'Resident Evil: The Final Chapter' Premieres: Get Ready by Reading Our Bonkers Plot Recap

By Oliver Lyttelton

This weekend sees one of the longest-running action franchises around come to an end with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter — the sixth, and purportedly last, movie based on the popular horror video games. The series, starring Milla Jovovich, is known not just for its martial arts and zombie gore, but also for its… interesting plotting, which has taken quite a few ridiculous twists and turns over the years. To get you ready for the finale, we’ve attempted, as concisely as possible, to recap the story so far:

Resident Evil (2002)

Alice (Milla Jovovich), wakes up in a deserted mansion with no memory. The mansion is raided by a group of private security contractors, including Rain (Michelle Rodriguez). They tell Alice that she’s a security guard working for the Umbrella Corp., the biggest company in the world, which owns a secret lab underneath the manor, where there’s been a disaster caused by an artificially intelligent supercomputer called the Red Queen. They capture an intruder, Matt (Eric Mabius, otherwise known as That Guy From Ugly Betty) and make it into the lab, where a corridor full of lasers kills half the security contractors (one guy gets turned into cubes). The lab turns out to be full of zombies (some of which have horrifyingly long tongues), caused by a virus that Umbrella created. Alice remembers she knows martial arts and kung-fu-fights some zombie dogs, before recalling that she was helping Matt and his now-zombified sister to tell the press about the virus. Rain is turned into a zombie, but Alice and Matt manage to escape the lab with the antivirus, only to be kidnapped by Umbrella again. Alice later wakes up in an abandoned Raccoon City. (Yes, it’s really called Raccoon City. There are no raccoons, not even zombie ones.)

Watch the trailer for the first Resident Evil:

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

An ex-cop named Jill (Sienna Guillory, who it turns out is a different person from Sienna Miller) is trapped in Raccoon City, which is full of zombies. She gets attacked by some tongue-zombies in a church, but Alice turns up and saves them by driving her motorcycle through a stained-glass window. It turns out she now has superpowers. Jill and Alice are called up by Umbrella scientist Ashford (Jared Harris), who says he’ll help them escape the city if they can find his daughter. Umbrella sends a Giant Zombie With a Rocket Launcher after our heroes. Jill and Alice find Ashford’s daughter at her school. It turns out he created the zombie virus accidentally while trying to cure her disability. Alice blows up some zombie dogs with a cigarette and realizes the Rocket Launcher Zombie is actually Matt, who’s been turned into a monster by Umbrella. They team up and destroy some helicopters, but Monster Matt dies. Raccoon City gets blown up with a nuke. Alice is killed, but then is alive again? Also, she runs down a skyscraper at one point. Also, the guitarist from Evanescence plays a zombie.

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

Isaacs, an Umbrella scientist (Iain Glen, a.k.a. Jorah Mormont from Game of Thrones) has been cloning Alice: He was the guy who gave her superpowers, but he needs the real Alice to come up with a zombie cure. It turns out the virus spread and has turned the world into something out of Mad Max. The real Alice kung-fu-fights some zombie dogs again, because it’s been a while, and eventually hooks up with a convoy of survivors, including 2000s pop star Ashanti and Claire (Ali Larter). They get attacked by zombie crows, but Alice kills them with her psychic powers, which she apparently has now. They go to Las Vegas, where Isaacs attacks them but gets bitten by a zombie. Back at the lab, he injects himself with his cure, but turns into a Tentacle Monster instead. Alice and her friends break into the lab, where she fights Tentacle Monster Isaacs with the help of one of her clones. She then warns Umbrella that she’s coming to get them…

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

…And she does, attacking Umbrella HQ in Japan with the help of an army of Alice clones. The head of Umbrella, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts) escapes, but not before injecting the real Alice with a serum that gets rid of her superpowers. She goes to Alaska, where she’s attacked by Claire, who’s being mind-controlled with a robot spider. Alice saves her, and together they head to L.A, crashing their plane on top of a prison of survivors, including Chris (Wentworth Miller), who turns out to be the long-lost brother of Claire. They’re attacked by zombies, including a giant one with a massive ax. The survivors make their way to a ship that they hope is a sanctuary but turns out to be an Umbrella trap. Wesker tries to eat Alice, but they manage to defeat him. Just when the think they’re safe, a fleet of Umbrella aircraft arrive, led by Alice’s former ally Jill, who’s being mind-controlled by another robot spider. Cliffhanger! There is only one zombie dog in this one, but it’s really scary.

Watch the Afterlife trailer:

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Alice wakes up as a suburban mom with a daughter named Becky, but zombies attack them all and Alice dies. Fake-out! It’s really another clone. The real Alice is inside an Umbrella facility, being tortured by Jill. But she escapes, runs into a reconstruction of Tokyo and meets Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), an ex-Umbrella assassin who’s now a resistance fighter. Ada tells her that the Red Queen is behind all this. They fight their way through giant reconstructions of New York and Raccoon City, where Alice finds Becky with the body of her clone. But Jill turns up with an evil clone of Rain (Michelle Rodriguez from the first one — she comes back from the dead a lot) and seemingly kill Ada. Alice and Becky meet a good clone of Rain in a reconstruction of Moscow, but a monster kills Good Rain and kidnaps Becky. Alice rescues the girl, and they escape to the Arctic surface in a snowmobile with Ada (who’s still alive), but then Jill attacks them in a submarine. Alice de-robot-spiders Jill, freeing her from mind control and feeds Evil Rain to some ice zombies. When she wakes up, she’s in the White House, where Wesker is now the president and wants to team up with Alice to destroy the Red Queen. Zombie dog count: 0.

How will it all end? We’re not sure yet, but we do know that Alice drives a Humvee into a dragon.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter opens Friday.

Watch our Resident Evil Role Recall with Milla Jovovich: