If you’d told me in 2012 that in 8 years Resident Evil: Retribution would have a cult following, I would’ve laughed at your face. Oh, but it does. And at the time my 16 year old self had enjoyed the movie, but just as a dumb little actioner with zombies and hot women in leather S&M clothes fighting each other, or whatever it is that you tell yourself to feel good about enjoying a movie that’s popularly deemed as “bad”.
And Retribution is by all means exactly that. It’s very easy to pick apart, since it blows the socks off of every possible made-up norm for “cinematic quality” there is. Unfortunately, we’ve wandered so far off in all of these years of “professional film criticism” that too many people have forgotten a very simple, essential truth: that movies are made, first and foremost, to please the senses. Nothing more. They are not made to be coherent. They are not made to have “well developed” characters. They can do and have these things, but ultimately the only thing a movie has to do is please. And it can employ any tactics it so desire to do that. So what if it does it via more unorthodox methods? So everything critics will swear are fundamental cinematic flaws in the traditional doctrine of what a mainstream movie needs to be actually are an ever so wild display of pure imaginative cinematic freedom. Paul W.S. Anderson doesn’t care about your so-called rules, he’s so artistically outrageous that film journalists can’t help but to loathe how he gets people to enjoy his movies, and he does so by making them however the fuck he wants. He just points… And shoots.
Something that’s always been a thing with this franchise is how every movie is its own thing — even though they’re directly connected by cliffhangers, they’re only loosely tied together, and each one is perfectly watchable without any of the others, partially thanks to Alice’s recaps at the start of every single one of them. Retribution particularly stands out in a certain way; the idea of a simulation. The movie takes place in an Umbrella testing facility that recreates real life scenarios in incredible detail — like a movie would — to test their biological weapons. Right off the bat, after its amazingly hypnotic reversed action opening sequence, it cuts to Alice having a normal life and a family with Carlos Olivera (who died in the third movie) up until Dawn of the Dead happens, and it doesn’t bother explaining what the hell you just saw until later on. Before it gives any sort of explanation, it also recreates the iconic Tokyo title sequence of Resident Evil: Afterlife, its direct predecessor, down to using the same footage from that very scene in that movie in order to do so — and this isn’t wholly new to the franchise, as Extinction did the same with Alice’s introduction scene from the original film. So if a scene from a different movie can be replicated at verbatim in this one… What’s to say that the same scene wasn’t a simulation in Afterlife as well? And if that scene can be a simulation, how do we know what scenes weren’t? What guarantees that this Alice we see here is the same one from Afterlife, Extinction or Apocalypse? What’s to say that ANY of these movies were ever real?
Hence the “only loosely connected” quality. That very well could serve as an explanation for the narrative inconsistencies we see throughout the series — Wesker is the head of Umbrella from 3 to 5, but Final Chapter says Isaacs is the actual boss and Wesker was his minion; none of that matters though, because in Retribution we clearly see clones of characters like Rain, Carlos and Alice herself playing different roles from their “original” counterparts, and we know for a fact that neither of the Isaacs characters from Final Chapter are the same from Extinction. In Retribution Anderson introduces that figment of doubt in our heads, and never bothers to explain it. He straight up says all of this might not be real, and then also says that doesn’t matter. Who cares what the true version of the story is? They’re loosely connected enough for there to be a semblance of sense, and that’s all it needs to deliver an exhilarating sensorial experience.
Film reviewers nowadays get so hellbent on script that they forget film is an audiovisual medium, not a written one. Visual language trumps any written word. There is no such thing as “style over substance”; style is substance, much more so than whatever people mean by “substance”. And that’s exactly what Anderson will prioritize during this whole movie. He starts off with the action sequence we expected this film to open with after the ending of Afterlife, except… it’s already over, and we watch it reverse back to the beginning, in slow motion. In many ways, this is saying Retribution is going to be a movie you’d expect from this franchise, but not exactly how you expect it to be. It then proceeds to confuse you even more with the aforementioned “normal life” scene, and finally we’re back with Alice, our Alice (or is it?), and little by little we come to terms with the fact that this entire movie is gonna be set inside an underwater installation. After two movies exploring a post-apocalyptic world (?), Retribution takes the action back to a confined environment that all but simulates a global experience. This film is actually more expensive than both its predecessors, yet it chose to frame the stakes from an internal, scaled down perspective as opposed to going all out with them. Nobody expected it to do that… But of course it did.
This entry is the deconstruction of the Resident Evil franchise. Hell, it’s a deconstruction of post-modern filmmaking. It reveals its façade of doubles, test environments, scripted roles and controlled set pieces, and then unleashes Milla Jovovich on a saucy leather outfit to utterly destroy it. She leads a horde of zombies from an intricately recreated Tokyo to a white perspective corridor, where the phoniness couldn’t be more evident, and the red of their blood and brains being blown off by her handgun couldn’t be more eye popping. She destroys the entire clone storage, she kills every single fake thing that stands in her way. Alice’s rampage through the simulation environments channels Paul W.S. Anderson’s own crusade to tear down every single norm of traditional mainstream filmmaking with this movie. It’s the death of language, except Godard could never make it look this good.
Retribution also has some of the most interesting political symbolism of this entire IP (yes, including the games). The core of Resident Evil is the commentary on how corporate conglomerates rule the world through unethical business that keep that capitalist machine running; in that context, Retribution setting its story in an old Soviet Union facility that’s been turned into a testing site by the Umbrella Corporation so they can sell their bioweapons to the highest bidder, not caring what consequences it bestows upon the planet, is nothing if not brilliant. A communist symbol appropriated by capitalism — and capitalism in this universe is single-handedly responsible for the end of the world. This is very much a Cold War movie at heart, as Anderson traces a direct parallel to the arms race at one point.
Another very compelling detail is how the heroes of the story are products of that very same capitalism, who turned on it to destroy it. First there’s Alice, an original character who in the diegesis of these films used to work for Umbrella directly; Luther, who used to be a star basketball player; and then Ada, Leon and Barry, who came from the videogames, and therefore are icons of a profit-driven product and are represented as such, their characterization being so very faithful to the games but in a kind of ludicrous way that owns the ridiculousness of their original designs. Ada is an Umbrella agent working in an underwater facility and she wears a fucking red dress, for fuck’s sake — not to mention that she’s an Umbrella traitor as well.
Where am I getting with this? I guess at the relationship of political commentary between product and producer. Many blockbusters are anti-capitalism, yet they are made by capitalist corporate companies and their very existence is only enabled by capitalism. A lot like these characters. The fact that such an economic system created them doesn’t mean they have to abide by them. It birthed them for a purpose, and still they turned on it. Much like companies employ filmmakers to create products for profit, and those same artists use the money given to them to create stories that very straight-forwardly criticize such a system. The characters of this Resident Evil are a manifestation of that; the movie itself is. It’s the apocalypse of all of those false realities propagated by the corporations that rule the world and that will, eventually, be its ruin. These characters may have been created by them, but they do not fight for them; instead they will bring upon those overlords the same destruction their greed brought upon the world. Ergo the title: Retribution.
