Resident Evil flounders on Netflix in a half-baked, 90-minute ‘series’

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness certainly has its moments.

When series hero Leon S. Kennedy faces off against a new breed of B.O.W. (that’s RE-speak for Bio Organic Weapon) inside the bowels of a deep-diving U.S. submarine, you almost get a sense of what might have been. It’s a tense sequence, and the closest this new Netflix series ever gets to really nailing fear-inducing horror.

But it’s fleeting. We might want to spend an entire episode, or even a full movie, watching how a zombie outbreak unfolds within the tight confines of a military vessel, but Infinite Darkness has greater aspirations. It’s a story about conspiracies and cover-ups. There’s nothing that really expands the universe of Resident Evil beyond what fans know, but there’s no doubt that those fans are the target audience.

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness ends up feeling like a set of stitched-together video game cutscenes.

Set in 2006 between the events of Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 (2005) and Resident Evil 5 (2009) video games, Infinite Darkness feels anachronistic right from the outset. Fans of the series absorbed these stories more than a decade ago, and this freshly conceived plotline jammed in right between the two — despite having very little to do with either one — makes for an awkward fit.

The plot revolves primarily around a conspiracy and subsequent cover-up, and the assembled powers-that-be behind those dark doings. But calling this a prequel isn’t accurate. Infinite Darkness doesn’t set up any of the Resident Evil stories we’ve seen since the mid-aughts, nor does it enhance our understanding of the same.

That makes this series more of a standalone story, but it also falls short there as well. The series, from TMS Entertainment and Quebico, consists of four episodes that all clock in at less than a half-hour. Trim out the credit roll at the front and back of each episode and you’re left with close to 90 minutes of material — a feature-length movie, basically.

There’s nothing in the make-up of the four episodes that suggests this story needed such an approach. But the episodic delivery does serve to mask some of the narrative shortcomings. There are leaps in both time and logic peppered all throughout Infinite Darkness, and the illusion of time passing between episodes muddies our sense of continuity.

Those flaws are still there, though. The patchwork set of episodes leaves gaping holes in the plotline, raising questions that never get answered. When Claire Redfield, another longtime hero of the series, discovers in the course of an investigation that one person in a military unit may still be alive, that person — who is shown in a snapshot — is never named or otherwise identified.

He’s a plot point whose purpose becomes clear enough when Claire shows up at his door. But the circumstances of how she managed to find him are left entirely vague. We’re also left to wonder what makes this one individual so special, compared to the rest of his unit.

Credit: netflix

That paucity of detail is a defining feature of Infinite Darkness. Forget about character development or emotional beats. Any moment where someone’s talking is pure exposition. When the talking eventually stops, as it does at least once per episode, we move into an action sequence. That’s how the show is paced, beginning to end.

It feels like a story that needed more time and more space to breathe. Leon and Claire are the ostensible stars, but Claire’s B-plot is primarily filler material until the final episode, when her path converges with Leon’s. And even then, she’s disappointingly relegated to a damsel-in-distress kind of role.

Perhaps another three or four episodes would have given Infinite Darkness the time it needed to flesh out what’s here and deliver a story with feeling. The problem there is, nothing in the four episodes we have already suggests there was even a desire to do that. There isn’t even a token effort to build these characters beyond the plot information they can provide and, in the case of Leon, Claire, and a handful of others, their links back to the larger series.

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness ends up feeling less like a serial story or even a movie cut into four equal parts, and more like a set of stitched-together video game cutscenes. It just doesn’t work. Cutscenes in video games only paint half (or less) of the picture, and that’s what we’re left with here: a half-baked Resident Evil story that bets big on visceral moments but falls short on substance.

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness is now streaming on Netflix.