Resident Evil Netflix

The second is the “current” timeline pre-disaster in 2022 where a young Jade and Billie Wesker (played by Tamara Smart and Siena Agudong) deal with the secrets ...

Family dynamics are another key focus of the show with the Wesker family, present and future, integral to the shape of the world as it unfolds. The second is the “current” timeline pre-disaster in 2022 where a young Jade and Billie Wesker (played by Tamara Smart and Siena Agudong) deal with the secrets that their father Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick) has kept from them their entire lives. The first timeline is set in the bleak landscape of 2036, opening with an adult Jade Wesker (played by Ella Balinska) on her own as she tries to study the zombies shambling around much of the world.

Netflix's new Resident Evil series is a Wesker family drama that ditches the horror. Why?

The show does a lot of work building on the story of the games and laying the foundation for future seasons should the show get picked up again. This Resident Evil is a family drama first and foremost, which is sure to turn off fans with certain, well-warranted expectations of the franchise. Some of the teen drama the girls grapple with at school feels a little aimless as well, but thank goodness Smart, Agudong, and Reddick are terrific together and elevate some of the weaker moments just enough to pull us through. Again, this is a show made for fans by fans, and to experience the story in full effect, the viewer should at this point be asking themselves, “Wait…didn’t he die in a volcano?” And yet, this is precisely how we meet him in the show, which should raise the eyebrows of longtime fans and mean, well, absolutely nothing to newcomers. But as you get deeper into the season, it becomes clear that the show is a direct continuation of the Resident Evil saga, centered on none other than Albert Wesker.

A still from the Netflix series "Resident Evil." He might seem like a nice-guy dad, but Albert Wesker is a mad scientist to the core. Credit: Netflix ...

But remember: The show already goes out of its way to build a story that's faithful to the events of the past. In all the ways that matter, though, the Netflix series is mindful of the world-building that preceded its arrival. It's important to remember, too: The last time gamers had any contact at all with Albert Wesker was in 2009's Resident Evil 5, which was set in the same year it came out. There's also a masked, chainsaw-wielding baddie who bears a striking resemblance to one of the threats players encounter in Resident Evil 4, but he serves a different purpose here and it's clearly not meant to be the same character. None of this is to say that the Netflix story is fully set within the same universe as all the games. There's even a "master of unlocking" gag, which plays with a widely mocked moment from the original Resident Evil. Totally different context on the show, but that's what makes it fun. But it's not subtle about referencing a fictional history that seems to tie in with the events of the games. The very first Resident Evil game is set in the fictional Midwestern town of Raccoon City, and the first Zero outbreak happened there in 1998. The giant centipede Zero that appears in the opening episode is almost identical to one that appears in a boss fight from the game Resident Evil 0. What I would say is there's nothing in the show's story so far making it utterly clear that Game Wesker and TV Wesker are separate people. The 2022 timeline introduces us to Albert, Jade, and Billie just as they're settling into New Raccoon City, a well-appointed company town established in South Africa, not too far from the capital city of Cape Town. But against all odds, the eight-episode live-action series from Andrew Dabb, a veteran of The CW's Supernatural story team, tells a riveting story about shady corporate maneuvering, the end of the world, and none other than Albert Wesker himself.

Albert Wesker returns from the dead in Netflix's 'Resident Evil' series. Showrunner Andrew Dabb and star Lance Reddick explain how.

Twins Jade and Billie are shocked when they find out that their father Albert is a clone after Bert pretends to be him and gets unusually violent over Olive Garden’s unlimited breadsticks. The diabolical scientist actually cloned himself in a bunker in the Arklay mountains, creating Albert, Bert and Alby, who are much nicer versions of him. The second thing is, this show is very much about parents and children, whether it’s Albert and his daughters, or Jade and her daughter, but also the original Wesker and his children because they were raised by him.” There’s just one problem: Wesker died in 2009 after a fight that ended with him falling into a volcano and being hit with an explosion on top of that. Someone like Albert, he would argue he’s not like his dad at all. “He doesn’t want to change the world; he wants to take over the world.

Netflix's furious reimagining of the veteran Resident Evil franchise makes it bones with terrific casting, dexterous pacing across two timelines, ...

