It’s Milla Jovovich’s zombie-ridden, apocalyptic world, and we’re all just living in it. When writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson (Pompeii) first brought Resident Evil to the big screen in 2002, he launched a contagious franchise that would endure for more than two decades. Part horror, part action, and all leather-clad flair, the larger Resident Evil franchise — which will soon consist of eight live-action movies; four animated films; two series (the live-action Resident Evil and the animated Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness); a stage play; and dozens of novels and comics — is based on Capcom’s long-running Japanese video game series of the same name, also known as Biohazard.
The primary live-action films star series mainstay Jovovich as Alice, whose journey from loyal employee to superpowered rogue warrior serves as the franchise’s (undead) heart. Alice begins the first film as an amnesiac security officer for the Umbrella Corporation, an evil pharmaceutical and biotech company that develops and unleashes the T-virus, which transforms its victims into flesh-hungry monsters. With every new installment, the mutated creatures grow more demonic. But Alice’s powers also flourish, as does her army of loyal friends and allies. Together, they work to stop the Umbrella Corporation’s world domination plot and save the final vestiges of humanity.
Read on to join the fight and learn more about the Resident Evil films now streaming on Netflix.
The lethal T-virus has turned the world into a desolate wasteland. Five years after fleeing the decimated Raccoon City, zombie apocalypse survivors Carlos (Oded Fehr) and L.J. (Mike Epps) join a roving band of fighters led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter). Alice (Milla Jovovich) — the heroic former subject of a cloning program gone awry — roams the desert, where she uncovers a reference to Arcadia, a supposedly uninfected locale in Alaska. After saving Claire’s people from a deadly flock of mutated crows, Alice convinces the group to seek out Arcadia together. But Dr. Alexander Isaacs (Iain Glen), the mad scientist who heads the Umbrella Corporation, isn’t finished with Alice and believes her DNA could hold the solution to his horrifying experiments. This 2007 threequel was written by Paul W.S. Anderson and directed by Russell Mulcahy (Highlander).
The fight against the evil Umbrella Corporation continues in 2010’s Resident Evil: Afterlife, written and directed by Anderson. As the superhuman Alice (Jovovich) travels the world searching for survivors and battling zombies, she unearths a terrifying truth: the legendary safe haven Arcadia isn’t what she thought. Upon reuniting with her ally Claire Redfield (Larter), the pair travels to Los Angeles, where they meet a capable crew of uninfected people living in a prison. But Alice’s enemies have eyes everywhere, and when the prison is beset by a giant axe-wielding mutant, the whole team will have to work together if they want to make it to safety.
The Umbrella Corporation is more powerful than ever in writer-director Anderson’s Resident Evil: Retribution (2012). As the T-virus continues to ravage the world’s population and zombies roam free, Alice’s (Jovovich) hunt for the people responsible for the outbreak leads her to vital clues about her mysterious past. She soon finds herself trapped in an underwater facility, having been captured by her brainwashed former ally Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory). But could her prison hold the key to salvation — for both Alice and the world at large?
The animated horror movie Resident Evil: Damnation (2012), aka Biohazard: Damnation, and its sequels are separate from the live-action films starring Jovovich. This flick follows agent Leon S. Kennedy (voiced by Matthew Mercer), who’s sent to investigate a former Soviet state to determine whether the government is using illegal Bio-Organic Weapons (BOWs) in an ongoing civil war. When he has a run-in with one of those BOWs, a terrifying mutant monster called a Licker, he’s ordered to evacuate. But retreat means letting the monsters ravage innocent civilians — and Leon refuses to stand by and let that happen.
In this 2017 Damnation sequel, Professor Rebecca Chambers (voiced by Erin Cahill) is studying the deadly A-virus — a mutant zombie pathogen that lies dormant in a subject until triggered — when a former CIA agent and current arms dealer, Glenn Arias (John DeMita), steals it for his own twisted revenge. Bioterrorism security officer Chris Redfield (Kevin Dorman) enlists Chambers and Leon Kennedy (Mercer) to take Arias down before he can unleash the virus’s horrors on New York City.
Agent Redfield (Dorman) returns in 2023’s Resident Evil: Death Island to investigate a potential T-virus bioterrorism event in San Francisco. When he and his team — Leon Kennedy (Mercer), Rebecca Chambers (Cahill), Claire Redfield (Stephanie Panisello), and Jill Valentine (Nicole Tompkins) — discover a trail of clues leading to the infamous prison on Alcatraz Island, they’re forced to face down a new zombie threat with the potential to destroy the world as they know it.
