Resident Evil Review

The structural idea is a sound one. Run the story of two sisters in a company town before the outbreak against the story of one of them fourteen years later in a dead world, and you get to show the same people as both what they were and what the collapse made of them. Executing it requires both halves to be interesting, and only one of them is. The 2022 timeline is a high school drama about new girls at a new school, and it stops the 2036 timeline dead every time the series cuts to it, which is roughly every ten minutes.

By the fourth episode the apocalypse has become the secondary plot in its own show. The franchise material fares no better. The series keeps the Umbrella Corporation and the names and drops nearly everything that made the games work, so there is no dread, no scarcity and very little of the fixed camera claustrophobia that is the whole texture of the source. Lance Reddick is the reason to watch it.

His Wesker is played straight, as a father and a company man who has already made the decision the season is building toward, and he supplies a gravity the writing does not. Some of the creature work is good and the ruined London has real scale. Netflix canceled it six weeks after release, and the arithmetic is not hard: the parts people came for are the parts the series has least time for.