Netflix’s ‘Resident Evil’ Show Is A Surreal Fever Dream That Defies Classification

For a while there, it seemed like we had perhaps broken the video game adaptation curse, thanks in part to Netflix itself, home of brilliant projects like Castlevania and The Witcher (yes, it’s based on the books, but influenced by the games). Now, we seem to be back in coinflip territory with the arrival of a deeply weird offering that I’m having trouble processing after binging it in one day, Netflix’s new live-action Resident Evil show.

This is easily one of the strangest shows I’ve seen in quite a while, it seems to be splitting fans in terms of whether they appreciate its insanity or reject it.

It may depend on where you’re coming from. Despite my day job as a gaming writer, Resident Evil is one series that I have never been terribly invested in. I’ve sporadically played the games over the years, but not that much, and my knowledge of the lore is pretty limited. So I am not going into Resident Evil with a superfan, “this must be a worthy, brilliant adaptation” idea.

And yet even as a weird, sci-fi zombie show, I don’t think Resident Evil works all that well either, with very few exceptions, and a couple of standout cast members.

From the beginning the show has chosen to do a timeline split. In 2036, we meet Jade, an apocalypse survivor studying the behavior of “zeroes” (zombies) to try to learn more about them. Then we flash back to 2022 where a 14 year-old Jade is arriving to New Raccoon City in South Africa with her sister Billie and father Albert Wesker.

First off, I hate this timeline split, even though it’s very clear why it was done. If the show focused purely on the “origin of the outbreak” storyline with the teens, there would have effectively been…zero zombies in a Resident Evil show. Can’t do that, so we need this future storyline that is more or less Jade just moving around from one dangerous place to another so we are treated to our quota of zeroes, lickers and giant, T-virus infected animals. This storyline feels like a sub-par variant of all the schlocky Milla Jovovich movies, and does not become remotely interesting until the end. Which is after eight hours of filler, because everything is now a TV show, not a movie.

Meanwhile, the “flashback” timeline is essentially the main one, and is bizarre on many levels. The tone of this show is just all over the place, threading in pop culture references like Elon Musk, Spongebob Squarepants and uh, Zootopia porn. More than once the T-virus is compared to COVID (you don’t need to quarantine, but it’s much more dangerous!).

Fortunately, the 2022 storyline gives us the show’s best asset, Lance Reddick’s Albert Wesker. I am a sucker for Reddick in pretty much anything, and he does a phenomenal job with what he has to work with here. He’s great as Wesker for the first stretch of the show, but then after a late plot turn, really has the chance to expand his range and answer questions Resident Evil fans have had about why this version of the character exists at all.

By the end, I also quite liked the main villain, Evelyn Marcus, played by Paola Núñez with a sort of unhinged glee which is what I wish the rest of the series projected. She feels like the most game-true character to me, lest we forget how bonkers most of the mainline Resident Evil games actually are.

One major problem with Resident Evil is how it ends, with zero resolution and boldly confident it’s going to get a second season pickup to continue storylines. Without getting into spoilers, you might imagine that the past storyline and the future storyline would converge, but the series ends with the clear indication that both of these separate time tracks are going to continue, and it’s just a litany of annoying cliffhangers that demand a second season. But it also makes watching everything that came before feel somewhat pointless.

I can’t say this is a good show. I’m also not confident saying this is a “so bad it’s good” show because even though it does have those moments, there’s just so much filler in these eight, hour-long episodes that it’s more just exhausting than anything else. While I respect the idea of doing a non-game storyline, I feel like there had to be have been better options, and I really dislike the split timeline gimmick that results in exactly zero payoff by the end. We’ll see how things play out in what at least the show believes will be an inevitable second season.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.