Resident Evil- The Final Chapter :Towards a zombie apocalypse

The Resident Evil franchise (supposedly) concludes fittingly with an entertaining instalment

Right off the bat, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter starts with a bang. For 15 years, Alice (Milla Jovovich) has been fighting zombies affected by the T-virus. And naysayers be damned, the world has loved every minute of it. No wonder then that Resident Evil has been the most successful video game to film franchise made. Of course, it also helps that Alice is one of the best action heroes of all time, male or female. And when it comes to the very limited list that belongs to the latter category, she’s up there with amazing characters like Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road and Trinity of The Matrix series.

In what is supposed to be the last instalment of the franchise, The Final Chapter starts off with Alice emerging coughing from an underground location to a zombie-ravaged Washington D.C. Her immediate attempts at finding life and supplies end up in an action-fuelled monster-killing. Indeed, viewers barely have a moment to recover from Alice’s triumphs that she’s back at it again. And yet, director Paul W. S. Anderson (also Jovovich’s husband) manages to pull off the near-constant action without it being tiresome. So time and time again, Jovovich, still in fine form, translates Alice’s limitless fighting abilities onscreen. There is a particularly exciting sequence, where she annihilates her foes with one leg tied up in the air, whizzing in circles and shooting her targets. In this film, the Artificial Intelligence named Red Queen (played by Jovovich and Anderson’s daughter Ever Gabo) that controls the Umbrella Corporation — responsible for the zombie apocalypse — reveals that the corporation had created an airborne anti-virus. The cure will destroy anything infected with the T-virus.

Alice must release the anti-virus, which is hidden at the Hive at ground zero in Raccoon City. She must do this within 48 hours to prevent the Umbrella Corporation from killing the last human settlement in the world. However, standing between Alice and her mission is Umbrella founder Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) and his army of the undead. When

The Final Chapter ’s boss fight does occur, it’s the last stand against a group of humans and scores of zombies. In true Hollywood fashion, the battle is anything but ordinary.

Now we’ve been lied to in the past when Anderson said that

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) would be the final film in a trilogy. And then he went on to make three more. So, there’s hope for more of Alice, although her already skimpy story has been stretched pretty thin. But in The Final Chapter , we do get some sort of closure, at least those (very few) who’re looking for it. We get answers to Umbrella’s impetus to create the world-destroying T-virus, and Alice’s lack of memories among other things. Not that it matters to viewers or fans of the video game. After all, Resident Evil, like its peers has little attention paid to character development

or story arcs. For instance, when characters previously dead re-emerge, it’s best to just be happy that someone has escaped the filmmakers’ Game of Thrones philosophy.

The only requisite for

The Final Chapter is to sit back and watch the gore and action unfold accompanied by equally aggressive music. If whatever little adrenaline from the film makes its way into its audience’s body, Anderson has succeeded. And this writer can safely vouch for that. Plus, if his little teasers are any indication, we can safely look forward to watching Alice on the big screen

again.