Editor's note: The following contains spoilers through Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is finally available in theaters, giving fans of Capcom’s iconic survival horror game franchise the chance to see many of their favorite characters brought to life. However, Welcome to Raccoon City takes many liberties regarding characters’ origin stories, Umbrella’s motivations, and even the events that take place in the night the C-Virus infects the local population, leading to a zombie outbreak. Instead of focusing on a single installment of the gaming franchise, writer and director, Johannes Roberts, merged the first trilogy of Resident Evil games into the same movie. That means the story takes different turns from the games, with new locations brought to life to stitch every loose end together. But what exactly happens at the ending of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City? And how different is it from the games?
What's the Final Fate of Our ‘Resident Evil’ Heroes?
In the original trilogy, each game takes place in a very distinct moment in time. The S.T.A.R.S. elite police squad went to investigate the Spencer Mansion in July 1998, uncovering the secret experiments made by the pharmaceutical company, Umbrella Corporation. However, the full zombie breakout in Raccoon City only happened around September of the same year, with the city destroyed by a nuclear bomb in early October. Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 occur amidst the zombie breakout, with Raccoon City’s destruction taking place at the end of the third game.
Welcome to Raccoon City mixes up things by confining all the events of the original trilogy into a single night. On this fateful evening, police rookie, Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia), starts his first day on the job at Raccoon City Police Station. Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) also arrives at Raccoon City to warn her brother that Umbrella has released a virus in the city’s water supplies by accident and that everyone is in danger because of it. Finally, the S.T.A.R.S. are called to investigate a murder in the Spencer Mansion which everyone believed to be empty for many years.
For most of the movie, Claire and Leon remain separated from the rest of the group, but Welcome to Raccoon City finds a way to unite them with Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell) and Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen) in the underground labs of the Spencer Mansion. To do that, Welcome to Raccoon City introduces a new key place, an orphanage that was used by Umbrella for many years as a cover to conduct experiments on unwanted children. Police Chief Brian Irons (Donal Logue) knows the orphanage is connected to the Spencer Mansion through a series of underground tunnels and leads Claire and Leon there in the hopes of escaping the city’s destruction.
In Welcome to Raccoon City, Chris and Claire are two children who grew up in the Umbrella orphanage. During her stay in the orphanage, Claire became friends with Lisa Trevor (Marina Mazepa), a deformed figure that crawls in the shadows during the nights. Lisa was one of the early victims of Dr. William Birkin (Neal McDonough), and the fact that Claire showed her sympathy so many years ago proves vital for the heroes’ survival. Lisa helps guide Leon and Claire safely to the secret tunnels, which leads to their reunion with Chris and Jill.
The four heroes fight a deformed version of Dr. William in the underground labs while trying to get to an underground train station after the good doctor injects himself with the G-Virus. At this point, the heroes already know Umbrella intends to destroy Raccoon City by 6 a.m., and they are all running for their lives. The heroes get to the train exactly five minutes before the deadline and are once again attacked by Dr. Williams, now transformed into a giant monster. Leon uses a rocket launcher to dispose of the creature, just as an underground explosion shakes Raccoon City and makes the earth swallow the whole town.
After Raccoon City’s destruction, we get to see an Umbrella report that defines the operation as successful. Umbrella believes they were able to destroy every evidence of their work in Raccoon City and that no survivor was left behind. But the company will find out soon enough that that’s not the case, as the movie closes to a shot of the four heroes walking out the train tunnel, with weapons in hand and the will to stand together against Umbrella.
How ‘Welcome to Raccoon City’ Set Up a Sequel?
Although Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City mixes and matches scenes from the original trilogy of games, the movie never really explains what Umbrella is doing in their secret labs. We know that the zombie outbreak is the fruit of accidental contamination of the town’s water supply and that they were experimenting on kids. We also learn that Umbrella gave a shot to all police officers in Raccoon City to prevent them from being contaminated by the toxic water. However, we don’t know Umbrella’s goals in the movie and why they decided to protect police officers only to kill them when they destroy the whole city.
In the games, Raccoon City’s outbreak also lasts long enough for the U.S. government to take notice of it. However, in the movie, Umbrella is able to quietly hide all their failures, which means they are still out there, quietly working on their bioweapons. That means potential sequels of Welcome to Raccoon City need to delve deep into what the movie version of Umbrella is doing and how the surviving heroes can expose the evil corporation.
To make matters more complicated, there’s a secret third party interested in Umbrella’s experiments. In the movie, S.T.A.R.S. officer, Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper), is contacted by a mysterious woman that guides him to Umbrella’s labs. The woman promises Wesker a lot of money to recover samples of the G-Virus and warns him that the city will be destroyed by morning. Unfortunately, Wesker ends up dead after being shot by Jill during gunfire that endangered an innocent child. Nevertheless, that’s not the end of Wesker.
In the credit scene of Welcome to Raccoon City, Wesker comes back to life. The scene also reveals the mysterious woman who had contacted Wesker is fan-favorite, Ada Wong (Lily Gao). Ada has brought Wesker back to life, but the movie never tells for whom Ada was working, why this secret organization with such long reach needed Wesker in the first place, and why they brought the officer back from the dead. If Welcome to Raccoon City gets a sequel, director Roberts has a lot of plot threads he has to explain.