Sleeper Star: Turlough Convery (Sanditon, Killing Eve) is a delight here as Baxter, a survivor of the T-Virus pandemic’s first wave and, just like in the Resident Evil video games, the leader of a squad of UC shock troops. But of course, the real connectivity here is in the casting, which is across the board brilliant. The scavengers have sold her out to the Umbrella Corporation for the bounty on her head, and Richard Baxter (Turlough Convery) is arriving to collect her with a chopper full of shooters. And that connects the world of 2036 back to 2022, where the dangers of the T-Virus are compared more than once to COVID in a savvy narrative update to our real world pandemic experience. “Stay the fuck away from me,” she tells them, and leaps from the compound’s wall. What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Netflix also features Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness, a CGI-animated miniseries set between the storylines of the fourth and fifth video games in the series. Rescued from the mutated caterpillar by a passing team of scavengers, the Jade of 2036 travels with them to their roughshod compound in Brighton, which is surrounded on all sides by endless packs of zeroes. “If they’re hiding this, what else are they hiding?” But as it turns out, the answer to that question is far more nefarious than either of them imagined. But he’s preoccupied with work, where Paola is pressuring him to authorize the launch of “Joy,” a direct-to-consumer panacea infused with the T-Virus. Its side effects are volatile, and decidedly not stabilized. “Eli Lilly made three billion a year off Prozac,” a marketing flack tells Albert. “We can double that in the first month.” Firing up a satellite-linked tablet, Jade visits with partner Arjun (Ahad Raza Mir) and her adorable daughter Bea, whose reading list has expanded from Wrinkle in Time to Shakespeare. But the distance is a grind, and especially because mortal danger is always one wrong step away. Based on all of the game action through Resident Evil: Village, the series puts two timelines to work, before and after the T-Virus global fail, and features many familiar characters, human and otherwise.

Lance Reddick (Albert Wesker) · Paola Nuñez (Evelyn Marcus) · Turlough Convery (Richard Baxter) · Ella Balinska (Jade Wesker) · Tamara Smart (Young Jade) · Adeline ...

But none of this means anything if you don’t watch the show and the only way to do that is by have an active Netflix subscription. If the stars properly align, he will talk about For Love Of The Game being the best baseball movie of all time. Connor Gosatti’s inclusion on the Resident Evil cast is perhaps the young actor’s biggest break yet. Smart first found success with the children’s fantasy drama series The Worst Witch in 2017, on which she took on the role of Enid Nightshade for the show’s four-season run. Portrayed by Siena Agudong, the younger version of Billie finds herself at odds with just about anyone and everyone in her path. Although her name may not be as recognizable as some of the other members of the Resident Evil cast, Balinska has proven she’s an up-and-coming star that needs to be followed. Since then, Rudolph has been featured on the podcast series Listening In, on which she voices a character named Sienna. Over the years, Convery has also found success on shows like Poldark, Les Misérables, Temple, Killing Eve, and Sanditon. In that same stretch of time, the Irish actor has popped up in a variety of movies ranging from Steven Spielberg’s 2018 adaptation of Ready Player One to Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical Academy Award winner Belfast in 2021. A prominent fixture of The Wire cast throughout the show’s five-season run, Reddick has long been one of the most prolific and interesting actors on TV, being able to play characters with a tremendous amount of range. The daughter of Albert Wesker is a hardened researcher who could very well be humanity's final chance at survival. But you won’t be seeing the return of Milla Jovovich’s Alice on this version of the Resident Evil cast since the show is taking a different direction than Paul W.S. Anderson’s successful film franchise of the same name. He has also played key roles in the Destiny and Horizon video game series the past decade.

Resident Evil has finally hit Netflix, but what are critics saying about the new series adaptation and it's approach to the canon?

With such a variety of opinions on Netflix’s Resident Evil present, it’s going to be a very interesting task to keep track of the reactions from fans binging the series as we speak. Austen Goslin of Polygon doesn’t seem to think the process of breadcrumbing future Resident Evil entries is working out, as seen in this piece of criticism: Starting with the review of Terry Mesnard at Gayly Dreadful, game and series canon seem to co-exist well enough:

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 ...

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. 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. 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. She feels like the most game-true character to me, lest we forget how bonkers most of the mainline Resident Evil games actually are. 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. 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.

There's a chance that a live-action Lady Dimitrescu may come to Netflix's 'Resident Evil.' Series showrunner Andrew Dabb spoke to Decider about the ...

