Resident Evil: Damnation (2012)

The second of Capcom's computer-animated excursions into its own merchandising, Resident Evil: Damnation sends federal agent Leon S. Kennedy into the fictional Eastern Slav Republic to confirm that biological weapons are being traded in a civil war. It is brisk and grim business: parasites beneath the skin, lickers in the church, tyrants in the bunker. The animation is competent, the action legible, and the whole enterprise sits somewhere between a video game cutscene and a feature. Director Makoto Kamiya wanted a story that stood apart from the games. He got a civil war and a tank.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the film is a near-total abstention. There is a female president, Svetlana Belikova, and a returning female spy in Ada Wong, both of whom handle themselves with competence and, in Belikova's case, a certain authoritarian chill. This is franchise furniture, not an argument. No romantic or identity-based subtext of any kind surfaces. The Eastern Slav Republic is invented wholesale, which spares the film any obligation to reckon with real history, and its conflict concerns bioweapons and sovereignty, not race, climate, or the depredations of capital. The screenplay has no sermon to deliver. It has monsters to deliver.

The closest thing to a thesis arrives through Buddy, a former schoolteacher whose fiancee and students were killed in a government bombing, and who takes up the parasite out of grief. The film treats his vengeance as tragedy, and Leon's refusal to grant him an easy death as mercy. That is humanism in the old sense, not the new one. There is no lecture here, no corrective aimed at the audience's assumed sins. It is a horror picture that ends with a man in a wheelchair pushing himself up a hill toward a school as the credits roll. The image is sincere and it is not trying to teach anyone anything. It simply is.