Very few video game franchises have had quite the cinematic afterlife of Resident Evil. Capcom’s survival horror series made the jump to the big screen in 2002 with Paul W.S. Anderson’s first adaptation, kicking off a surprising fourteen-year run of increasingly ridiculous action-horror spectacle that refused to die. While the movies drifted further and further away from the games themselves, they also developed their own bizarre identity, one built around Milla Jovovich’s original character of Alice, apocalyptic stakes, impossible action sequences and enough soap opera-esque twists and turns to keep the story moving long after any semblance of conventional continuity had disappeared.
And it worked.
Anderson’s Resident Evil movies were never particularly interested in playing by standard rules. They were loud, bloody, aggressively silly genre mashup movies that kept finding new ways to reinvent their own mythology and action beats. Characters died and returned. Villains became heroes and heroes became villains. Clones fought zombie hordes, Umbrella Corporation goons and other clones in equal measure. The world seems to have ended several different times over. And through it all, Anderson’s maximalist filmmaking style gave the franchise a visual identity that made even its dumbest ideas look awesome.
After Resident Evil: The Final Chapter seemingly put an end to that particular era, Johannes Roberts attempted to reboot the series with 2021’s Welcome to Raccoon City, taking a much more directly faithful approach to the games. It didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Now, five years and an equally ignored television reboot later, Barbarian and Weapons filmmaker Zach Cregger has taken another swing at the property, delivering a radically different interpretation that has been met with plenty of love from critics and fans alike.
So, with eight live-action movies now in the books, it’s time to once again enter the Spencer Mansion, or Raccoon City, or whatever hellscape these movies have cooked up this time, and rank them all from worst to best.
8. ‘Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City’ (2021)
It’s safe to assume there are fans of the video game series who have plenty of love for Welcome to Raccoon City, and to Johannes Roberts’ (Primate) credit, this is a perfectly serviceably made movie. The cast is solid, the production design is clearly trying to recreate the atmosphere of the games, and there’s something admirable about attempting to cram the events of both Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 into one movie.
But that’s just it: it’s only serviceable. Roberts approaches the material with such a by-the-books reverence that very little of it sticks. The movie is constantly pointing at things fans recognize without finding much of its own personality in the process. There are some fun creature designs and recognizable locations, but the whole thing feels weirdly overstuffed, as though several movies were compressed into one and none of them had enough room to breathe.
It’s mostly just boring. Welcome to Raccoon City becomes increasingly muddled the further it goes, transforming what should be a lovingly grimy survival horror reboot into a strangely lifeless slog. The Anderson movies may have been ridiculous, but at least they knew how to put on a show.
7. ‘Resident Evil: The Final Chapter’ (2016)
Anderson’s over-the-top action-horror-sci-fi magnum opus goes out with a bit of a whiff.
That’s disappointing no matter which way you look at it, especially after the inspired double whammy of explosive excitement that was Afterlife and Retribution. The editing is a sizable problem here, chopping Anderson’s usual chaotic-yet-coherent style to pieces in a way that lessens every punch, kick, and gunshot. For a series that had essentially turned visual excess into an art form, The Final Chapter frequently feels like it’s fighting against itself.
There are still flashes of the good stuff. Ali Larter’s Claire Redfield returns, a midway zombie army stronghold siege delivers some appropriately grandiose action, and the final showdown between Alice and Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) gives Anderson an opportunity to shine again.
But the bigger problem is that this is supposed to be the culmination of Alice’s entire apocalyptic journey, and it never quite delivers the emotional or narrative payoff that premise promises. So many memorable supporting characters are simply absent, leaving the conclusion feeling strangely lonely. After six movies of increasingly absurd escalation, The Final Chapter should have been the biggest, dumbest victory lap imaginable. Instead, it’s just fine.
6. ‘Resident Evil: Apocalypse’ (2004)
Apocalypse is an objectively terrible mess. The dialogue is frequently atrocious, the deliveries aren’t much better, and the Nemesis, while certainly memorable, isn’t exactly the most frightening final boss imaginable. The bigger problem with this first of many sequels, however, is the action. For a franchise whose identity is at least half built around exaggerated, stylistic action, Apocalypse simply fails to deliver on that front.
Directed by Alexander Witt, the editing is choppy, the staging is awkward, and so much of the blocking feels clumsy that the movie becomes a bit of an eyesore whenever it’s supposed to be kicking into high gear. That’s a pretty serious problem for a movie that spends most of its runtime trying to convince you that it’s awesome.
So why on earth is it above the bottom two? Simple, my friends: Jared Harris is in it, and "Vermilion" by Slipknot and "The End of Heartache" by Killswitch Engage play over the credits. The continued early-2000s energy of the original is alive and well in Apocalypse, and that counts for something. Still, no amount of Slipknot can completely rescue a movie this clunky. Well, maybe a little. Imagine if a second song was in there. Or, hell, even three.
5. ‘Resident Evil: Afterlife’ (2010)
This is where the Resident Evil movies finally start hitting the peaks they were always destined to reach. Anderson returns to the directing chair and goes for broke in the best way, delivering big for fans and non-believers alike in a celebratory spray of blood, bullets, and badassery.
