Resident Evil is the first film adaptation of the Resident Evil franchise, and the start of the Resident Evil (Film Series). It is written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson.

A young woman named Alice (Milla Jovovich) awakens to find herself in an empty mansion with little-to-no memory of her past. After soldiers burst through the doors, they take her with them into the Hive, an underground bioresearch facility situated beneath the mansion. Alice, the strike team, and two tagalongs found in the Hive discover an unspeakable secret within the facility that the Umbrella Corporation wants hidden away for good: the company has developed a bioweapon far beyond anything the world has ever known. As Umbrella's response unit hunts for the cause of the devastation within the lab, the result of that devastation soon becomes clear: the dead have come back to life, and they hunger for fresh flesh!

The film also stars Michelle Rodriguez as Rain Ocampo, Eric Mabius as Matt Addison, James Purefoy as Spence Parks, Martin Crewes as Chad Kaplan and Colin Salmon as James "One" Shade.

Resident Evil contains examples of the following tropes:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Mostly subverted. The team is told that the Red Queen has gone homicidal for no reason, but it is the Queen's job to contain possible outbreaks, which she did perfectly. True, she killed a couple hundred people without even explaining why they had to die, but that was required to keep the outbreak from escaping the Hive. And it's nothing to the destruction that follows in the sequels as a direct result of Umbrella breaking her quarantine. However, as soon as it's revealed she can speak wherever she wants and decides to only do so at the very last moment before they pull the plug on her, and that the only thing she can say is "Please, don't turn me off. Get out!", it's somewhat played straight—she either can't or won't stop being cryptic and give a straight answer unless asked a direct question.
• Abandoned Hospital Awakening: Alice does this at the end of the movie.
• Action Girl: Alice is the standout example, but there's also Rain.
• Adaptational Badass: The zombies. In the games, a headshot wasn't necessarily required to bring down a zombie. Enough bullets (or even knife slashes) to the main body was enough to kill one. Here, it is established that only massive trauma to the brain or severing the top of the spinal column will do the job.
• Air-Vent Passageway: At one point, the surviving team members go through air vents to evade the zombies.
• Alice Allusion: Alice, the Red Queen, and in later movies, the White Queen:
  • The Hive is located behind two mirrored doors (Through the Looking Glass).
  • Spence is the Wild Card, like the Cheshire Cat.
  • Rain and J.D. are Tweddle Dee and Tweedle-Dum.
  • Kaplan constantly worries about time (as the White Rabbit does).
  • A white rabbit is used to test the T-Virus.
  • Many "off with their head" instances: The Red Queen kills two people through this specific execution: the Umbrella Corp worker in the elevator, and the medic in the laser room. Alice uses an axe to decapitate a reanimated Spence, and in a scene prior to that, the film made it seem like she was going to use that same axe to decapitate Rain.
  • When the first zombie is seen, Matt is sitting on a high ledge (supposed to be a reference to the caterpillar).
• All for Nothing:
  • The survivors are offered an opportunity by the Red Queen to leave the Hive alive; all they have to do is execute Rain, who's already infected. The survivors refuse, knowing that there's a potential cure somewhere, and as a result spend way more time in the Hive than they otherwise would have had to, with more than a few extra casualties along the way. Rain turns into a zombie anyway as they inject her with the cure too late, so it was all for naught. The final survivor count would have been higher if they had just taken the Red Queen's offer.
  • After everything Alice and Matt went through to escape the Hive with the hopes of bringing Umbrella down, they're almost immediately picked up by a group of Umbrella scientists, one of whom orders the Hive re-opened; the state of Raccoon City at the end of the movie shows that, despite everything the survivors and the Red Queen did, the T-Virus got out anyway.
• All There in the Manual: The novelization provides a lot of background information about character motivations and the plot in general.
  • Matt's sister, Lisa, becomes a Decoy Protagonist, with her personal motivation against Umbrella described in detail. A close friend of hers, Mahmoud al-Rashan, died because of complications from a botched surgery, and the Umbrella Corporation was partially responsible due to their negligence. Lisa was specifically chosen for an undercover role by her own brother Matt, who suggested it to his supervisor Aaron Vricella. Alice, for her own part, decided to aid Lisa out of her own personal disdain for the corporation.
  • The reason Kaplan was able to locate Alice, Matt, and Rain, after being separated, is explained by him using a heat signature scanner from his wrist-top computer.
• Amnesiac Dissonance: Spence is reasonably helpful and friendly to the rest of the group until his memory returns, at which point he reverts to his actual sociopathic personality.
