Resident Evil: Character Analysis

A biological agent is stolen from a top secret facility run by the Umbrella Corporation and, in the process, is released into the facility, triggering the artificially intelligent security system to kill everyone inside. The problem is this: the biological agent regenerates non-living or diseased tissue and the recently dead don't stay that way. So an elite commando unit infiltrates the base to assess the damage and to contain the aftermath following the incident. And the aftermath is much larger than the corporation anticipated....

Our protagonist, Alice (Milla Jovovich) is initially a perfect example of an audience proxy. Alice loses her memory during the security breach. She is our eyes to the adventures; information is explained to her as the narrative plays out and she also regains her memory part of the way through. Jovovich's Alice has a certain innocent quality about her; and, as she starts to remember, her innocence fades and we're left with her true nature, which is consistently and incrementally released from innocent, amnesiac to hardened, jaded revenge-warrior. The outside world reflects her change. The global environment changes from lush, variable ecosystems to global deserts and urban wastelands.

The main villain is not a person, its a corporation whose play for world domination through business creates the apocalyptic condition their primary customers become. Their operatives are expendable; their lieutenants and leaders are cowards, living miles underground, away from the consequences. Then there's the infected, the consequence, which our heroes must fight, kill, or become part of on their way through the journey. They are the embodiment of what the Umbrella Corporation is, a gluttonous machine. Says a bit about massive corporations, I wonder if that's the point. Each film has a personification of the corporation, a main lieutenant, so to speak, and it's handled fairly well.

Alice is supported by some well fleshed-out characters through her journey. They provide a wide cadre of people to break up the mundanity of a single character going through the adventure. It's all right for video games, from which this series is based because it's a single-player game and the object is to simulate that the player is Alice. For instance, my dad has been Lara Croft, the Prince (of Persia fame,) Batman (in Lego form,) The Fellowship of the Ring, The Master Sergeant, and many others. However, he still looks like my dad, even after all of that. This approach, however, is not good for movie stories. Granted, it has worked before: Cast Away, I Am Legend, for instance. But, not for me. It's in human relationships that a story thrives. And a supporting cast is perfunctory for a story to work for me. This series has this in spades.

Audiences connect with people, so characters are required to act that way, whether they are human or not. In this case, the zombies are not characters, they are weapons and thematic elements. The Red Queen, in the first film, is a character, regardless of the fact she is a computer; she is purely logical and purely evil, something humans can be. The rest of the characters are human, so we definitely relate to them; and they are written well enough in this series for a relationship to form between the audience and the people in the series and for Alice, our hero.

The characters work well, their chemistry is well written and well delivered; a nice transition from a statically written medium.

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Coming Soon: Resident Evil - Story and Series Analysis.