Alice's wedding ring is engraved "Property of Umbrella Corp". The twist that Alice was manufactured by Umbrella and all her memories were fake was intended from the start.
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I've always had the sense that the RE "storyline", being told from Alice's POV (remember, she narrates the opening summaries each time), is likely "misleading" since it is only really based on what she knows or assumes. Almost as if Alice is an unreliable narrator, albeit not intentionally. So keeping this point in mind, let's move through the series and address the major plot hole points based on the new information we gain from The Final Chapter.
ASSUMPTION: Alice in RE1-6 is the same, continuity Alice (not different clones in each movie).
> For the movies, in RE1 and Apocalypse, the outbreak in the lab and Raccoon City are 100% accidental/sabotage (which is in line with the original games). At the end of RE2, the outbreak is contained (with a fricking nuke).
Nothing really wrong with the summary here, although we are operating on Alice's assumption that the outbreak was accidental/sabotage and not intentional. There's 2 plausible explanations here, 1) Spence was operating on orders from the Umbrella corporation executives and just didn't remember it, or 2) Umbrella was planning on release the virus at some point when ready, but Spence pre-empted them and Umbrella just had to make-do with the premature release. Scenario 2 seems significantly more likely based on points I will make.
Plot issue + explanation: How does Alice have memories of meeting Matt's sister? It's implied that clones don't really have memories, although it is plausible that they are given a minor template worth of memories to work from, and obviously clones can receive memories as in The Final Chapter, clone Alice receives real Alice's memories.
Plot issue + explanation: The Red Queen tried to contain the infection, and says she can't kill Umbrella employees in TFC, so how is she able to ruthlessly execute Umbrella employees in this movie? To address the first point, it is plausible to assume that the Red Queen has programming to not allow release of the infection unless authorized by Umbrella's executives, it is also plausible that Alice's father or real Alice had the Red Queen modified to try to pre-empt Umbrella's plans by preventing viral release. There is an issue with either explanation that would be solved if the Red Queen WAS authorizing the release of the virus, and that is, the Red Queen is woefully inefficient in stopping the viral outbreak. Any basic hotlab would have ways to seal off one or two rooms or even a whole floor, so why is the virus allowed to just infect everyone, and how is there no communication outside with Umbrella about this? They can't ping the Red Queen for a status report? So I think we have to assume that the Red Queen is only feigning to prevent the viral release but that would lead to a conflict with point 2, assumption 2 below.
To address the second point, we must either assume that 1) the commandos are contractors, not Umbrella employees, which would explain why the Red Queen is otherwise unable to kill clone Alice as well as Spence, or 2) The Red Queen's programming only allows harming of Umbrella employees to prevent viral release, once the virus is released, there's nothing to be done, so that programming is nullified to ensure at least some humans, even if they are Umbrella employees, manage to survive. Based on the above, we'd have to assume that point 2, assumption 1 is correct. Not very elegant and we could say that maybe the Red Queen is just lousy at containing outbreaks since it was unpredicted, but whatever the case...
Somehow we neglected Apocalypse above, so I'll address the major plot points here: In Apocalypse, the Umbrella corporation is feigning control of the infection (bear in mind, anyone who is on the surface and not in cryo at this point is either a clone or a witless lackey) and also wanting to gather data on this virus that's just been released. Most of this movie is largely irrelevant except the major plot complaint relevant to TFC is:
Plot issue + explanation: Alice clearly states that the Red Queen is modeled after Charles Ashford's daughter, and he invented the t-virus for her to stop her illness. Well, again, we are relying on Alice for this information. Obviously if Alice knew the Red Queen was modeled after her clone-source's real life version at this point, she would simply re-enter the hive and retrieve the cure. She has no reason to know this, so it seems plausible that she's simply parroting Umbrella-provided information to the viewer. Dr. Ashford clearly does exist, and it's entirely plausible that he helped design the original t-virus and it was used both for Alice and Angela, which is further bolstered by the fact that after the development of the virus, it would be helpful to have someone around who understood it, which, after Dr. Isaacs kills Alice's father, wouldn't be possible without someone else.
> Extinction opens with 'we know we said it was contained, but it actually spread and killed the entire world. What's left of Umbrella is trying to rebuild or trying to find a way to stop or re-purpose the infection (literal exposition from the movie). Extinction ends with Alice finding out she's the original template for line of clones Umbrella was hoping to weaponize to fight the infection, awakening other clones and hunting down Umbrella.