• And the Adventure Continues: At the end of the movie, Alice wakes up again alone and confused, apparently facing a T-Virus outbreak, just like at the start.
• Artificial Outdoors Display: In the Hive, one room has a window which displays the sights and sounds of a big city:
  Matt: Makes it easier to work underground, thinking there's a view.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • The Red Queen infamously says the human body remains active after death - a common myth stating that hair and fingernails continue to grow. You'd expect a supercomputer to know better.^note The myth comes from how a dead body loses its moisture rapidly after death, causing the skin to contract, and making nails and hair look like they have grown.
  • Matt says blood only coagulates after you're dead, indicating who attacked them was a zombie. Blood doesn't just coagulate after you're dead. It can also coagulate when you're alive due to blood clotting from specific conditions, diseases, viruses and untreated injuries such as untreated cuts and bruises.
  • The medic should have fallen to the floor instantly when the laser went through her; severing the spinal column would not keep them standing.
  • Despite the T-Virus being called a protean virus and mentioned as being capable of switching to airborne or fluid transmission, the characters never express concern that merely breathing the air or being splattered on could get them infected. The initial infection spread when a canister of the virus was shattered and the virus entered the Hive's air system, but once Alice and the strike team meet the zombies head-on, the virus has evaporated and bites seem to be the only way for anyone to actually become infected. The novelizations say the T-Virus has an airborne variant with a hot zone, and this is the initial deployment method, but the virus soon reverts to the non-airborne variant (with all the people-eating that entails). The film hints at this when the Red Queen notes that the transmission method depends on environment, but doesn't say it outright.
• Artistic License – Pharmacology: The lab the virus was released into allowed it to escape through air ducts. Any room that requires people to wear safety suits - and the scientists say it's sealed - would have air vents.
• Ate His Gun: Kaplan almost does this. Instead, he changes his mind and just shoots a zombie that was about to bite him.
• Bait-and-Switch: A Jump Scare is seemingly built up when Alice slowly reaches for the gun of the zombified cop that she just killed, implying that it will wake up again to attack her. The real jump scare would come from a zombified dog arriving through the glass window.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • Alice makes it through the entire ordeal without getting cut up or bruised. When she emerges from The Hive, she's merely wet. Illustrating how much this is in effect, Milla Jovovich talked about being covered in lesions and bruises after shooting the brief moment where Alice is dragged across the grille in the train.
  • Rain looks very good for someone who has been bitten by multiple zombies and only merely looks like she's got a bad hangover.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The primary antagonist is the Red Queen, who has sealed the hive and is terminating the Umbrella employees to contain the zombie infection - though considering what she's trying to prevent, it's kind of justified. The other antagonist is Spence Parks, who spends most of the film as an amnesiac and was the one who purposely caused the virus outbreak as a distraction for him to escape the Hive with the sample of T-Virus, which he would later sell on the Black Market.
• Big Red Button: Opens and closes the subway car's floor door.
• Bittersweet Ending: Despite all their effort to escape the Hive, Matt is infected and he and Alice are taken away by Umbrella to be experimented on. Also, Raccoon City ends up in ruins after the virus gets out. The only good side is that Alice is apparently alive and well.
• Black Dude Dies First: Inverted in the laser hallway, where One is the last to die.
• Bloodless Carnage: When the commandos are sliced to pieces by the Laser Hallway. Justified in that the lasers cut by burning, so the wounds are being cauterized even as they're inflicted.
• Blown Across the Room: Rain's machine gun fire sends a zombie flying about 20 feet.
• Bookends:
  • The movie starts with Alice waking up nude, alone and confused and ends up that exact way.
  • The Umbrella scientist played by Jason Isaacs narrates the opening of the movie and shows up at the end to collect Alice and Matt and order the Hive re-opened.
• Boom, Headshot!: Most zombies are shot in the head, since it's their weak point. Also happens to J.D. and Rain.
• Bottomless Magazines: Bullets run out only when the film demands it. Otherwise even the revolvers can shoot non-stop with no need to reload whatsoever.
• Braids of Action: Rain, as the Vasquez of this film, has her hair sensibly tied back in a braid. Of course, this is military protocol, but the fact that she has it in a braid as opposed to the medic's bun shows that she'll be a badass.
• Bullet-Proof Fashion Plate: Spence spends most of the film wearing a tight T-shirt that doesn't get torn and he doesn't even get a scratch on his exposed arms. In contrast, Matt and Kaplan get plenty messed up.
• The Cameo: An uncredited Jason Isaacs as the Umbrella scientist who narrates the start of the movie and has Alice and Matt taken captive before ordering that the Hive be re-opened at the end of the movie.
