Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness Review

I say “Leon’s adventure” because while he and Claire share top billing, Leon, Jason, and Shen Mei enjoy most of the screen time, while Claire’s investigation is relegated to a B-plot until the final episode when all their paths converge for a final boss fight with the big bad. There are a few twists and turns along the way, but you’ll likely see most of them coming. In fact, the miniseries plays its best card in the second episode, with the final two dealing with the fallout.

Genuine scares are few and far between, with Infinite Darkness mostly adapting the action movie tone of later installments in the video game series, but there are a few standout moments of horror. The scariest sequence involves flesh-eating rats inside of a submarine. The way those undead critters swarm their prey absolutely gave me goosebumps. True to the source material, expect some very gruesome scenes, including grotesque moments of body horror.

Meanwhile, flashbacks to a rescue mission in the war-torn streets of Penamstan are basically ripped right out of Black Hawk Down, which makes sense considering Ridley Scott’s 2001 war film was a key inspiration for Resident Evil 5 and the Chris Redfield section of Resident Evil 6, the most action-heavy installments in the game series. The detailed CG animation brings some realism to these battle scenes which start as straightforward military fiction until the zombies show up. Overall, the CG feels like a step up from Resident Evil‘s past animated movie offerings, including 2017’s Resident Evil: Vendetta.

But looks aren’t enough to carry this particularly self-serious chapter, which devolves into an action shooter more often than not. That would normally be par for the course for a Resident Evil adaptation — and it’s likely what most fans will be looking for when queuing up Infinite Darkness — but this miniseries often teases greater ambitions. Infinite Darkness is happy to ask some tough questions but pulls out the guns and the zombies just when it’s time to give some answers.

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness is streaming now on Netflix.