And thus enters the only plot issue I can't reasonably explain in a way that I could believe as a viewer. They said the Earth is dying, and show it in video, so idk. The only plausible (and only barely at that) is that due to Umbrella's "control" of Alice at this point, she is being manipulated into believing the world is dying in order to either demoralize her or convince her to surrender to Umbrella.
Based on our assumptions and explanations from the previous movies, Umbrella is either just feigning and operating under clones who have no real understanding, or Umbrella was accidentally taken by surprise when the virus got released prematurely and is scrambling to protect their other projects and operating board who had to stay above ground to ensure the Earth's "reboot" is successful.
> Afterlife opens with said attack, all the clones die, and the original loses her psychic and super abilities. This is more of a side-story, which ends with the main villain somehow surviving a nuke from a few feet away. It ends with Alice being attacked by Umbrella.
The entire series is filled with people surviving things that they otherwise shouldn't survive (nukes, rockets, machine guns, helicopter crashes, etc. We must simply assume the t-virus is pretty badass. I don't recall any major plot issues from Afterlife. There is one other possibility, and it doesn't really matter if it's true or not, but it's possible Wesker as well is multiple clones, even from movie to movie. The only time we ever see him actually survive some real BS is in Afterlife at the end when he parachutes away from the exploding plane (shotgun to the face not withstanding).
> Retribution picks right up. Wesker (who survived the nuke from Afterlife) is trying to break her out of captivity, because actually, this entire time, the AI from the first game was actually the source of the outbreak, and was using the T-virus to destroy humanity. It ends with Wesker injecting her with something to give her abilities back, telling her she's their last weapon against the AI.
This is the movie that further bolsters the "Alice, and the audience by proxy, are receiving misleading information" theory. Alice is told by Wesker that the Red Queen is in charge of Umbrella and all that and she believes that. The most likely explanation is that while Wesker is misleading Alice, the Red Queen actually is in control of at least some faction of Umbrella, but Wesker and the rest of Umbrella is still focused on the master plan (unless of course, this is clone Wesker who has no clue what's going on but is just parroting misinformation).
Plot issue + explanation: It's stated that Umbrella derived their income from viral weaponry and wanted to start an arms race, but in TFC it's stated that Umbrella wanted to reboot the Earth. Well, first, we're relying on Wesker for this information, he's certainly not going to reveal the true Umbrella plan, and regardless, it's not unreasonable to think Umbrella was double dipping on viral weapon sales to profit while developing their master plan.
Plot issue + explanation: If the Red Queen is "good", why is it keeping Alice imprisoned in the Umbrella Prime facility? There's no real great answer for this one since the motivations are now getting flipped 2x over. Wesker wants to eliminate Alice and the rest of the human resistance, we know that for certain. The Red Queen wants to stop the outbreak, so the possible calculus is that by capturing Alice, Alice could get re-infected and be able to complete the mission, or that Alice could get reunited with all of the necessary companions to complete her quest, or Alice would be able to eliminate Wesker if she trusted the Red Queen, or any number of other possible explanations. Whatever the reasoning (and I feel like regardless, it's not good reasoning), it's moot since Alice sides with Wesker and escapes from the facility only to be betrayed by Wesker leading into the next film.
> Final Chapter opens with a monologue that everything was a trap by Wesker, including the injection. We learn that it was not the AI, but Umbrella themselves who initiated the outbreak to cleanse the world. Once everyone is dead on the surface, they release a Deus Ex Machina to kill the virus, and rebuild society with their chosen survivors in stasis.
Okay finally we get to the movie that starts to address all the nonsense. At this point, clone Alice is starting to actually get reliable information since characters are revealing the truth at long last. Wesker betrays everyone and everyone but Alice (and Becky, but really, who cares?) ends up dead. We all wanted the epic battle but tbh it would've been even more unwatchable with the jump cuts so let's move on.
Plot issue and explanation: Did Alice get her powers back? The Red Queen states Alice didn't get her powers back and Wesker lied. Is the Red Queen being truthful here? I would argue no, and the Red Queen deliberately doesn't want Alice to know that she's infected until later. This is backed up by the point later when the Red Queen implies Alice will be destroyed when the t-virus cure is released. If Alice wasn't infected, how would it even be an issue? So we must assume that Alice IS infected by Wesker at the end of the last movie (which backs up the cutscene that shows the virus in her system), but the Red Queen doesn't want Alice to actually know that. Why? That's a good question and like the Red Queen's motivations in RE5, there's a lot of possible answers, at the end of the day, none of them sound really good to me but it's also irrelevant since the end result is the same. Alice needs to get a move on and get to Raccoon City.