• Canon Immigrant: The Red Queen and Alice.
• Cat Scare: J.D. jokingly pulls a jumpscare on Rain (and the audience as it's cued by a loud sound) after she jumps down the train's trap door and stares at a vent. He even lampshades what he just did.
  J.D.: Jumpy. Haha!
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The train's trap door which Rain initially has to jump down from to fix the train itself is later weaponized by Alice and Matt to kill the evolved Licker. The camera even has an angle looking up at Rain from said trap door to indicate its large size.
  • Early on during their raid, the special forces team can be seen carrying a huge container. It's an E.M.P. device which gets used to disable the power in the Hive.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Prior to the outbreak, the Hive worker who threw the T-Virus vial and bumped into the office worker carrying a cup of coffee is Spence, as revealed later on via a Once More, with Clarity flashback.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Alice seems determined to save everyone, even if she just met them. Especially Rain and Matt; she takes Rain's death especially hard. This could be justified by the fact that she had always intended to betray Umbrella and help Lisa escape with the T-Virus.
• Colourful Theme Naming: As shown in the closing credits, many Umbrella employees in the Hive are named after colors; Mr. Grey, Mr. Red, Ms. Black, Dr. Green, Dr. Blue, Dr. Brown, Mr. White, and Ms. Gold.
• Combat Parkour: Alice takes this to ridiculous extremes, as she sends full-grown adults (and zombies) flying with moves straight out of The Matrix.
• Company Town: Raccoon City was under the thumb of Umbrella.
• Composite Character: The Licker is composited together with the Tyrant, serving as the Final Boss.
• Crazy-Prepared: Despite admitting that she didn't think the protagonists would get far enough for it to matter, the Red Queen released the Licker to serve as a final means of preventing anyone from escaping.
• Creator Cameo: Producer Jeremy Bolt has a cameo as one of the zombies.
• Creepy Child: The Red Queen is a great example. Although she is just a gender-less AI who only uses the avatar of a young girl, that doesn't make her any less creepy, especially as she speaks with her emotionless and monotone voice, and referring to herself as a "bad, bad girl" when she revealed that she secretly released the Licker to kill Spence, and likely, everyone else, to further prevent the release of the T-virus.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The laser room deaths. One ends up diced into itty bitty pieces by the Red Queen's lasers.
• Cutting the Knot: One manages to evade one of the Laser Hallway beams by leaping up and grabbing the ceiling. When the next beam passes by, he prepares to either jump or duck, depending on its position. Then the beam changes into an entire laser grid which is impossible for him to avoid.
• Deadpan Snarker: Spence Parks, during the following exchange:
  Rain: (covered in gore and bites) When I get out of here, I think I'm gonna get laid!
  Spence: (beat) You may want to clean up first.
• Delayed Causality: The medic and One are killed this way in the Laser Hallway. They stay perfectly standing until their injuries start to show; the medic has her neck sliced open while One is cut into tiny cubes.
• Devoured by the Horde: Subverted. At one point, J.D. is pulled into a hallway and attacked by a group of zombies. However, when he turns up later on as a zombie, he is almost completely whole, so the zombies just infected him with the T-virus and didn't eat him.
• Diagonal Cut: In the laser hallway, after the first pass of the laser beam, the medic commando's head slides off. The last commando in the hallway, One, is cut by a grid of lasers and slides into pieces.
• Disposable Pilot: Kaplan becomes this as soon as he gets behind the controls of the train for the ride out.
• Dueling Hackers: Kaplan has a hacking duel with the Red Queen to bypass her defenses.
• Dull Surprise: While not entirely dull, Rain reacts to a zombie (believing it to be an ordinary person at first) biting her hand with mere annoyance. She seems to think the woman just went crazy.
• Dwindling Party: The film deals with a group investigating and then trying to escape The Hive. Not only is the facility armed with several deathtraps, but it is also infested with zombies and other mutations that attack anything living. This was guaranteed to happen.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The opening narration isn't done by Alice, and even has an opening crawl of sorts. The second movie justifies this by having Alice find the camcorder she supposedly recorded all the movies' narration on.
  • The first movie is the only entry that's straight-up Survival Horror, with later movies becoming increasingly action-packed. Alice is actually treated as a vulnerable human being in this one, with her zombie-killing one-woman-army persona the film series is actually known for only developing in later films.
  • This is the only movie in the series where someone else shares billing in the marketing with Milla Jovovich, in this case being Michelle Rodriguez.
• Easy Amnesia: Both Alice and Spence become amnesic shorty after the T-Virus outbreak in the Hive. Alice's identity is already known to the Umbrella commando team who break into the mansion.
