Ella Balinska as Jade Wesker in Resident EvilPhoto: Netflix
The new Resident Evil trailer proposes a question: when did the world officially end? Is it in 2036, when the zombie outbreak is past the point of no return? Or was it in 2022, when the T-virus seems to have exploded out of New Raccoon City? Or maybe it was years before that, in the original Raccoon City?
Jade Wesker (Ella Balinska) has an opinion on the answer, and she was there to witness most of the carnage firsthand. The most recent adaptation of the video game series will toggle between two timelines, following Jade’s experience in 2022 (with her younger self played by Tamara Smart) and her life in the dreary end-times version of London more than a decade later.
The latest trailer (released as part of Netflix’s 2022 Geeked Week) sticks with the foreboding Americana soundtrack theme to introduce the shiny New Raccoon City, where the Umbrella Corporation is “trying to reinvent itself.” With the games serving as the “backstory” for the new Netflix series, “We are now essentially 20-plus years from the first Raccoon City,” showrunner Andrew Dabb previously explained to Entertainment Weekly. “Everyone knows it was destroyed in a very tragic incident, but very few people know exactly what happened, which makes sense, given that it was a bit of a cover-up in the U.S. government.”
In 2036, Jade is “like Jane Goodall for zombies,” Dabb told EW. “She’s studying them. She’s trying to learn how they operate. This is a new organism.” And as the trailer shows, Jade gets up close and personal with the subjects of her study, bathing in the blood of many a zombie–and encountering some monsters along the way.
Meanwhile, she’ll have to face a traumatic past with sister Billie (Siena Agudong) and their infamous father, Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick). It doesn’t seem to take long for Umbrella’s rebrand to fall apart, as Albert is well aware that the company’s latest drug “contains the T-virus.” The apocalypse is right around the corner… or it’s already begun.
