With Women Of Action, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time
For a schlocky action series featuring zombie dogs and killer laser grids, Resident Evil carries quite a few cinematic distinctions. At various points, it’s been the highest-grossing horror film franchise, the highest-grossing zombie series, and the highest-grossing video game adaptation. Before The Last Of Us turned video game zombies into prestige television, writer-director Paul W. S. Anderson turned them into slick, goofy B-movie fodder. And in between the hyper-stylized fun, Resident Evil also quietly challenged Hollywood norms about who gets to lead action movie franchises.
If women-led action movies are rare enough in Hollywood, women-led action franchises are even rarer. When it comes to series that expand beyond just one sequel, you can almost count them on one hand (and virtually all of them star white women). The 1980s and 1990s paved new ground with the twin Alien and Terminator franchises. The 2010s were defined by The Hunger Games and copycat series like Divergent. And the 2000s were dominated by two techno-infused, horror-inspired, post-Matrix franchises that each created a real-life marriage: Anderson and Milla Jovovich’s Resident Evil and Len Wiseman and Kate Beckinsale’s Underworld.
Of course, Underworld and Resident Evil aren’t the only women-led action blockbusters of a decade that also gave us Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, a new set of Charlie’s Angels, and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series. Nor are they the only films to lean into the leather-clad genre aesthetic that also popped up in mid-aughts flops like Catwoman, Elektra, Æon Flux, and Jovovich’s Ultraviolet. But they are notable for their sheer longevity. Ripley, Sarah Connor, and Katniss Everdeen each got four films apiece. Beckinsale’s Selene fought Lycans across five Underworld installments, but Jovovich’s Alice battled zombies and corporate overreach through a whopping six Resident Evil films, right on through to 2017’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.
It’s the sort of ongoing iconography we take for granted when it comes to male action heroes. Even setting aside superheroes and the whole James Bond franchise, it’s not unusual for male-led series to reach four or more films—think Die Hard, Rambo, Bad Boys, Lethal Weapon, Indiana Jones, John Wick, Mission: Impossible, and the Bourne franchises to name just a few. There’s a casual cultural assumption that male action heroes deserve to take up cinematic space. Women, meanwhile, have to fight for their place at the franchise table, even as they regularly star in action films that make tons of money at the box office.
Released in 2002, the first Resident Evil made an impressive $103 million on a $33 million budget, numbers the rest of the franchise would only improve upon. In many ways it was a movie of its moment: Jovovich was a few years out from her breakout role in The Fifth Element, Anderson was a few years out from successfully bringing Mortal Kombat to the big screen, and the best-selling Resident Evil video game series was on its fourth installment. In other ways, however, Anderson clearly found his inspiration in earlier female-led action franchises that had paved the way.
While Resident Evil would eventually become synonymous with delightfully daffy, increasingly apocalyptic sci-fi storytelling, the first installment starts with the horror movie simplicity of the initial Alien and Terminator films. In the sequels, Jovovich’s Alice casually runs down the exterior of a building. In the first film, it’s a huge moment when she jump-kicks off a wall. (In both cases, Jovovich did the stunt herself.) While legendary horror director George A. Romero had taken a stab at a more direct adaptation of the game (which had been inspired by his zombie movies to begin with), the German production company that owned the film rights decided to go with Anderson’s idea for a more self-contained prequel. Anderson even invented a brand-new protagonist for the series: an amnesiac Alice in Wonderland who falls down the rabbit hole of a high-tech underground lab overrun by zombies.
On paper, there’s actually quite a bit of plot to the first Resident Evil movie. Alice is an above-ground security guard for a secret underground research facility run by the malevolent Umbrella Corporation. When Umbrella’s genetically engineered T-virus contaminates “the Hive,” an automated AI computer system known as the Red Queen wipes Alice’s memory and kills everyone inside in various Final Destination-esque ways (including a great bit of elevator horror). A team of commandos soon swoops in to figure out what happened, and they wind up taking Alice and a few other stragglers down into the Hive to explore its mysteries level by level.
