Resident Evil (2002)

WHAT WENT WRONG

The hosts analyze the 2002 film Resident Evil, examining its confusing narrative and its role in stabilizing Paul W.S. Anderson's career. Th

Key takeaways

• The Resident Evil film is criticized for a convoluted plot that withholds key information until the final act.
• The franchise's roots trace back to the Japanese horror film Sweet Home, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Main topics

• Resident Evil (2002) film review
• History of Capcom and survival horror

Notable quotes

It is kind of one of a litany of post-Matrix science fiction ripoff films.

Conclusion

While narratively messy, Resident Evil stands as a significant cultura

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:20) Hello, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one that begs the question, when do the raccoons come out? I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what did you make me watch for today? I Speaker 4 (0:43) gave you the privilege of watching the first installment of the... You can't kill it, shoot it in the head, Resident Evil franchise, which bears some resemblance to the games upon which it's based. And we're going to spend a lot of this episode actually talking about the games. It's got an interesting history, how the first game was developed, and then it led to this unusual film that kind of birthed a weird B-movie subgenre of its own. So I'm really excited to talk about it. It's got some fun characters, you know, kind of some folks who needed a break and caught it at the exact right moment. But Lizzie, we got to start with... What a treat it must have been for you to watch this last night. And what was your experience watching it? Had you ever seen it before? You know, talk us through it. Give us the blow by blow. So I Speaker 2 (1:27) had not seen this before. I thought that I had, maybe because... You may have Speaker 4 (1:30) seen parts of one of them. There are many. Speaker 2 (1:33) Yes. And also her outfit in this is so iconic that I think that was burned into my head. You know, the asymmetrical red dress with the knee high. Black flat boots. Great outfit. Very impractical for killing whatever the hell those things are. But she looks great doing it. Although she doesn't actually do much of it in this movie. We'll talk Speaker 4 (1:55) about that. There's a funny reason for that. Okay. Speaker 2 (1:57) So yeah, I had never sat down and watched this all the way through. And, you know, I started this pretty late last night. I was very tired. Yeah, you texted me. I saw the timestamp of your text and I thought. wild choice to start this that late the night before recording. Didn't have an option. We have been moving into a new house many states away from where we used to live, and 9.30 p.m. was the only time I could start watching Resident Evil. It is a movie. First of all, it's deeply confusing. I didn't know what was going on for like 70 % of this movie. For something that is seemingly so simple, it almost felt like you had to have played the game to kind of know what was happening. No? Chris is shaking his head no. I don't think playing the game Speaker 4 (2:47) would help you that much. As we'll learn, this is not a direct adaptation of the game. Well, Speaker 2 (2:51) then what was happening? What Speaker 4 (2:53) do you think happened? I Speaker 2 (2:54) don't know. I don't know. Honestly. Like, truly, I was so confused. I still am so confused. There's Speaker 4 (3:02) a Wuhan lab leak. They send Speaker 2 (3:04) in the team. That part I got. The lady gets her head chopped off by the elevator. That was fun. Speaker 4 (3:10) Emilia Jovovich's Alice has memory loss from the halide or whatever comes out of the smoke Speaker 2 (3:15) detectors. But who is she? Why is she there? Who is James Purifoy? What the fuck was their relationship? Also, what happened to James Purifoy? I liked him a lot when he was around. He's very good in Vanity Fair, that movie with Reese Witherspoon. And then he just disappeared off the face of the earth, and I don't know why. So anyway, where did he go? He's not great in this, but that's not his fault. I just found it to be both stupidly simplistic and deeply confusing at the same time. That being said, it has fun performances. I love Mila Jovovich always. I think she's a very good actor and she, you know, holds this down as well as anyone possibly could. If anyone's never seen The Messenger where she plays Joan of Arc, she is actually like great in that. Kind of a mess of a movie, but she's very good. Speaker 1 (4:03) And yeah, I was just, Speaker 2 (4:04) I was just blown away by how little sense it makes. You know, like I'm okay with there not being a lot of logic in movies like this. Or rather, I'm okay when the logic doesn't relate to our real world logic. But I expect some logic to exist within the world itself, even if they're making it up. And that just doesn't happen here. Speaker 4 (4:26) Like, it was bizarre. Do you want me to explain a little bit of what happened? Yes! Because