  James 'One' Shade: (staring at Alice) Report. (Picks up the confused Alice) Report, now!
  Alice: What?
  James 'One' Shade: (shakes Alice) I want your report, soldier.
  Alice: I don't know what you're talking about.
• Enemy Rising Behind: When Spence is holding the other survivors at gunpoint, a zombie rises up out of the water behind him and bites him on the neck.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: The dogs being kept at an office seem to notice the incoming airborne viral outbreak as they bark aloud while looking at the air vents.
• Evil Elevator: In the opening sequence, when the Hive's employees get wiped out.
• Evil, Inc.: Umbrella, who is performing illegal research and creating viral weaponry.
• Expositron 9000: The Red Queen would later on explain what the T-Virus does to the human body, and how a Licker was created from it. A plot point also involves Alice and the remaining survivors having to reactivate the Red Queen and threaten her to find a way out for them.
• Face–Heel Revolving Door: The Red Queen's sole purpose is to keep the virus contained, and she won't help the strike team if it means the virus has any chance of escaping. She even requests the remaining survivors to kill the infected Rain in exchange for revealing a passcode. All things considered, that's her job and she's got a point.
• Failed a Spot Check: When he was planning his heist, Spence was aware of the Red Queen's defense systems; he even worked it into his getaway plan. Spence's mistake was that he completely missed those same defenses also extended outside the Hive.
• Failsafe Failure: Aside from Umbrella's strike team deliberately circumventing its own security measures, the Hive has several of these:
  • The Red Queen has full control of the building and seems allowed to run security as she sees fit, but either she doesn't have to send reports or Umbrella doesn't see fit to share those reports with its security team. (Which, knowing Umbrella, wouldn't be out of character.) This means that when she takes drastic action, the explanation for this action doesn't reach the people on the ground.
  • There's also no easy way to turn the Red Queen off—the team has to fight their way through her security carrying a large, bulky EMP device. Nor, for that matter, can it be done without also turning the main power off, which also unlocks all of the locks on everything. With "everything" meaning "every single highly hazardous experiment the Hive is working on".
• Fan Disservice: Alice shows the most skin when she wakes up at the end of the movie on an operating table, and full of IV needles.
• Fast-Roping: The soldiers engage in this when they enter the mansion after arriving off-screen via a helicopter.
• Final Girl: Alice is the only one able to escape the Hive without getting killed or infected. She does get "infected" after she escapes, though. By horror movie standards, she subverts the 'most wholesome' aspects (she has flashbacks to having sex with Spence, appears nude and provides Fanservice by way of her sexy red dress) and she's also the rare blonde Final Girl.
• Fingore:
  • One of the Commandos has his fingers sliced off in the laser hallway and apparently dies out of shock.
  • Rain later has several of her fingers bitten off by zombies.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • When Alice gets spooked by the gust of wind outside the mansion, a helicopter can be briefly heard in the background after Matt pulls her back into the mansion. The special forces team then arrives afterwards.
  • Rain slams Spence into a mesh screen covering a pipe when he starts disagreeing with her, snapping that they don't have time to argue because "those things are right behind us!"; sure enough, a horde of zombies soon reach through the mesh to try and grab Spence.
• Foreboding Fleeing Flock: Numerous birds fly away and a gust of wind suddenly blows the leaves outside the mansion. This spooks Alice, but it simply signals the arrival of the special forces team.
• Foreshadowing:
  • As the group make their way into the Hive, they find several rooms that were sealed and flooded, with a woman's floating corpse inside. After they depart, the corpse's eyes open.
  • At the same time, Matt hears the sound of mass moaning coming from one of the vents.
  • When the Red Queen remarks on the T-virus's military applications, the camera focuses on Spence, who seems affected by what the Red Queen is saying; the third act reveals that he caused the outbreak and stole samples of the virus to sell on the black market.
  • The Red Queen warns that too long after infection, there's no guarantee the Anti-Virus will work. Sadly she's proved right with Rain.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: During the opening scene, Spence is clearly visible for a couple of split second shots as he unleashes the T-Virus and makes a quick getaway.
• From Bad to Worse: The team shut down the Red Queen, only to release what she was trying to keep locked up.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • During the initial purge of everyone in the Hive, the camera cuts away at the last second before a woman is decapitated by an elevator.
  • One is literally diced by a grid of beams, but we only see the blurry image of his reflection as he's falling to bits.