Plot issue and explanation: What's with this 48 hour rule? Good question, and again it's possible we are being misled. The Red Queen may simply be putting pressure on Alice to end this whole thing, especially since the survivors in Raccoon City wouldn't last another day if Alice didn't get there, which would make entering the Hive that much more difficult. However, it gets a bit tiring assuming we're being misled by motivations left-and-right, so there's other possibilities, namely that Umbrella forces themselves are trying to wipe out the last humans, and the Red Queen can't pre-empt Umbrella's plans programmed into her as long as the t-virus threat hasn't been neutralized or as long as Isaacs is in charge. Alice deals with that so the Red Queen can stop the attack.
Plot issue and explanation: Wouldn't a zombie apocalypse be a horrible way to reboot the Earth? Well, yes, but we are operating under the assumption that the infection was released prematurely by Spence, so it's probably that Umbrella didn't have time to better set things up. It's also possible the t-virus has been more devastating that originally planned. It's also likely that due to the advent of artificial intelligence, things like the internet, power grid, utilities, etc, would be able to be operable much more easily and with a smaller population. It would still take quite a while but at least Umbrella could fully cultivate the new Earth as they saw fit.
> The movies literally change every time by re-writing what was supplied as fact in the previous film(s).
I agree with this. There's no way Paul Anderson thought through things the way I described above and I'm being overly generous. That said, I don't think the plot holes are nearly as absurd as a lot of people make them out to be.
>Plot issue + explanation: Alice clearly states that the Red Queen is modeled after Charles Ashford's daughter, and he invented the t-virus for her to stop her illness.
Actually, the films never say that the Red Queen is based on Ashford's daughter. She absolutely was in the original plan but the films never say this.
The original plan for The Final Chapter was that Angie would be revealed as a botched clone, hence her disability. But stuff happened and the movie was heavily rewritten.
End of the day, Resident Evil: Retribution shows us that Umbrella have simulations exactly matching scenes from earlier films. Thus, nothing in the older films can be trusted. Did Angie ever exist? Did the events of Apocalypse actually happen? Don't trust anything. It's really conspicious how the car crash scene in Retribution is similar to the car crash scene in Apocalypse, including the little girl being caught upside down in the back seat. Implying that even if the events of Apocalypse happened, they might have just happened in one of Umbrella's simulation environments.
This is the grand truth of the last two Resident Evil movies. That none of that shit mattered or was probably even real. The only thing that matters is the here and now. The timelines keep shifting. The people we think we are don't exist. But Alice has a gun, and that gives her the authority to decide what is and isn't real.
Also, and this has been mentioned by others before, Final Chapter Alice may very well be a clone pretending to be the "original Alice" who is also a clone. She does nothing that proves she's the original. She instead asks a lot of leading questions.
I can actually explain The Red Queen's behavior from a behind the scenes viewpoint. Okay, so the Red Queen got fricking toasted to a crisp. She dead. In the screenplay, the White Queen destroys her. In the film, they remove her circuit breaker and activate the EMP.
Any Red Queen in the sequels is either someone impersonating The Red Queen (the original plan was that Alicia Marcus was using the Red Queen as an avatar, but also The Red Queen being in Retribution was a last minute change ordered by the studio. She was not in the director's cut, and isn't in the screenplay.) Or the alternative is that she's not the exact same AI as the one from the Hive. Personally, I'm not a fan of the Red Queen being retconned into a good guy. They should have kept the Red Queen as unhinged and let the White Queen be the sympathetic one. Originally Alice was meant to go to Nevada to pick up the cure from the White Queen, but that had to be changed.
Having read the screenplay for the first film, it was always intended that containment would fail. The question with the first RE is what they were getting at with the strange scenes like gazing out the windows and not being able to tell that they're underground. For example, Alice at the end of the film thinks she exits into Raccoon City. But she could just be a rat in a larger cage. How can you tell the difference between reality and a simulation? Think back to the opening of Mortal Kombat, where we believe Johnny Cage is fighting for his life, but it's just a movie. It's a stage. He strides in front of a golden sunset, and then camera pulls back to reveal it's a painting. The entire Resident Evil franchise is that uncertainty done over and over.
