Zombie dogs, martial arts and a meet-cute: Resident Evil has it all

In 2009, actor Milla Jovovich married director Paul WS Anderson. Longtime partners and creative collaborators, the two met on the set of 2002’s Resident Evil, an adaptation of the Japanese video game franchise which pushed the limits of the PlayStation in the 90s. Starring the former and written and directed by the latter, the production – which would inaugurate a six-film, billion-dollar franchise – was not without its hiccups.

The story goes that Jovovich, unhappy with script revisions which palmed her action scenes off to her co-stars, threatened to walk. But instead of leaving, she and Anderson spent hours amending the script: the genesis of a fruitful partnership, both professional and personal. Most significantly, the rewrites returned to Jovovich’s character (the amnesiac Alice) the film’s defining scene, in which she runs up a wall, spins, jumps and kicks a zombie dog square in the face.

The games that provide the source material were light on action and heavy on dread; they ostensibly ushered in the nascent medium’s “survival horror” genre. Less concerned with generic fidelity than sensory thrills, the film ports the games’ universe into the nu-metal action cycle of the early 2000s (see: The One, xXx), a period brimming with tactile, tacky pleasures – chief among them hard rock and martial arts.

Onscreen, the wall-jump dog kick plays out in graceful slow motion with a guitar lick, a yell and the shatter of glass. Arriving at the halfway mark, it’s a turning point: with a single blow, Alice begins to regain both her memory and corporeal ability. From here on, it’s her film.

Like the games, the adaptation is set in a world under the purview of the Umbrella Corporation, a multinational conglomerate with their grubby mitts on everything from healthcare to military technology. When a hazardous viral material is let loose within one of their secret subterranean research facilities known as The Hive, the site goes into lockdown. You might’ve guessed what happens next: all the staff turn into zombies.