  • Kaplan is seen putting a gun in his mouth; the film then cuts to a reaction shot of Alice hearing the shot being fired. Subverted when it turns out Kaplan just shot a zombie and is looking for another way out.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Umbrella Corporation; all of the characters apart from Matt work for them, and their research resulted in the T-Virus, though the only direct influence they have on the story before the ending is sending the clean-up crew. Taking them down was the goal of Matt, his sister Lisa, and Alice prior to the movie, but the actions of Spence and the Red Queen (one a rogue Umbrella agent and the other an A.I. designed by the company) undid that plan, and even when the survivors manage to escape, a team from Umbrella quickly takes them prisoner and renders their efforts virtually meaningless.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Commando 2 attempts to jump the second laser and is cut in half when the laser goes up.
• Hand Signals: Rain and the team leader One exchange military hand signals as the group starts going through the Hive.
• Hand Sliding Down the Glass: Inverted where a hand slamming against the glass is proof that something very bad is about to happen, as the dead scientists in the sealed room aren't so dead, after all. Played straight in the scene where multiple people are trapped in a room filling with gas. Practically all of them are beating against the glass and then having their hands slide down as they slowly succumb.
• Heel–Face Turn: Alice worked for Umbrella as one of the Hive's security officers, but she had turned on the company shortly before the movie, working with Lisa Addison to steal a T-Virus sample in the hopes of bringing Umbrella down.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Among the first things the strike team does is take their gas masks off, even though they know the Red Queen can deploy nerve gas. (One at least seems to be doing it because he realizes the temporarily-amnesiac Alice will respond better to a human face, but Rain really has no reason to take hers off except to show the audience she's Michelle Rodriguez.)
• Heroic Sacrifice: J.D. ends up performing one unintentionally when he pushes Kaplan away from a locked door so that he can unlock it himself (which unfortunately turns out to have a horde of zombies behind it).
• Hologram: The Red Queen's projected image which is likewise aptly colored red.
• Hope Spot:
  • After Rain is bitten and our remaining heroes are briefly trapped, Kaplan pulls a Big Damn Heroes, the Mega-Licker finishes off Spence for them, and they manage to get the antivirus he left behind, leave the Hive on the train, and inject Rain. Then the Mega-Licker catches up to the train... oh, and the antivirus doesn't work, mainly because Rain was not only bitten so many times, but was also infected for a length of time that would render the anti-virus ineffective.
  • Alice and Matt manage to reach the mansion seconds before the Hive is permanently locked down, with the virus samples in tow, set to expose Umbrella's shady dealings and bring the company down, avenging all those who died in the film, as well as having enough anti-virus to help an infected Matt. Alice is a moment away from curing him when a biohazard team from Umbrella arrives, abducts them as Matt starts to mutate, and a scientist orders the Hive re-opened. The end of the movie heavily implies that things rapidly went downhill from there.
• Identity Amnesia: Alice and Spence have no idea who they are, and only regain their memories as the film progresses. According to the special forces team, memory loss is a side effect of the nerve gas defense system that rendered them unconscious.
• Idiot Ball:
  • As Cracked notes above, the highly-trained tactical team spends twenty minutes somehow not landing a headshot on the zombies. They hit the walls, the floor, and the locks on the containment units. And even served far too right as all of the protagonists can barely aim to save themselves, most notably Rain who aimed for the chest instead of the head.
    [They] shoot so badly, they actually increase the number of zombies.
  • The locks are designed to contain some of the most dangerous viruses known to man. These locks, when damaged, unlock instead of staying shut. There's no kind of manual lock backup like actual biohazard vaults might have.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite being a hardass Umbrella commando, Rain ultimately proves to be quite reasonable.
• Jerkass Has a Point: The Red Queen orders Alice to kill the infected Rain in exchange for opening a locked door, saying that although there is an anti-virus, at this point there's only a chance it will work, and "I don't deal in chances". Rain is visibly sick from her wounds and could turn into a zombie at any rate, and considering what happens later, you can't really blame the Red Queen for doing this—in fact, Rain herself agrees that killing her is the responsible choice.
• Kill It with Fire: How the Licker meets its end, though admittedly all Alice was hoping to do was crush it under the train. The fire was just an added bonus. Also, if flamethrowers and incendiary grenades were used at the very beginning instead of traditional weaponry, then half of the protagonists that ended up dead from zombie attacks would have never died in the first place.
• Knuckle Cracking: After she succumbs to the T-virus infection and turns into a zombie, Rain does the neck cracking variant just before she attacks.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Spence becomes amnesic shorty after causing the T-virus outbreak in the Hive.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After unleashing the T-Virus in the Hive to cover his escape, Spence doesn't quite manage to get far enough to actually escape, being hit with nerve gas and rendered unconscious, and subsequently having to spend most of the movie barely surviving the zombie outbreak he caused. It culminates in his Karmic Death where leaving Alice, Matt, and Rain for dead while he flees just means that he's first on the menu for the Licker. As a final dose of karma, it's Alice who puts the zombified Spence down once they finally reach the train.