it seems like it never really connected for you. They do hide the ball for most of the movie, but they do eventually explain what's going on. Do they? Yeah. Speaker 2 (4:38) There's a compooper. There's a computer. Speaker 4 (4:41) Eric Mavis' sister, the police officer's sister, works in the lab. She was secretly meeting with Mila Jovovich. I know. Who has a front with James Purefoy as the couple that owns this mansion, right? That's actually the secret entrance to the facility that goes under Raccoon City. Mila Jovovich and the scientists were working together to expose the corporation. James Purefoy heard them coming up with this plan, so he decides he's going to steal the T-virus for himself. That kicks off the events of the movie. He infects the entire lab. He then escapes. But before he's able to escape, he's knocked out by the gas, which causes a memory loss. And so he and Milijovic wake up as the S.T.A.R.S. team, Special Tactics and Rescue Services, bust in and bring them down to exterminate the viral infection down below and blow up the whole thing eventually. Get the antidote and leave. That's the setup. Speaker 2 (5:34) Okay. I understood. Like 95 % of that. I think actually the part I was most confused by was James Purefoy. And like, what? I mean, Speaker 4 (5:43) they don't do a great job explaining him. No. I understood that he was some sort of double agent. Kind of. Speaker 2 (5:49) Yeah. It just, it's like, I don't know. Also, why is everything so fucked up when she gets out? Is it because the virus got out? Yes. When did that happen? Well, you don't see it. Speaker 4 (6:02) It did. I mean, they bring Eric Mabeus is infected when they bring him out at the end. Yeah, but... And they're saying, like, get him to the Nemesis program. But so he clearly must have infected someone. Speaker 2 (6:12) But they didn't feel like they needed to show. Anyway, whatever. Okay. I don't think that was necessary. This movie is very confusing. That part of the movie, I don't think is confusing. Okay, fine. But it was Speaker 4 (6:22) very Speaker 2 (6:22) late. It was very late. It's late in the game. They do a big reveal, like you're saying, very late in the game. I didn't love it. I didn't love it. I thought I would have loved it. Speaker 4 (6:30) What if you turn that corner to, but it was great? No, it Speaker 2 (6:34) was not great. And I like this kind of movie. So I was actually quite surprised by how little I enjoyed this movie. I do always enjoy a Michelle Rodriguez action movie performance. She is always great. And I like Eric Mabius a lot. Where did he go? Also, two of these guys, where did they go? They were great. They were fun. I would say he and Mila Jovovich really hold this movie down. Anyway, Chris. That's enough of me being incredibly confused by what I watched at 9.30 p.m. last night. What about you? I Speaker 4 (7:03) saw this movie when it came out, roughly around this time. It is kind of one of a litany of post-Matrix science fiction ripoff films, I would say. You could throw Equilibrium in there, Aeon Flux. perhaps with Charlie's Throne, the Karen Kusama film that we covered, Ultraviolet, also with Mila Jovovich. There are many of these films that I think came out after The Matrix and were deeply influenced by The Matrix and yet felt candidly like bargain bin versions of The Matrix to a certain extent. Big time. This Speaker 2 (7:33) is like a Speaker 4 (7:33) bargain bin 28 days later. Well, it came out before 28 days later, so I don't think you can technically say that. I'm still going to say that. So I didn't love it. And yes, in relation to something like 28 Days Later, this fell distant second. However, as more and more of these came out, Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife, the final chapter, the final chapter, final chapter, you know, whatever the version is, there is, I find... sort of a guilty B, C, Z movie pleasure in these movies. And the downside of this one is it's actually not ridiculous enough. Yes, Speaker 3 (8:07) I agree. The Speaker 4 (8:07) movies start to become so absurd that I enjoy them more and more the more ridiculous they get. You know, Milijovic ejecting the magazine from her gun or dropping her gun and then jumping to the ground to grab it and shoot the bad guy before they react. It's the most ridiculous move in action movie history. Give me more Speaker 2 (8:23) of that. Speaker 4 (8:23) We need more of that. But I think they realize that eventually, you know, when they're making these movies, and we'll talk about kind of the continued evolution of these movies during the legacy portion, all to say, I still enjoy, again, the time passed quickly for me watching this movie, even though I agree with you. It feels a little shoddy, you know, throughout, even though I like sequences and I like, I mean, the whole beginning feels like it's something out of Final Destination or Ghost Ship or something like that. It's very fun. And then the movie kind of grinds to a halt for a little while and you kind of