YMMV / Resident Evil: Apocalypse

• Ass Pull: See the series' page.
• Awesome Music: The ending theme, "The End of Heartache" by Killswitch Engage, is an amazing metalcore piece that brings the whole early 2000s to mind.
• Base-Breaking Character: LJ is either an offensive Ethnic Scrappy or someone who's pretty funny. Thankfully, he drops the Uncle Tomfoolery in the next movie.
• Complete Monster: Major Timothy Cain is the Umbrella operative in charge of containing the viral outbreak in Racoon City. When a zombie almost escapes the city, Cain closes the gates, having his men fire on the crowd to force them back into the city. Cain then releases the Nemesis, a bioweapon he created from Alice's friend Matt, into the city, having it kill the members of S.T.A.R.S. as a test. Interested in testing Alice's capabilities as a weapon against Nemesis, Cain murders Charles Ashford to force her to fight it, threatening to kill the rest of her friends, including Charles's young daughter. When his cruelty causes Nemesis to turn on him, Cain orders Umbrella to nuke Racoon city, abandoning both Alice and Nemesis to save his own skin.
• Contested Sequel: Apocalypse is either a good follow-up to the first film with increased action and improved visual effects, or an overall step down that gleefully stomps on the games' established canon.
• Critical Dissonance: The film is the lowest ranked installment of the franchise on Rotten Tomatoes, yet is the highest ranked on IMDb, while other reviewing sites take middle positions.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • While the first film avoided stepping on the games thanks to having its own original characters and playing with them in a manner that was realistic to the franchise's universe, Apocalypse based itself on Resident Evil 3's storyline and imported characters from it, ensuring the rest of the film saga would mandatorily intrude in the games' canon with its increasingly divisive Alice arc. Most notably, this film was the one that started the trend of making Alice unbeatable and including fan favorite characters from the games to be outclassed and overshadowed by her in every possible field.
  • The way Apocalypse mixed up the games' canon and Anderson canon affected the disposition of the fans towards the franchise. It caused the films to be panned both for straying away from the games (attracting the fans' ire for "not being RE at all") and for being faithful to the games (which would then gain accusations of being "unoriginal" and "copypasted"), as well as some instances where they would criticize elements in the films that came actually from the games, like Nemesis being a controllable B.O.W. or Wesker looking and acting like a character from The Matrix.
• Fridge Logic: There is a scene where Jill Valentine and Angela Ashford are hiding from zombified dogs in a school's kitchen. Jill turns on all of the stoves, and runs out with Angela. Awaiting them outside is Alice ready to blow up the gas. This is all fine and dandy until you realize that Alice has no reason to be waiting for them, and certainly no reason to be conveniently smoking the cigarette that she used to blow up the gas. She even has a fireproof blanket to cover up Angela with.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Not the last time that Jared Harris would play a scientist who would be partly responsible for a deadly virus being created and who is betrayed and killed halfway through the film.
  • The cover up for Raccoon City's obliteration is that is destroyed in a nuclear meltdown. A surprisingly plausible cover story seeing as Jared Harris would get mixed up in one of those Chernobyl . And that the USSR and Umbrella have more in common than they should. They even reference the Chernobyl incident at the end!
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Many watch the movie simply to see Nemesis blasting people away with a minigun and saying his catchphrase "S.T.A.R.S."
  • Sienna Guillory as Jill Valentine also becomes a reason people watch this movie, especially for her surprisingly game-accurate portrayal.
• Memetic Mutation: The line "My name is Alice" due to it being one of the most memorable and quotable lines in the series.
• Narm:
  • The action sequences try just a bit too hard to be spectacular. RedLetterMedia's Half in the Bag analysis of the series several clips of Mike, Jay, and Rich unable to discuss the movie as they watch it because they're too busy reacting to these scenes with raucous laughter.
  • Nemesis in his game, at the time, being incredibly nimble and sprinting around was like a massive yet efficient predator gunning for Jill that was bound to terrify players. Nemesis in this movie trying to leap around and hunt down Alice? Absolutely hilarious thanks to an oversized costume suit as dramatic slow-motion emphasizes him having all the grace of a brick. This isn't helped when Umbrella has him and Alice battle each other to prove who's the better research subject, resulting in what's obviously a man barely navigating said oversized costume trying to do a CQC fight. Words fail to truly describe how awkward this is to actually watch, even for casual non-RE fans.
  • Nicholai getting jumped by a Cerberus would probably have been more of a Jump Scare if it didn't look like someone tossed the model in from off-screen and accidentally bonked his actor upside the face with the closed mouth.
• Nightmare Fuel: Say what you will about the movie itself, but its "Regenerate" commercial is genuinely creepy. Ignore the fact it mentions the Umbrella Corporation, which would fly over the head of someone not versed in RE lore anyway, and it seems like a genuine commercial for a revolutionary skin product. That is, until it mentions that, like with any product, side effects may occur...
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: Watching the 1991 Dark Warrior anime OVA can give the impression Anderson wanted to make an enormous homage to it with the excuse of a RE adaptation. In said OVA, we have a main character who discovers that a massive corporation has given him superhuman abilities, is hunting him down, and wants to pit him in a test battle against an even stronger human bioweapon who was previously an ally of his. The protagonist then wins dramatically and swears revenge on the corporation, but only to be taken away and put into a liquid vat, where he is experimented on while kept in stasis in a nice fetal position. There, another ally who is a little girl with a psychic bond to him wakes him up telepathically, allowing him to break free and join the rest of the resistance against the corp, though not without discovering he has gained now unexpected psychic powers as well. If those similarities are not enough, the next films still have more.
• Signature Song: Even though it is only heard in the marketing, Papa Roach's "Not Listening" definitely counts.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Sienna Guillory spent a lot of time studying Jill's movements in Resident Evil 3 and putting a lot of effort into her role, and it showed in her performance's universal praise. Notably on the DVD commentary, she keeps things serious while Milla Jovovich and Oded Fehr goof off.
• Villain Decay: As pointed out in this review of the movie:
  Deusdaecon: Because every fan when they played Resident Evil 3, every single one of them, when they saw Nemesis killing people and being a scary enemy, all of them said in unison: You know what would make him better? A tragic fucking backstory. Because he's not a scary, inhuman monster unless you care about him.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Say what you want about the film itself, but the Nemesis costume is pretty awesome and game accurate (barring the minigun). They also used platform boots and vertical stretching in scenes only featuring Nemesis to make him seem taller to be more in line with the character's height.
• Win Back the Crowd: After the tepid fan reaction to the first film, the trailer for Apocalypse became one of the most watched on the internet, with 8.5 million downloads from November 2003 to May 2004, as fans were naturally curious about how the canon characters would be handled in the film's storyline.

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