• Laser Hallway: The Red Queen's main defense. It takes down several of Umbrella's elite investigation squad before being shut down.
• Leg Focus: Alice's minidress allows her to show off her legs. Even when wearing Spence's jacket, she's still showing some leg.
• Male Gaze: There are many shots of Alice's legs throughout the film. The camera is kept down as low as possible to view them.
• Meaningful Echo: When Spence recovers his memories and betrays the rest of the party, he says "I'm missing you already" as his parting words to Alice (referring to their relationship). Alice echoes this same quote back as she kills a zombified Spence.
• MegaCorp: The Umbrella Corporation has its fingers in a lot of proverbial pies, selling everything from cosmetics to industrial machines to biological weapons.
• Mortal Wound Reveal: Two of the commandos' deaths in the Laser Hallway.
• Ms. Fanservice: Alice. She has a shower scene and there's a moment where she's briefly nude.
• Murderous Thighs: Alice does a Neck Snap of a zombie this way.
• Mythology Gag:
  • While fleeing from the zombies, the group double back through the Laser Hallway. To their confusion, the bodies of the operatives killed there are gone. In the games, the bodies of dispatched zombies would often disappear after the player left the room.
  • Matt Addison is an unlucky rookie cop whose first assignment is to investigate the mansion, similar to Leon Kennedy’s situation in Resident Evil 2.
  • As a Jump Scare, a zombified dog jumps through a window when Alice reaches for the gun of a zombified cop. Resident Evil 1 has an infamous hallway where two Cerberus dogs crash through the windows and attack the player.
  • As a Wham Line, an Umbrella scientist orders an infected Matt to be taken to the "Nemesis program", hinting at the eponymous Nemesis tyrant from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.
• Necessarily Evil: The Red Queen qualifies big time. Yes, she did murder the entire Umbrella research facility staff, but she was only following her main directive to prevent a T-virus outbreak. Her actions are probably the most sensible out of anyone in the entire series when it comes to containing a T-virus outbreak. Her actions are brutal, but effective at least until Umbrella unseals the facility and lets all the zombies loose.
• Neck Snap:
  • Rain breaks a zombie's neck by twisting it.
  • Alice snaps zombie necks three times, once with Murderous Thighs and twice by kicking them in the head.
• No Name Given: Three of the commandos aren't named and are only credited as "Medic", "Commando 1" and "Commando 2". At least in the Laser Hallway scene, the commando leader One tries calling the female medic by simply yelling "Medic!".
• No One Gets Left Behind: When Kaplan gets cut off from the rest of the party by a horde of zombies, Alice says they'll come up with a plan to rescue him. However, Kaplan tells them to keep going. Then he makes it out alive and comes back to save everyone. Then he dies at the last minute anyway.
• Not a Zombie: When the group first encounters the zombies, they assume they're just a bunch of injured survivors gone crazy.
• Not So Stoic: Badass Action Girl Rain is openly crying in the background in the scene where Kaplan is separated from the group and they're forced to leave him behind.
• Off with His Head!:
  • One of the workers of the Hive is decapitated by the elevator in the intro of the movie.
  • The Medic is decapitated by the first laser beam.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Kaplan somehow managed to escape a horde of ravenous zombies that seemingly had him cornered, and managed to make his way back to the rest of the group in time to pull a Big Damn Heroes.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The last word of One, right before he gets sliced into chunks by the Laser Hallway trap:
    "Shit".
  • When the Red Queen explains that a bite from a zombie can transmit the T-Virus, a visibly dismayed Rain looks at her injured hand, bitten by the first zombie she encountered.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
  • James Purefoy slips out of his American accent occasionally when pronouncing a word with an r in the middle.
  • Colin Salmon does likewise when he says "now let's move it".
  • Martin Crewes's holds up really well but does slip on the odd word.
• Once More, with Clarity: A flashback at the end of the movie uses the shots of the hand throwing the T-virus vial and the office worker getting coffee knocked all over him again to reveal that both of these were Spence, running away from the scene of the crime.
• Our Zombies Are Different: These zombies exist because of science — specifically, a virus. A cure exists, but doesn't have much reliability even when administered soon after infection. The T-Virus zombies move slow, and any head trauma (not just a shot to the head) will kill them; Alice kills a zombie dog by kicking it in the head and smashes a zombie's head with a paperweight, while Rain kills a zombie by snapping her neck.
