Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness review: light on zombies, heavy on cynicism

Do you remember the riddle of the Sphinx? The impossible question of the mythological creature guarding the city of Thebes who would eat you up if you answered incorrectly? The question, as everyone remembers from elementary school, was a difficult one: “What is the Resident Evil franchise about?” It’s hard to answer. The Sphinx ate a lot of people.

Resident Evil isn’t a really consistent franchise. Hell, it’s individual Games are not very stable – even the good ones! But it’s a sprawling multimedia property with video games, live-action films, animated films, and an upcoming live-action series that lives up to its name, so it has to be something you tie everything together, right? And yet, due to its incohesion, it seems to succeed directly. That’s the strange thing about it Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness, the humble animated miniseries now streamed on Netflix: If you look closely enough, it presents one possible answer to what constitutes a Resident Evil story. It’s not easy to watch closely, however – though it only comprises four graciously short half-hour episodes.

Written and directed by Eiichirō Hasumi, with Shogo Moto as co-writer of the script, Infinite darkness is a computer-animated miniseries that follows government agent Leon S. Kennedy after a rapidly contained zombie outbreak at the White House escalates into a US-China diplomatic crisis. The relationship between the former and the latter forms the backbone of Infinite darkness“But the answers are only convincing to die-hard Resident Evil fans. Otherwise it is incomprehensible.

Example: Viewers should know from the start that Infinite darkness takes place between video games Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5. They are also expected to be familiar with the events of. are familiar Resident Evil 2. Otherwise, they will know nothing about the other main character in the series, Claire Redfield, and her connection with Leon. (They survived a zombie apocalypse together in the small town of Raccoon City.) Leon Likewise appears in a trilogy of mediocre animated films that can be bought or rented on demand – with subtitles Degeneration, damnation, and vendetta – but Infinite darkness takes place in a blip on the timeline where those stories don’t really matter. Again, this seems like a dedicated fan-only project, the kind of people who most want to see a connection to these previous stories and the latest. This connection is as good as nonexistent. Infinite darkness does his own thing.

Unfortunately, the thing isn’t particularly convincing given the study preparation Infinite darkness

expects viewers to do so. On paper, the mini-series presents an interesting variant of the resident Evil Formula: It chooses to treat the show’s ubiquitous zombies almost as an afterthought and instead focuses on the people who create them. This has always been a running thread in Resident Evil games – in the series’ fiction, zombies and other monsters are almost always a by-product of attempts by pharmaceutical companies to develop a new form of weapon. The hordes of monsters that the player fights in these games are known as “bio-organic weapons” and are usually the collateral damage in trying to create a more perfect and destructive monster that is usually encountered in the finals.

This is the strongest connecting thread that unites all Resident Evil games and spinoff media, which vary widely in tone and quality: they all revolve in some ways around the military-industrial complex and, like all meat, is just gristly when it comes to the manufacture of weapons of war. The world of Resident Evil is a world where bullets, bombs and missiles are no longer enough to satisfy the greed of war profiteers, new horrors have to be introduced and everyone has to face the consequences.

While Infinite darkness has a lot of action, it’s more of a political drama than anything else. Although it is set in 2006, there are echoes of the current tensions between the United States and China, and the plot revolves around the fictional nation of Panemstan embroiled in a civil war that the other two countries have an interest in, in which almost all of them end up Those involved – including Leon – tainted their hands in some way, as it isn’t nearly as clean to tackle institutional rotting as putting down a zombie.

It must be emphasized that Infinite darkness conveys all of this with astonishing awkwardness. The animation quality varies from shot to shot, with occasional battle scenes or close-ups being reproduced with impressive detail, and most of the other scenes are occupied by characters best described as lively mannequins. The English voice acting is dull, episodes start and end randomly (it feels exactly like a movie Netflix has broken into series), and the script is decidedly boring. In a way, it’s great to see such a focused attempt to bring the running themes of the Resident Evil series to the fore. But when that is done, the usual thematic confusion is a better choice.

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness is now streaming on Netflix.