wonder, why are we withholding so much information? And then I do think the ending gets pretty fun when it just becomes a creature feature with the liquor, you know, at the end, the big tongue creature. I Speaker 2 (9:02) agree. Beginning and end, totally fun. The beginning, I was actually excited because I was really enjoying it. It was giving like bootleg Contagion, which I'm always. is here for. I very much enjoy that. But yeah, that middle, like the middle two thirds of the movie are pretty rough. I'm surprised. Well, Speaker 4 (9:19) I think this is the hardest thing about adapting a video game is what do you do with act two? The second act of a video game is the character either defeating increasingly difficult bosses or completing increasingly difficult puzzles. But They're not marked typically by remarkable story turns, right? It's a linear progression through a sequence of escalating challenges. And I think that that's a really tricky thing with video game adaptations. I don't think they cracked it here necessarily. We'll talk about the process of writing the script. I think that's the section of the script that they struggled with the most. And we'll talk about a couple of other writers and their approaches. And maybe they would have worked better. And I read other versions of the script, Lizzie, and I can pitch them to you. And you can tell me if you would have liked them more. But all to say, I still kind of enjoyed it. Do I think it's good? No. Would I ever recommend it to someone? No. But if it comes on, I probably wouldn't turn it off. And that's where I land with Resident Evil. And so I'm excited to get into it today. Yeah, Speaker 2 (10:08) I'm excited to hear about this process too. And, you know, you make a good point about when this came out. I think now, because this type of movie is so ubiquitous, it's easy to be like, wow, that was not good. But considering it came out before 28 Days Later, that makes more sense to me as to why this did end up spawning a film franchise. I was very confused about that when watching it. watching it because it just seemed like a bit of a dud, if you will. But tell me more, Chris. All right, let's talk Speaker 4 (10:35) about it. Before we get there, the details. Resident Evil is an action zombie science fiction video game adaptation written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. The other one. It was adapted from the Capcom game of the same name, produced by Bernd Eichinger and Konstantin Film of Germany. It stars Emilia Jovovich as... Alice, Michelle Rodriguez as Rain, James Purifoy as Spence, Eric Mabeus as Matt, Martin Cruz as Kaplan, Colin Salmon as one and many, well, a few more. It actually has a pretty contained cast. Yeah, I was going to Speaker 2 (11:11) say, not that many. It Speaker 4 (11:12) was distributed by Screen Gems in the United States, and it was released in the United States on March 15th, 2002. As always, the IMDb logline reads, a special military unit fights a powerful, out-of-control supercomputer and hundreds of scientists who have mutated into flesh-eating creatures after a laboratory accident. Speaker 2 (11:32) Okay, you know what? I know what it is. I know what the part of this movie is that confused me the most and felt like such a redirect. It's the computer. Sure. I was just very deeply confused about what proto-mothers... The Speaker 4 (11:44) files are in the computer? Speaker 2 (11:45) Yeah. Yeah, I felt like Zoolander in this movie. about what her motivations were and what her function was. Yeah. I mean, it seemed like it was to contain the virus, but then at other times it did not seem like that. That I think was the biggest sticking point for me is what is mother doing? I know it's not mother, but. Speaker 4 (12:02) There are some kitchen sink qualities to the way this was written. And we can get into perhaps the motivations for the inclusion of specific elements, especially given the success of films that immediately preceded Resident Evil. So the sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, we had a really fun time deep diving this one, Resident Evil Oral History, Set Secrets from its 15-year run from Inverse. That also includes a lot of really fun facts about the later films, which we're not going to talk about. Fangoria Magazine's 211th issue from April of 2002, Phantom Limbs, Dissecting Horrors, Lost Sequels, and Remakes by Jason Jenkins. This is a really fun book. The PlayStation Magazine, May and June of 1998 releases. Resident Evil, behind the scenes, the DVD featurette. Also, I just want to recommend the director. The audio commentary for Resident Evil is very funny. It's Speaker 3 (12:49) Milijovic and Michelle Rodriguez and Paul Anderson. And Speaker 4 (12:52) Milijovic, like, forgets they're doing a commentary at one point. And it's just like, wait, what are we doing here? Is this a commentary on this movie? She at one point, I believe she says that if enough people see the movie, she'll get implants at one point in this thing. It's very funny. So if you guys