• Poor Communication Kills: The Red Queen had very good reason to initiate a lockdown and keeping the doors shut. Yet the team did not bother to ask why she had done this, nor did she explain until explicitly asked. It's unclear how much this is the Red Queen's "choice" and how much is faulty programming. She automatically answers any direct question in clear, specific language, but either can't or won't clarify on her own that the reason she sealed the facility is an outbreak and they shouldn't turn her off because turning her off would release Umbrella's catalog of bioweapons—although Kaplan's also under the impression that she's designed to lie in her own defense, even to Umbrella personnel, so who knows if that would've helped.
• Pull the I.V.: Alice does this in the hospital scene that comes at the end of this and near the start of Apocalypse.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The novelization reveals that the members of One's team have different backgrounds and include a military veteran (One himself), a former NYPD cop (Drew), an ex-convict (Warner), a former LAPD officer (Rain), a Russian Army medic (Olga), an ex-FBI agent (Kaplan), and an ex-CIA agent (J.D.).
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: As mentioned by the Red Queen, the zombies can only be killed by severing the top of the spinal column or inflicting massive trauma to the brain. Rain, being a commando, simply interprets this as scoring a headshot.
  Rain: How do you kill them?
  Red Queen: Severing the top of the spinal column or massive trauma to the brain are the most effective methods.
  Rain: You mean "shoot them in the head"?
• Returning the Wedding Ring: Spence and Alice were pretending to be a married couple and eventually started an actual relationship. Near the end of the movie, Spence betrays Alice and is turned into a zombie. After she kills him, she drops her wedding ring next to his body.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: The human security personnel have no trust whatsoever in the Red Queen to start with—they easily believe she's gone off the rails and don't even entertain the idea she might have a good reason for purging the facility for a while. In fact, Kaplan specifically says that she can't be trusted and Alice shouldn't listen to anything she says. The Red Queen, for her part, seems to have been operating under the assumption she didn't need outside help or to explain to anyone outside the Hive what she was doing. Thus the strike team spends a lot of time accidentally undoing her efforts to contain the virus, and she spends a lot of time very purposefully trying to kill them for it.
• Rule of Cool: The whole series invokes this rule by the boatload, but special notice for this film goes to the laser hallway. The Red Queen could've just killed everyone right away by using the "laser grid" on the first pass. Watching the grid adapt to the victims' attempts to avoid it and take them down one by one makes for a much more awesome scene, though.
• Sequel Hook: Alice walks out of the hospital to find that she's in a deserted (except for zombies) Raccoon City.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Spence shoots out the lock on the lab door off camera.
• Sinister Scraping Sound: The second zombie limps in dragging an axe across the floor.
• Slow Electricity: When the Red Queen (and the power) are shut down and restarted.
• Spanner in the Works: As Spence laments during The Reveal, his theft and escape got derailed because he didn't realize the Red Queen had defense sytems outside the Hive in addition to inside.
• Spicy Latina: Rain downplays this, as her aggression is more 'understandable frustration at being locked underground with zombies' and she shows a softer side. But she plays it straight in being the most prominent Action Girl, confrontational with the other characters and being just attractive enough despite her tomboyish appearance.
• Stab the Salad: The Red Queen computer demands that the remaining protagonists chop off Rain Ocampo's head (because she's infected with the T-Virus) before she'll let the rest of them go. Alice appears to agree. She raises up the axe, the music swells, and Alice chops into the video monitor the Red Queen has been using to talk to them.
• Staking the Loved One: After JD reanimates as a zombie, Rain is forced to put her friend down for good, leaving her badly shaken up, a feeling not helped by her own infection.
• Stat-O-Vision: How the Red Queen sees the world.
• Stripperiffic: As Jovovich pointed out on the "Making Of" feature for Apocalypse, they had to find a way to make Alice sexy since "in real life, she just wears a security uniform [and] no one pays to see that". Thus, Alice dons the red dress and black short shorts. Admittedly, the dress doesn't give her too much trouble since she's wearing a jacket over it for most of her action scenes.
• Suicidal "Gotcha!": After the survivors are forced to leave a wounded Kaplan, who has only a single bullet left in his gun, he puts the barrel in his mouth, and the rest of the group hears a gunshot. When the scene cuts back to Kaplan, we see that he used his last bullet to kill a zombie, and he defiantly tells the horde that they'll have to work for their meal.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: This happens four times — once in the laser trap scene, once with the "dining room" attack scene, and twice with the Licker. This continues in the sequels.
• Sword Drag: In a hilarious bit of Foreshadowing, a zombie is shown dragging an axe on the floor just like the Executioner will.
