee which had not been correctly attached to a rotating platform, when the vehicle fell off its stand and crushed him against a wall. He later died in hospital. Sometimes film sets can be extraordinarily dangerous places.
22 Continuity Errors Ahoy
Continuity errors can be small, or they can be far, far bigger. Take, for example, the scene in Commando, where John Matrix’s Porsche suddenly repairs itself in between scenes, or the error in the famous apartment scene in Pulp Fiction, where bullet holes are in the wall behind Jules and Vincent before any shots are fired. This one in Resident Evil is a bit of a glaring error, and suggests that the film’s directors weren’t paying very much attention to their work.
In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Sienna Guillory had dyed her hair black while playing the role of Jill Valentine. However, in the next films in the series, Sienna is back to her natural shade of blonde. Are we to suppose that somehow, while traveling around the infected world, they keep stumbling across boxes of L’Oreal dye?
21 Reuse Is Better Than Recycling
Sometimes, when you’re filming a film that’s relatively low-budget, you’ve got to be smart about your budget. In Resident Evil: Retribution, this involved several scenes from Afterlife finding their way on to the screen for a second time. Patient zero of the T-Virus in Japan, the anonymous “J-Pop Girl” is seen to attack a businessman in both movies, with the same sequence being used in each. The scene of the serum flowing through Alice’s system is also the same in both movies, as is the scene with the Osprey aircraft approaching the Arcadia.
Retribution isn’t the only film in the series which does this either. Apocalypse uses a whole sequence from its predecessor. I know that sometimes flashbacks serve as a stylistic choice, but this does rather reek of corner cutting.
20 Hurting For Your Art
Normally if you see an actor or actress getting cut up in films, you may think to yourself “wow, that makeup is good/awful,” depending on how convincing the wounds look. Not so in the original Resident Evil film, where the movie’s lead, Milla Jovovich, did all her own stunts, resulting in the myriad cuts and bruises you can see on her body over the course of the film. Regardless of the quality of the finished product, you’ve got to respect an actor who isn’t scared of getting their hands dirty for their art.
It does, however, raise an interesting point on continuity. As most films don’t shoot their scenes in chronological order, are there scrapes in the early scenes which aren’t there in later ones? I’ll leave that to someone who likes the films more than I do to find out.
19 Cleanliness Is Next To Dogliness
Zombie dogs are the bane of everyone’s life in the Resident Evil franchise. Whether bursting through windows or simply looking gross, they’re a rapid, efficient and terrifying enemy. In real life though? They’re still dogs, and as such, good boys. When the Dobermans were having the makeup applied, the artists found that there was a key problem with their plan. However they applied the fake blood, prosthetics, and false skin, the dogs would find a way to get it off them again, licking and shaking off the artists’ good work.
How they managed to make them behave in the end is unclear, but the result is one of the standout scenes from the first movie, and a great call back to the franchise’s beginnings in gaming.
18 Always A Bad Sign
There’s a couple of ways to tell that a movie is going to be bad before actually seeing it. Maybe the promotion around the film has been focusing on a ten-second celebrity cameo, rather than the film itself. Maybe the film’s extremely short and has a bunch of “stars” that you’ve never heard of. Another surefire way? See if the producers allow critics to see it. If they don’t put on press screenings, you just know it’s going to be an absolute stinker, or at least, the people behind it don’t think it’s going to be. Resident Evil: Extinction was one such film.
It may not be abortively bad, and, in a certain frame of mind, it can be entertaining, but nobody expects it to win the Palme d’Or, and the studio knew it.
17 Not Dressed For The Weather
Films often love to show off the, let’s say, assets of their main cast. The Resident Evil franchise is no different. As we previously mentioned, there’s only one franchise that doesn’t show Alice completely unclothed in one scene, but when it came to Apocalypse, the crew decided that Milla and Sienna would need an excuse to wear skimpy clothing. The reason given in the film is that there’s a heatwave occurring in Racoon City, which would be all fine and dandy were it actually filmed in summer, and ideally, somewhere warm. Yeah, there’s one little hiccup: the filming actually took place in Toronto, and in November. I’ve got to imagine that the pair of them were more than a little chilly under that Canadian winter sky.
16 Lights, Camera, Gunshot
Films are probably the most expensive form of entertainment that humanity has ever conceived. They frequently cost millions, and occasionally, hundreds of millions of dollars, all to get the seats filled. Do you know what makes them even more expensive? Accidents during filming. Take, for example, the accidental destruction of a camera during the filming of Resident Evil: Afterlife. During one scene, Milla Jovovich was required to shoot an apparently live round, and ended up peeling the cap of a $100,000 camera. I guess she needed to work on her aim a little after that.
As far as expensive bloopers go, it beats the $40,000 guitar which got smashed during The Hateful Eight’s filming, but is still dwarfed by the $200,000 model ship which Adama smashed in the Battlestar episode “Maelstrom.”
15 Creative Censorship
I do love a good bit of censorship, there’s something much more satisfying about verbal substitution instead of a simple bleep. I talked about the use of “Funk” instead of, well, the other Fun word in Shaun of the Dead. Other amazing examples of censorship in films include the old standby of “yippie ki-yay, Mr. Falcon” from Die Hard 2, and “melonfarmer” in the counterculture classic that is Repo Man. How does Resident Evil get around those troublesome MFs for TV broadcast? Well, the cast takes a word places it was never meant to be used, and instead call people “motivator.” What does that mean for Mr. Motivator? Were countless “get motivated” websites taken down by the government in the Resident Evil universe for encouraging obscene acts?
