Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
Sixth, and last, of Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil movies. Where Retribution made an effort to streamline the series narrative, iconography and ideology to its bare essentials, Final Chapter is an explosion of out of left field stylistic excesses and narrative sleight of hands. Final Chapter is the longest of the series, albeit still well under two hours long. It also presents the biggest stylistic departure from the other movies in the series. It's shot, edited and written very differently from anything that came before.
Final Chapter is the most typically post apocalyptic installment of the series since Extinction. About half of it deals with Alice's track from Washington DC to Raccoon City through devastated landscapes, now depicted as a red tinged, metal cover hellscape. Meanwhile, the cinematography abandons the clarity of the two previous movie in favour of a hectic machine gun barrage of images and movement. It speaks for Anderson's skills as an action director that the action scenes still manage to maintain their coherence despite this feverish presentation. "Feverish" might be the best way to describe Final Chapter in general. The series is not so much reaching a conclusion as completely unraveling as it's dragging itself past the finish line after catching on fire.
Final Chapter starts with Alice, weakened from an unseen battle in Washington DC, getting a message from the now rogue Red Queen AI, urging her to travel to the research facility where the series began for a last chance to stop Umbrella's push for world domination and find a cure for the virus. Final Chapter is big on last minute plot twists. Dr. Isaac's, Extinctions main antagonist, is still alive to oversee Umbrella's plot to inherit the earth. There are two of him, in fact. Alice is a clone of a murdered Umbrella scientists daughter, who's still kept alive by the Umbrella management. It's wild.
Final Chapter is, probably, the most ambitious and formally experimental movie in the series, but that also means it's the messiest since Apocalypse. All of a sudden, Anderson starts to dabble in religious imagery. Dr. Isaacs compares himself to Noah and employs the rhetoric of religious fundamentalism. A trinity (of bitches) is invoked when three different versions of Alice meet. The inner sanctum of the hive now resembles a cathedral more than the abstract, minimalist spaces we've come to associate with Umbrella's architecture. The elderly technocrat as the high priest of an apocalyptic cult with no, however misguided, intention to save the world but merely to "end it on their own terms". It's, if nothing else, an unapologetically angry movie.
RE: TFC show the series not so much coming together, as spilling out in many different directions. If Retributions compressed it, Final Chapter sees it exploding. Caught in that blast are, partly, things we've seen before. Ideas about the relationship of an original to a mass produced copy are brought up again and brought to their conclusion, both hero and villain of the movie being clones. But that's only part of it. Religious analogies. Robocop references. Mad Max inspired iconography and, hell, even some parts that harken back to Event Horizon. It lacks the focus on clarity the series used to have at its best, but it is undeniably kinda punk.
Final Chapter is a very messy way to conclude a long running series, and feels in many ways like an inversion, deliberate or otherwise, of what Anderson had been doing with it after taking back direction with Afterlife. Letting lose again after tightening it up. It still has its share of impressive action scenes, but the hectic, almost panicked direction makes them harder to appreciate them. The story throws in plenty of odd, last minute turns, some of which haven't been foreshadowed at all. It's, by all means, not a clean way to end the series.
Despite all of its ups and downs, I don't regret watching the Resident Evil movies. They were, even at their worst, examples of competent and decently engaging action cinema, at their best cheeky, satirical romps that invoke some of Verhoeven's better outings. There is a lot to be said for Anderson trying out a number of interesting things with this, not all of which pay off but enough of which do for me to appreciate them. Both at its best and its worst, I can say: I want Alice to step on me. And also, I was enjoying myself.