• Sympathetic Villain, Despicable Villain: The Red Queen, despite having killed everyone in the Hive and making every effort to ensure the protagonists don't escape, is actually the sympathetic villain here, as she's simply following her programming and doing her best to ensure that the T-Virus doesn't breach containment (given its horrific effects, it's hard to blame her). Spence Parks, meanwhile, is the despicable villain, having caused the outbreak to cover his own escape after stealing samples of the T-Virus and its anti-virus to sell on the black market for his own personal gain, leaving everyone else, including his own lover, to die once his memory returns.
• Take a Third Option: The Red Queen gives Alice an ultimatum: Kill the infected Rain and escape or stay in the Hive and die. Kaplan pulls off a Big Damn Heroes moment by frying the Red Queen and unlocking the door.
• Take My Hand!: Rain to J.D. It doesn't work so well because the latter is being dragged by a horde of zombies.
• Tempting Fate:
  • J.D. after entering the door code to their supposed next route. What's behind the door is a horde of zombies that bite and drag him away.
  • Moments before getting the anti-virus injection, Rain says that she doesn't want to end up as a zombie, "walking around without a soul". One Hope Spot later, it turns out that the injection was too little, too late, and she soon becomes a zombie.
• Third-Option Adaptation: The movie features an entire cast of original characters.
• Tongue Trauma: Alice pins the Licker's tongue to the grill in the train car's floor with a sharp piece of pipe.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • One's unit didn't even bother to ask why the Red Queen had gone homicidal until several of his team had already been killed or injured.
  • There's a small alcove between the door and the laser hallway, enough space for at least four people to stand safe from the lasers. None of them go for it.
  • The Umbrella scientist who seizes Alice and Matt at the end of the movie orders the Hive re-opened; a Time Skip to Alice waking up in a desolate Raccoon City makes it fairly clear how well that went.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Rain plays this straight.
• Villain Ball: The Umbrella clean-up team sent to investigate the Hive reveal that the Red Queen has a timer running on the facility. The T-Virus broke loose and infected everything within the facility, so when the Queen's timer counts down to zero, all of the Hive's entrances will permanently seal shut. Nothing gets in or out. This seems pretty smart so far. Umbrella does not agree with this. Not only does the system have a built-in override, but the team sent to override the system contains five people. Guess what happens when they override the system?
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Rain vomits hours after being bitten by a zombie.
• Wall Crawl: The Licker can climb walls and ceilings, as best seen just before it kills Spence.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Red Queen killed everyone in the Hive (around 500 people) to prevent the T-virus from breaching containment, kills several of the clean-up crew when they try to deactivate her, and does everything she can to avoid the risk of the survivors reaching the surface, not telling them about the anti-virus after Rain is infected, and even unleashing the Licker to kill them as a last resort; everything that happens after the initial outbreak proves the Red Queen right, as deactivating her also unlocks the doors containing hundreds of ravenous zombies, Rain turns out to be past the point of saving, and the state of Raccoon City after Umbrella has the Hive re-opened shows how dangerous the T-Virus is.
• Wham Line: Upon seeing Matt start to mutate after being infected by the Licker, an Umbrella scientist has this to say:
  "I want him in the Nemesis Program."
• What a Drag: The film shows us a rare heroic example when the Licker gets dumped out the cargo hatch and dragged beneath the train.
• Whoosh in Front of the Camera: Near the end of the movie, Alice wakes up in an operating room in the Umbrella facility. While the audience's POV is in an observation room watching her, a figure moves across the screen (inside the observation room) with a scare chord.
• Xanatos Gambit: The Red Queen pulls one when the protagonists try to escape The Hive before the doors close for good. Alice, Matt, and Rain are trapped in a lab with a Licker at the window, which it is slowly breaking through. The only door out of the lab is locked, and the Queen won't give Alice the code unless she kills the infected Rain (and invokes Vasquez Always Dies). The Queen doesn't care if Alice kills her, as keeping the door locked will let the group live long enough for the Licker to kill them all — and keep the virus contained. She would've won, too, if Kaplan hadn't taken Option Three and fried the Red Queen to unlock the door and allow everyone to escape. This ends badly.
• You Did Everything You Could: As Alice and Matt near the exit, Alice feels responsible for not saving all of their comrades who died:
  Alice: I failed all of them. I failed.
  Matt: Listen to me. There is nothing else you could've done.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The start of one anyway. The zombies are contained inside the facility, but they could (and inevitably do) escape.
• Zombie Gait: Averted, subverted, inverted, played straight, played for laughs and everything in between.