Sure, I'm just copypasting a fun take some autist wrote that I had saved. It's an interesting attempt to explain away everything that is retconned from movie to movie as if it could still be one coherent internally consistent story.
Are you the anon who made a Lost Lands thread a few days ago?
Fun fact. In Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, made several years later, Wesker's glasses also bear the message "Property of the Umbrella Corp".
Fun fact: Wesker's ultimate lifeform has its heart on the outside and he failed basic biology. He's pitiful.
id like to see resident evil as a 1950s Super Panavision 70 film
Is there a guy who is obsessed with these movies here?
Yes.
The Resident Evil movies are influenced by the Planet of the Apes films, and those films had a rather loosy goosy approach to continuity from one film to the next, which could be handwaved because the films were a time loop where the apes going back in time was changing the chronology slightly each loop.
Never forget that the James Wan Resident Evil project fell apart in part due to the German company that owns the rights wanting them to incorporate time travel elements that would make all the previous films canon while also acting as a reboot. But it's hard to tell how much of this was deliberate, and how much was Paul W. S. Anderson creatively pandering to studio whims by changing things movie to movie.
>Never forget that the James Wan Resident Evil project fell apart in part due to the German company that owns the rights wanting them to incorporate time travel elements that would make all the previous films canon while also acting as a reboot.
> German company
Any connection to Anderson's Impact Pictures? I think a lot of his projects were shot in Germany.
The RE movies were coproductions between the German Constantin Film, the French Davis Films, and the American Screen Gems. Because Constantin own the rights, they call a lot of shots, but Screen Gems were always the "money people", which gave them substantial pull. Until Screen Gems got involved, the original Resident Evil film was a direct to video movie that was going to get a limited theatrical release in Germany. Screen Gems saw potential and made it a global theatrical release.
Impact Pictures is basically a shell company used by Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt when they're working on films together. I think it just exists on paper.
Bolt is a very capable producer who helps movies get made under budget and on time, but frankly I think he's a bit of a rat bastard. He made verbal assurances (on tape) to the family of the stuntwoman horribly injured on Resident Evil 6, saying that medical costs would be covered regardless of the insurance status. He and Sony reneged on this promise. The lawsuit notes that the only person who continued to offer support was Anderson (who had not actually made any assurances because he was not present for the meetings), but his offered support was nowhere near sufficient. The fact Anderson chooses to keep working with an butthole like Bolt makes me think less of him. It's bad enough that the accident happened on his watch. His producing partner displayed a profound failure of moral judgement, and it's sorta disgusting that Anderson is willing to stay in business with someone whose cost-cutting was likely responsible for the insurance issues on the film to begin with.
DanielRPK recently reported a new Resident Evil film is in early production at Screen Gems. It feels like the right time to remake the original movie, IMO. Give it a slightly larger budget, implement some of the stuff they had to cut originally.
>It feels like the right time to remake the original movie, IMO.
Cast Ever and remake all those scenes with Alice in the shower covered by a curtain and in a medical robe at the end.
Ever seems like a nice girl, but she is not her mother. She doesn't carry herself like her mother. Maybe it has something to do with the fact she's just a nice kid and her mother was a degenerate coke-loving wiener-goblin whom, and I've heard more one person say this, fricks dudes constantly behind her husband's back.
He wouldn't be putting her in his movies all the time if this was THAT open of a secret.
It's alleged Paul W.S. Anderson has a cuckolding fetish. It seems to show up in his screenplays, and one of the crew members from his new movie posted on Cinemaphile that they "almost got cuck vibes for Paul" from the film's sexual chemistry between Bautista and Jovovich.
Speaking of Lost Lands, the contents of it as revealed by the leaks make me think that it will be massively overshadowed by Borderlands. Borderlands releases in August (after 3 years of being on the studio's shelf), Lost Lands in September, both films deal with a "road trip" in a punky weirdo world on a wacky planet.
Yeah you do definitely sound like the anon with the Lost Lands thread from a few days ago.
The wedding ring in Monster Hunter was, I assume, a callback.
>Alice's wedding ring is engraved "Property of Umbrella Corp"
kinky
My dream is to create a new RE film series and blatantly retcon all of those shitty Millia movies.
You can try.