The French actress and model has starred in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers and 2006’s Casino Royale. “But that being said, I’m sure there are actresses out there who would kill it that we’re not even thinking of. I would say it’s the No. 1 demand,” Dabb told Decider. “As the show moves forward, we will start to see more characters from the games show up. In an interview with Decider, showrunner Andrew Dabb revealed that he does know what we all want to see: yes, the writer’s room has talked about adding Lady Dimitrescu to this story, and yes, he has an actor in mind.

For six choppy hours, Netflix's "Resident Evil" series struggles to find its footing. Then Lance Reddick takes control. [Spoilers]

Surrender is the only option — and for “Resident Evil,” it’s also the best. “Resident Evil” is consistent in its attempts to convey substantial scale (be it the physical sets or CGI-monsters that fill them), and the finale refutes its bland title (“Revelations”) by opening up the goofy floodgates. Bert lets Reddick play a joyful new song, but to explain Bert, “Resident Evil” has to introduce a full band of Reddicks. To kick off Episode 7, we learn that Albert used to work at a lab in the Arklay Mountains with Bert and Alby. All three are clones of the original Albert Wesker, who made them to conduct secret research on his behalf. Second, and arguably more significant, is that Bert’s introduction tips “Resident Evil” over the edge. Bert has to pretend to be Albert — to be the dad he never got the chance to be — and suddenly he’s at an Olive Garden with Billie and Jade, shouting about breadsticks. The unnamed seabeast justifies its star turn by noshing on zombies, swatting helicopters out of the sky, and even befriending a little girl. The ending is actually fun, in part because “Resident Evil” lets its finest thespian off the leash, but also because it’s forced to serve the story its created, rather than any other ideas of what it should be. Albert’s big conflict throughout Season 1 is that Evelyn wants to rush a mood-boosting super-drug (lazily named “Joy”) to market, and he doesn’t think it’s ready. (Side note: I absolutely love that “Resident Evil” keeps with the films’ focus on female action stars and even doubles down by revolving around two sisters’ fractured relationship. Rather than tell one story well, it tells two stories poorly, and in a rebuttal to Jade’s quest to housebreak 6 billion zeroes, it’s clear the living and the dead can’t coexist. Up until the opening of Episode 7, Reddick plays Albert Wesker, Billie and Jade’s father who happens to be the top scientist at Umbrella. Working directly underneath the villainous CEO Evelyn Marcus (Paola Nuñez), Albert has been up to some shady shit. (For example, some zombies dive-bomb victims, piercing body armor and skin in a single bite, while others politely move aside when the hero’s only shield is a trashcan lid.)

Out of ammo - The live-action adaptations of the Resident Evil franchise have had a real rough time of it, huh? Paul W.S. ...

The callbacks to iconic moments from the games are certainly cool for veterans, but accomplish little more than muddy the waters for newcomers to the franchise. There’s enough here, in theory, to draw in newcomers while keeping long-time fans entertained, but unfortunately this Resident Evil squanders much of its potential and proves itself to be a convoluted mess that focuses too much on the family drama surrounding the Weskers and not enough on the franchise staple: the monsters. Indeed, for much of its runtime, Resident Evil feels very much like a young-adult drama wrapped up in the visual style of Capcom’s classic franchise. It’s a commendable attempt to break away from the core narrative of the game series in a way that makes sense for newcomers (mostly), but at the same time it tries desperately to please long-time fans of the franchise, ultimately failing to nail down its target audience. Zombies (known as ‘Zeroes’ here) understandably play a prominent role throughout, and we also get to see Zombie Dogs, Lickers, Giant Tarantulas, Dr. Salvador, and even a Tyrant. The problem, though, is that none of them are afforded any significant screen time. When Netflix announced its own take on Resident Evil via an eight-episode series, fans were understandably sceptical that the streaming juggernaut could pull off what Anderson and Roberts failed to do.

Exclusive: Lance Reddick, Paola Nuñez, Ella Balinska, Adeline Rudolph, Tamara Smart, and Siena Agudong tell Den of Geek what it's like bringing a new ...

