Back in 1996, while newspaper coverage was fixated on the divorce of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, a phenomenon was spreading around the world, not unlike a virus. Osaka-based video game developer Capcom had just released Resident Evil, a shoot-’em-up in which players enjoyed the brainless fun of blasting the brains out of the brain-eating undead. Almost three decades later, and the brainiacs (OK, I’ll stop now) at Netflix have brought the franchise back from the dead for an eight-episode run, its first live-action small screen iteration following a seven-film cinematic universe that, despite blanket critical panning, has never been killed off.
At the heart of this new version of Resident Evil (the character through whose eyes the story would unfold, were this a first-person video game) is Jade, played by Charlie’s Angels Ella Balinska. She’s a tough, undercut-sporting scientist-cum-action hero, in the mould of Resident Evil heroines before her. The twist here is that her father is Albert Wesker (the Big Bad of the games) played with typically sonorous authority by The Wire’s Lance Reddick. Two timelines unfold: the “present” day, where Jade, a research scientist, monitors zombies on the streets of London (“Come on, show me something,” she whispers at a rabbit she’s placed before the horde), and 2022, when she was a child living with her father and sister in New Raccoon City. This thread, it soon emerges, chronicles the genesis of the virus that will imminently reduce humanity to a mass of slobbering flesh munchers.