14 Showing Less Shame
The movie franchise is well known for one, more steamy aspect, that is Alice being shown in states of undress in all but one of the movies. However, the original movie was set to show even more intense scenes, before one small detail got in the way: Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson falling in love. The two first met on the set of the original movie, and while they didn’t get married until 2009, there was an agreement between the two of them regarding one of the original’s shots. According to Milla, one of the shots was going to show her chest in even more detail than we got, but once the two agreed that they had something real, Paul cut the offending shot from the movie.
13 Counting (Zombie) Crows
The art of using CGI to essentially cut and paste different actors, creating huge crowds from relatively few people, is a well-known technique in modern cinema. Look at how, in Lord of the Rings’ epic battles, a crowd of extras were hired before being reproduced through technology into baying armies. However, sometimes this can be taken to something of an extreme. For example, during Resident Evil: Extinction, the gang is attacked by a swarm of zombie crows, but the actual number of crows may surprise you. Just two birds were used to create the huge swarm, with all the others being computer generated.
Even birds as intelligent as crows would prove to be troublesome to wrangle as a swarm, so this effect would have proved exceptionally useful during filming.
12 Snoop Zombie Dogg
The plans for Resident Evil: Apocalypse shows that it was apparently meant to be a far more interesting film than it used to be. When the movie was being cast, there were originally set to be some pretty interesting people involved in the film. Avid gamer Snoop Dogg was set to play the role of L.J. Wayne, and the role was written around Snoop’s well-known persona. Unfortunately (though maybe fortunately for his career), Snoop dropped out and Mike Epps took his place. Jason Issacs was also set to return in Apocalypse, which would have lent the film a thoroughly undeserved level of acting. Eric Mabius, of Ugly Betty fame, was also originally going to be the actor behind the role of Nemesis, but he was instead played by Matthew G. Taylor.
11 Mr. Producer, Close Down This Square!
From all accounts, filming anything in Moscow can be a proper palaver. It’s well known that the Russian authorities don’t take too kindly to people poking around important areas with cameras, with celebrities as far afield as Noel Gallagher experiencing police harassment as a result. Through some incredible production skill (apparently), Resident Evil: Retribution was able to not only be filmed in Moscow, but actually close down Red Square for the production.
According to producer Don Carmody, the sequence in the square took nine hours to film, and of the 300 people on set at the time, 150 were Russian police officers. I find it pretty surprising that such a relatively low-budget film could essentially take over the Russian capital, but it’s testimony to the skill of the backroom staff behind the movies.
10 Stuntmen Going Hungry
I talked earlier about how Milla Jovovich does her own stunts, but this isn’t exclusive to her. Michelle Rodriguez, who plays Rain Ocampo in the series, spoke of training for her own “elaborate” fight sequences, though admits that she has a stunt double to do her own wire work, saying simply “I am not Tom Cruise, man.”
Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t always work out for the movies’ stars. Boris Kodjoe (he of Real Husbands of Hollywood fame) decided that he also wanted to jump on this bandwagon and do his own stunts when he appeared in Afterlife. It didn’t go so well. The actor ended up dislocating his knee during filming while kicking a gate open. Maybe you should read up on your door kicking technique, Boris.
9 So Much To Answer For
It can very much be argued that the Resident Evil franchise kickstarted the awful wave of video game movies we were plagued with in the 00s. While there had been video game movies before, the success of the first Resident Evil movie led to the Doom, Silent Hill, and Max Payne licenses being snapped up by studios. So many of these turned out to be absolute, next-level garbage.
One franchise of somewhat entertaining popcorn fodder led to such weird scenes as The Rock shooting demons in the face somewhat unconvincingly, Michael Fassbender doing his level best to pull off a cowl, Pyramid Head wobbling his way across a theater screen, and…whatever Max Payne turned out to be. I don’t know, I’ve never seen it, but its reputation precedes it somewhat.
8 Quite The Accident
While none of the other Resident Evil films have seen such horrendous incidents as The Final Chapter’s intense finales, Retribution had its incidents too. During filming in Toronto’s West End, 16 actors, who were dressed as zombies, were filming on a raised platform. The platform then suddenly shifted, and the actors fell to the ground below, suffering back, leg and arm injuries. Luckily, no one was too seriously hurt. Thanks to the makeup which had been applied, though, responding paramedics initially thought the situation was far worse than it was.
“I could see the look on the first paramedic, saying ‘Oh my God’,” said emergency medical services Commander, David Ralph. The studio faced an investigation by Canada’s Ministry of Labor as a result of the industrial accident.
7 Wait, Why Was This Made Again?
You’ve got to love a hardcore retcon. That kind of sharp slamming into the reverse of this cinematic vehicle, which gives you a bad case of narrative whiplash. The Final Chapter makes it pretty clear to us that the reason the T-Virus, which unleashed untold reanimation onto the world, was created, was because Dr. Marcus wanted to save his daughter from premature aging. This isn’t what was established in Apocalypse, however.
No, in Apocalypse, it was established that the T-Virus was in fact made by Dr. Ashford for his daughter, Angie. So whose daughter was it made for? Was it made for a girl dying from premature aging, or to cure one of her disabilities like a viral Jesus? Just make your mind up, Resident Evil, come on!
6 Weapon Goofs
I know films don’t have to be exactly scientifically accurate when it comes to weapons, but a bit of common sense would be nice. Partly, this is for continuity purposes, and partly because it just contradicts basic facts about firearms. For example, in Apocalypse, there’s a scene where the Beretta 92 pistol that’s being wielded suddenly morphs into a Colt M1911, before shape-shifting into a Smith & Wesson. Were props labeled on this film at all?
There’s also an issue in Afterlife with Alice’s choice of shotgun ammo. The issue here is that Alice likes to custom load her shells with quarters. It’s a neat little stylistic choice, but quarters are actually way too wide to fit down a 12 gauge barrel, and thus into a shell. If you could somehow jam the coins in, all that would happen is you’d be left with half of a shotgun at best.