are interested, check it out. Also many, many more articles, retrospectives and interviews with those involved in the film. So Lizzie, let's talk about how a relatively straightforward, I would say, computer game, video game, console game became one of the most confusing movies you've seen in recent years. Speaker 2 (13:22) I will preface all of my complaints by saying that I was very tired. So... It may be mostly my fault. No, no, Speaker 4 (13:30) no, no. No, I'm not that dumb. It is kind of unnecessarily convoluted. There's no reason to withhold certain reveals as late as they do in the movie, in my opinion, too. Well, Lizzie, in some ways you could trace Resident Evil back to a seminal film of the late 1960s, shot in black and white for almost no money on the East Coast. What am I talking about? Speaker 2 (13:51) Oh, oh, Night of the Living Dead? Speaker 4 (13:54) Night of the Living Dead by George Romero. And if you're interested in the evolution of zombies as monsters, you can listen to our Primer episode to search zombies! Exclamation point in our feed. We will put a link in the show notes. But practically speaking, Resident Evil was actually born far east of where we are right now, far from the American East Coast, in Japan. Okay, that makes sense. It's based on a Japanese video game. But that video game, Lizzie, never would have existed. if it had not been for a video game that preceded it called Sweet Home, which was not sweet, but it did take place in somebody's home. And this video game was based on a movie. So in January of 1989, Toho, which we talked about during our episode on Seven Samurai, released a horror film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. No relation to Akira Kurosawa. I mentioned Kiyoshi Kurosawa briefly, Lizzie, when we were doing our review of Obsession, because there's a couple of shots in Obsession that are direct homages to Kurosawa's film Pulse, which was adapted in the United States with, I think, Kristen Bell at one point and wasn't great. Kurosawa is one of the masters of kind of slow burn J-horror of the late 90s and early 2000s. His movie Cure is pretty amazing. But Sweet Home was much earlier in his career. 1989. It was produced by Juzo Itami. Now, Itami is also a big producer. He's an actor. He's a director in his own right. He actually has a role in this movie as kind of the gas station attendant who warns our heroes from going to the Haunted Mansion. It has a lot of Western Speaker 3 (15:26) themes Speaker 4 (15:26) to it. Yeah, he's wearing a lot of prosthetic makeup. You go, why is this like 40-year-old man dressed like a 70-year-old? So the IMDb logline reads, a TV production crew is making a documentary about the infamous painter Mamiya Ichiro. When they start filming at his old home, they come under attack from the ghost of the painter's wife. So I watched this movie in preparation for this episode. It's very fun. It's basically a pretty direct ripoff of Robert Wise's The Haunting. Okay. If you've seen the 1963 version of that film. I Speaker 2 (15:55) may have seen a remake, but yes. Speaker 4 (15:57) Yeah, there was the remake in 99, I believe. But anyway, so, you know, camera crew, five people, basically, they go to this house. It's a haunted house. They're looking for these frescoes that are supposedly in this house. This painter's died 30 years ago. They find this beautiful fresco, but then in other rooms, they find these really horrifying frescoes. And what they slowly realize is that the spouse, the wife of Ichiro, was opening the furnace to, you know, heat up the house in the morning. And when she wasn't looking, her child, her toddler, crawled into the furnace. She started the furnace, accidentally burned her child to death. went insane and then started luring other children to the home to burn them in the furnace so that her child would have friends in the afterlife. And then the townspeople murdered her by throwing her in the furnace. It's gnarly. Whoa. All right. It's also, for the first hour, I would say it's pretty tonally jarring because musically it plays almost comedic. But then for the last 40 minutes, it's great. And it goes full poltergeist. And it is so fun. Nice. All right. I would highly recommend it. If you guys are, you know, fans of Cure or Pulse or, you know, Kurosawa, try to check it out. It's on YouTube. This is, again, a little more down the middle. It's like Poltergeist, The Haunting, Alice in Wonderland. But it's got a few unique elements. So producer Juzo Itami's father was Mansaku Itami, who mentored Shinobu Hashimoto, who wrote Seven Samurai, Fun Connection. Second. Oscar winner Dick Smith did the special makeup effects, and they are great. Speaker 2 (17:29) Amazing. Yeah, he's an absolute legend. Speaker 4 (17:31) Yeah, The Exorcist, we talked about recently. Guillermo del Toro, you know, wrote to him to become his mentor. Third, the movie's got a tie-in video game. It's going to be released the same year for the Japanese console system, the Famicom. That stands for family