From there, the story spins out threads involving corporate espionage, romantic mysteries, and more Red Queen shenanigans, although, as with most of Anderson’s screenplays, it all barely hangs together in the moment, let alone when you try to piece it together afterwards. The point is just to have something to sustain the zombie thrills and game-style challenges. In fact, given Anderson’s focus on kinetic imagery over coherent plotting, there are times where Resident Evil almost plays more like a silent film than a modern sci-fi adventure.
Thankfully, he found the ideal lead in Jovovich, who has the perfect face to be a silent movie star. When we talk about what it means to be a good film actor, we often undervalue the X-factor of magnetism. Especially when it comes to action movies, being a presence is often more important than anything else. And with her piercing blue eyes and quiet sense of confidence, Jovovich has that ineffable star quality. She keeps your attention even though Alice has absolutely zero characterization.
Indeed, the fun of Resident Evil is that it doesn’t have aspirations to be more than it is, yet it also feels like everyone involved is invested in what they’re doing, which is a hard balancing act to pull off. Jovovich’s steely yet empathetic performance is key to that. So is Colin Salmon in the small but memorable role of “guy who gets cubed by lasers.” And so is Michelle Rodriguez in one of the most effective uses of her own brand of tough-talking onscreen charisma.
In fact, if Resident Evil does anything truly revolutionary, it’s not its vague anti-corporate sentiment or even the role it played in revitalizing the zombie genre—it’s the fact that it’s the rare female-led action film to feature another ass-kicking woman as a major supporting player. It’s something that no other American film I’ve covered so far in this column does. (And another place where Hong Kong action cinema was ahead of the game.) Even Wonder Woman had Diana ditch the Amazons as quickly as she could.
When other women exist in a female-led action series, they’re usually there as villains or to draw a softer, more innocent contrast to our tough female lead. In Resident Evil, however, Anderson lets Rodriguez’s Rain Ocampo serve as a tough-as-nails ally and teammate for Alice without worrying that one female character will overshadow the other. It’s something the series would continue to do (to varying degrees of success) with the likes of Sienna Guillory and Ali Larter in the sequels.
Of course, for every progressive beat, there’s plenty of sheer goofiness too, like the fact that Alice wakes up with amnesia and immediately throws on a strappy red dress and knee-high boots as her daywear. But that’s part of the B-movie fun. Resident Evil serves up a handful of genuine jump scares, some surprisingly dynamic camerawork, and a few memorable set pieces while getting in and out in 100 minutes. Watching it in a vacuum, it feels like there should be dozens of schlocky female-led franchises like it. It’s baffling that it’s more the exception than the rule, especially when you consider its ongoing financial success.
With an average budget of around $45 million each, the six Jovovich films and the franchise’s 2021 reboot have collectively grossed over $1.2 billion. (Jovovich’s sixth and final film earned an impressive $314 million just on its own.) Yet time and again, Hollywood seems to view female-led franchises as a gamble, or see the failure of one film as a warning sign for all. I suspect the fact that Anderson and Jovovich’s recent action collaboration In The Lost Lands flopped will be held against women-led action movies in a way that, say, the latest Indiana Jones movie flopping won’t be held against all male-led action movies.
Though I joked about it earlier, it actually does feel notable that the Resident Evil and Underworld franchises were spearheaded by husband-wife creative teams. Presumably, those duos had more of a personal vested interest in keeping those franchises and their stars going than your average Hollywood executive might. (In contrast, both the Terminator and Alien franchises have tried out other, more male-centric perspectives at various points.) You have to wonder if part of the reason Hollywood hasn’t produced more ongoing female-led action franchises is simply because male execs, producers, and directors don’t feel compelled to push for them in the way they do for male-driven star projects.
Otherwise, I really don’t know how to explain it. Resident Evil and The Hunger Games have proven that female-led action franchises can make upwards of a billion dollars. Yet even though Charlize Theron’s Atomic Blonde outgrossed the first John Wick, that movie never got a sequel while John Wick is heading towards its fifth installment. There’s a disparity that goes beyond cold, hard financial logic, especially when stars like Theron and Jovovich are clearly champing at the bit to work in the genre. If Hollywood is an Umbrella Corporation making irrational decisions in the name of domination, it’s fitting that Resident Evil is one of the few series that tried to overthrow that system.
Next time: As Thunderbolts continues Yelena Belova’s story, we look back at the 2021 Black Widow movie that introduced her