Of course, the script is barely there, and Afterlife absolutely does not work as a standalone movie. You need to have some familiarity with the increasingly ridiculous mythology and characters that came before it. But once you accept the rules of this particular universe, Afterlife offers the best kind of rollercoaster ride.
The 3D slow-motion, Matrix-style action is everywhere. There’s no irony or guilty-pleasure qualifier necessary here. Afterlife is genuinely a hell of a great time. The movie finally locks into exactly what the franchise is supposed to be: a style-WAY-over-substance fusion of horror, sci-fi, video game plotting and music-video maximalism. Also there’s A Perfect Circle’s "Outsider" blasting over the final fifteen minutes of this one. Come on.
4. ‘Resident Evil: Extinction’ (2007)
Not as overtly and embracingly silly as either its predecessors or its successors, Extinction occupies a genuinely interesting middle position in the Anderson series. Directed by Russell Mulcahy, this third chapter surprisingly works well enough on its own.
The post-apocalyptic desert setting immediately gives the franchise a nice visual shakeup, essentially turning Resident Evil into a Walking Dead meets Mad Max movie. The world has already gone to hell, civilization is collapsing, and Alice and the survivors are wandering through an increasingly hostile wasteland populated by infected humans and animals. The crow attack alone is one of the series’ most memorable creature sequences.
Ali Larter’s introduction as Claire Redfield is another major asset. Larter gives Claire enough personality and toughness to hold her own alongside Jovovich, while the larger mythology starts embracing some of the wonderfully stupid science-fiction ideas that would eventually consume the series: Alice clones, an increasingly mad scientist villain in Dr. Issacs, and telekinetic superpowers.
I’ve always had a soft spot for this one. Extinction is arguably the most subdued of the Anderson series, but that somehow works in its favor. It still has plenty of nonsense, but there’s a true, tangible sense of atmosphere and progression here. For once, the apocalypse feels like a place rather than simply another excuse for the next action scene.
3. ‘Resident Evil’ (2026)
Zach Cregger’s fresh swing at Resident Evil is an uneven movie, but when it works, it represents perhaps the clearest cinematic translation of what makes the actual games so compelling. Rather than attempting to cram Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, Wesker and every other recognizable character into one movie, Cregger strips everything down to an ordinary guy having an absolutely fucking terrible night.
Check out our full review of Zach Cregger's 'Resident Evil'
Austin Abrams’ Bryan is not an action hero. He fumbles with guns, gets his ass kicked, runs out of resources and repeatedly has to figure out how the hell he’s going to survive the next five minutes. The film’s tactile, over-the-shoulder camera work and limited-resource structure beautifully recreate the sensation of actually playing a Resident Evil game, while the creature work gets progressively more grotesque as things spiral into biological nightmare territory.
The movie eventually loses some of that magic as Bryan reaches Raccoon City and the scope expands. The increasingly uneven comedy doesn’t always work, and the film becomes less interesting the bigger and louder it gets. But the snowy opening stretch is thoroughly fantastic, the creature effects are spectacularly gross, and Cregger remains an enormously confident visual filmmaker. It’s lopsided, but there’s more than enough here to make this new chapter worth getting excited about.
2. ‘Resident Evil: Retribution’ (2012)
If Afterlife was Anderson discovering the maximum possible level of Resident Evil insanity, Retribution is him looking directly into the camera and saying, “You want more?”
Springboarding off the excellent place that Afterlife left the series, Anderson quadruples down on everything he and the fans love about this franchise and delivers a completely one-of-a-kind maximalist genre mash-up. There are multiple versions of characters (half of them in skintight catsuits), elaborate simulations, gigantic monsters, constant explosions and a truly unlimited stream of flying bullets. The whole thing is set in an underground Umbrella facility designed like a theme park for apocalyptic super-soldiers filled with endless waves of undead.
It’s ridiculous. It’s awesome. It’s an exhilarating kind of overstimulation. If you don’t care for the franchise, Retribution probably isn’t going to convert you by some miracle. But if you’ve already come four movies deep into this nonsensical, cyclical series, prepare to be rewarded with the glorious spoils of Anderson at the absolute top of his game.
The only real crime is that it ends on a final sequel tease instead of an actual culmination. Had Anderson simply ended the series here, Retribution would have served as a far more satisfying franchise retrospective and victory lap than The Final Chapter ever managed.
1. ‘Resident Evil’ (2002)
As with nearly every movie franchise ever made, it’s very tough to outdo the original. It all started here. Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2002 Resident Evil remains an undeniable time capsule, one that captures a very specific moment when video game movies were still trying to figure out what the hell they were even supposed to look like.
It doesn’t attempt to directly adapt the game’s story so much as construct its own mythology around the basic ingredients: Umbrella, the T-virus, zombies, a high-tech underground facility, a group of increasingly doomed characters and a whole lot of things going horribly wrong.
This is also where Milla Jovovich’s Alice enters the picture, becoming the leading hero and connective tissue for the entire fourteen-year cinematic saga that followed. There are tons of iconic images and moments here, and remarkably, the movie remains a surprisingly solid watch even more than two decades later if you meet it on its own terms. Of course, here at Knotfest, we know this movie to be absolutely essential Slipknot lore.
That’s just science. I know why you plague me, baby.