computer. And it was Nintendo's original console released in 1983. The American version, Lizzie, released in 85, was eventually called the Nintendo Entertainment System or the NES. Got it. So in the United States, video game tie-ins at this point had a pretty bad reputation. And they would for a long time. There's a really notorious example that we have actually mentioned on the show, which was the E.T. the Extraterrestrial tie-in game for Atari. Yes. So this was released in late 1982. I actually read that they had to develop it in something like six to eight weeks in order to make it to market in time. And it was a massive flop. So released in 1982, same year as the film. E.T. becomes the highest grossing movie of all time. And then there was a rumor that this game sold so poorly that they actually dumped all the extra copies in a landfill. Yes. That actually ended up proving somewhat true. The magnitude of the number of cartridges dumped was exaggerated. However, they did dig them up eventually and realized, well, there's a lot of cartridges down here. An excavation of the E.T. cartridges. Some historians have even cited this game as a contributing factor to the 1983 video game crash, which sent the industry in the United States into a recession through 1985. This recession was bad, Lizzie. So home video game revenue dropped more than 90 % from 1983 to 1985. Speaker 2 (19:08) Listen, if you're going to make a bad video game, you want to make sure it's tank the market, make sure it's bad enough to literally ruin it for everyone. Speaker 4 (19:16) That's right. So again, very broadly speaking, video game tie-ins have historically been considered, you know, low quality cash grabs. I would put them a level or two below novelizations of films, for example. When video game designer Tokudo Fujiwara joined Capcom, he wanted to design arcade games. So arcade games, Lizzie, often used high-end custom hardware, way too expensive for the average home to buy, but they then had better graphics, they could do more sophisticated things. Consoles were cheap, but consoles were kind of starting to win the market. So Capcom had started in the arcade space, but with the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System, they started to pivot. So Fujiwara had worked on 1985's Ghosts and Goblins, which was an arcade game that we don't believe featured any ghosts, but did have a lot of zombies and maybe some goblins. It was a hit on arcade, and then it was a smash when they ported it, meaning they transferred, they made a version for the console system. So they have to make a version that works on the lower quality hardware of the console system. Street Fighter is released in arcades in 1987. That gets ported. And then all of a sudden, around this time, Capcom gets split into two departments, arcade games and console games. This is a bit of a surprise because before it was just, look, we'll develop it for arcades and then we'll create sort of a downstream version for consoles. And now they're saying, no, we're going to develop stuff straight for consoles. It would almost be like a studio saying, we're going to do stuff for theaters and then we're going to independently do things for home video. Perhaps a way to think of it. So Fujiwara was apparently pretty stunned. They were going to make games for the Famicom system. And then he got assigned to run the console division. Not exactly what he's hoping to do at this point in time. He's working on Mega Man 2 and he hates it. Quote, I wasn't earning a daily income. We didn't do any location testing. We didn't get to interact with players. The hardware was a step down from what I was using before. Not to mention the fact that I'd originally wanted to make arcade games. All this made it hard for me to see the change in a positive light at first. Speaker 4 (21:17) This podcast is sponsored by Built. Guys, Built was an easy advertiser to say yes to because it means you earn points on every housing payment. That is the biggest expense for the vast majority of us. I know it is for me. Rent, mortgage, it doesn't matter. You're paying it anyway, and Built says you should get something back for it. 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Speaker 4 (22:28) So Fujiwara is working in the console division and they get the assignment to make the sweet home video game tie-in, which from one perspective could be seen as the ultimate demotion. Not only are you not making arcade games, Speaker 3 (22:39) but Speaker 4 (22:40) you need to make the weird video game tie-in for this random horror film. And then all of Speaker 3 (22:45) a Speaker 4 (22:45) sudden Fujiwara realizes something. With horror, the limitations of the hardware became an asset. So as one interviewer of Fujiwara wrote, Even though primitive hardware makes for poor graphics, it means that you don't run into issues when making games with extreme content. With advanced hardware, you can show off more realistic graphics, but the better the graphics get, the stricter the censorship becomes. When