We really love the games, and we want fans to know that.” The once shy, loving sister and daughter is now a high-ranking commander for Umbrella, relentlessly in pursuit of Jade and her comrades. She’s got her life partner and daughter to keep her sane, as well as her scrappy band of rebels. Being chased by giant spiders, caterpillars, and lickers was almost like a direct trajectory from playing the games to being in them.” Fans of the games will recognize her surname, as she’s the daughter of James Marcus, the former lead Umbrella scientist and head of training who pioneered t-Virus research. A tenured actor in Mexico, Paola Nuñez is best known to American fans for her role as Rita in Bad Boys For Life. In Resident Evil, she plays Evelyn Marcus, head of Umbrella Corp. and Albert’s boss.

While the video games have always been beloved and acclaimed, the Paul W. S. Anderson movie series starring his wife Mila Jovovich based on them are more ...

Most like Gossip Girl, these two adults also seem to have the composure and emotional maturity of teenagers. The issue with adapting Resident Evil is that many of the things that make the games good are impossible to translate to film, and the story was never one of the things that made these games so beloved. Making the leads of the show two teenage girls also makes the plot of the show pretty ridiculous, but not in a way that feels out of character for Resident Evil. If you’re a fan of the games, you probably know what happened to the original Raccoon City (zombie outbreak), and in the fiction of this version of the story, the discovery of this corporate coverup falls into the hands of two 14 year olds. In Gossip Girl, Serena and Dan’s parents dated when they were younger, and when the two teens meet in high school and hit it off, the two parents also get entangled in their own melodrama. Netflix’s Resident Evil is similarly campy, and that tone is enthusiastically embraced by Lance Riddick, who plays the longtime series villain Albert Wesker. In this show, he has two adopted daughters who come with him to New Raccoon City in South Africa, where he is working on a drug called Joy, that makes people happier. Resident Evil as a series has had a complicated relationship to the medium of film.

Resident Evil is back, and this time it's in the form of a live-action series from Netflix. While the games influence the plot and universe of Netflix's first ...

We know in the games that the Resident Evil timeline’s most recent entry point is 2021 (thanks to Resident Evil Village); with the Netflix series exploring the year 2036, a lot of it is open game in terms of the lore. Exactly how a second season and future titles could tie together has yet to be seen, but there is plenty of legroom here for the show to explore uncharted territory the games have yet to touch. It almost seemed like the crocodile had the intent of protecting the child before Umbrella blew it to hell, but we’ll have to wait until Season 2 (should we get one) for those answers! In a later scene, we learn that the person the Wesker twins and Bert are out to find is Ada Wong. In the games, Ada was employed by an Umbrella company known as “the organization.” The company would eventually merge with Tricell, a pharmaceutical company that was involved in the plaga outbreak that happened in Kijuju, which is a key event in Resident Evil 5. Before Albert blows up the lab, we see him give the girls a note and instructing his daughters to find someone.

The new Resident Evil show on Netflix may be worth watching or not depending on who you ask given that its Rotten Tomatoes score keeps jumping around all ...

It's certainly not the same gator as the one seen in the show, but the creators could've picked any sort of animal and still chose an alligator, so again, the implications here are clear. You definitely can't miss this creature's appearance in the Resident Evil show, but if you didn't play the past games, it might look a bit wilder than it already does in Netflix's adaptation. Later on in the show, we see Lance Reddick's Albert Wesker asking for an update on something referred to as a chest-mounted device. In yet another Easter egg found in the fourth episode of the Resident Evil show, we see Jade finally get a moment of peace away from the zombies. Judging from the unique shape of the weapon and particularly its longer barrel, it looks like these are most definitely Red9s like the ones seen in Resident Evil 4. It happens in the fourth episode during a tense moment where Jade and her reluctant partner, Baxter, are trapped in a prison by a cult. This is one of the ones that might stick in your head as something you know you've seen somewhere even if you can't quite place where it came from. These are technically two different Easter eggs found in separate episodes, but given that they achieve the same goal of being callbacks to normal, recurring enemies from the games, we've lumped them into one Easter egg here. Right when everything seems to calm down, the earth shakes, and a giant, mutated arthropod erupts from the ground to give Jade one last threat to contend with. If you've got a favorite Easter egg included in this list or not listed here at all, be sure to let us know in the comments. During our review of Resident Evil, we, too, were on the lookout for these sorts of Easter eggs and were delighted to find as many as we did. The new Resident Evil show on Netflix may be worth watching or not depending on who you ask given that its Rotten Tomatoes score keeps jumping around all over the place, but one thing is certain if you do give it a shot: You'll find plenty of Easter eggs buried within.