At this point, it was more than obvious that Paul W.S. Anderson had no idea what he was doing with this franchise. He handed the project over to others, retconned massive plot points, erased characters with little to no explanation and gave Alice every single superpower under the sun. Whatever the plot ran into, either make Alice more powerful or cause something lucky to happen. Retribution was supposed to take place right after the battle on the ship, but everything that happened on the ship is hereby gone. Yeah, the Redfield siblings are not present anymore, nor is K-Mart. At this point, they are putting whatever they think is clever or conveniant into the plot and rolling with that.
For some reason, everyone just changes factions and serves the enemy for this one single movie. This is the only movie where Wesker is seemingly on Alice's side and for some reason, the Red Queen is trying to kill her along with the human race. Now, we see the simulations that they alluded to before to see that they're all filled with clones. Yes, we're going back to clones and we're bringing back old characters who died in previous entries. Michelle Rodriguez actually has a starring role, but as two different clones, one of them being evil.
For one reason or another, Alice is captured in another Umbrella facility, mostly naked blah blah blah. We've seen this so many times, it's not even funny anymore. She runs into Ada Wong, who is actually rather decently portrayed. She's almost kinda like her video game character, so that's something. In fact, we have a lot of characters from the video games in this film. We actually have Leon, and even Barry makes a small appearance. Jill is here, but she's mostly a villain being mind controlled to hunt Alice with a bunch of Umbrella Corp guys.
Alice has no powers in this movie because Wesker shut them off with a syringe. Half of the things she does in this movie is superhuman, but she's supposed to be a normal human being like she was in the first movie. She does not act like a human being in any conceivable way throughout this entire film. She finds a clone daughter in the simulation. Yes, Alice has a daughter between her clone and a clone of Carlos from the second and third movies. This little girl follows her through half of this movie, but is never seen after the credits roll. Yes, she is yet another deleted character. Pour one out.
The Red Queen is one of the worst aspects of this entire film, as odd as that sounds. She represents everything wrong with this movie, as compared to the first installment. Like I said in that previous entry, I actually liked it to some degree. The Red Queen's CGI was very dated and looked awful, even for back then, but it looks a ton better than how she turns out here. Here, she just looks more realistic, but also more fake at the same time. The affects are completely changed for this, almost making it seem like it's a different character entirely. That would have made much more sense than trying to tell the audience that this is the same character we met then. Not only does she act differently, but she also changes the meaning of her catchphrase "You're all going to die down here", and effectively killed that catchphrase from this point on. The delivery was off, and brought in at the most awkward times and they treat it like some clever callback, which it isn't. Now, she is out to kill the human race, where she tried to save it in the first movie by cutting off all of the zombies from getting out of the facility. Whoever wrote her part in this movie needs a nice hard demotion and a lesson in writing dialogue.
More nonsensical action sequences and army zombies firing weapons happen while half of the Umbrella Corp characters come to save Alice from the simulation. Again, Wesker is helping her through the facility to escape because he needs her to fight against the Red Queen.... again, for some reason. None of this has any build up, there is no point to this plot and it's all apparently just poising the characters for a double-cross that never comes. It's all just to facilitate a bunch of giant zombies bombarding streets of pointless simulations because Umbrella is bored and can apparently piss billions of dollars a day on seeing what happens when clone civilizations get the T-Virus. Surprise surprise, they all start dying and panicking.
Most of the characters die, and even if they don't, many of them are never seen again in the final film. Anderson and Jovovich kept hyping all of this up like it comes to some awesome conclusion, but anyone who has been paying attention to this "movie series" can easily see that these were all aimless, mindless action movies that have little to nothing to do with one another. How can there be an awesome conclusion when nothing about them coincides with the other or builds to any sort of endgame? It still baffles me that Anderson had the gall to say "Since the beginning, I knew that the movies would end with the Hive". Paul, no you didn't. You had no clue where this whole thing was going to end, you just kind of thought that going to the main facility from the beginning would be like "poetry because it rhymes". Trying to pass off any of this like it had some sort of plan or story structure is laughable at best, pathetic at worst. The movie has some decent effects and a few cool, effective action sequences. Beyond that, it's mindless gibberish that thinks it's a real story, but it's Virtua Sadness.
