Pop-Cultured Catholic #10: How Capcom’s Animated Film, “Resident Evil Damnation”, Portrays A Just Cause Defiled By Unjust Warfare
Hello everyone. This series has not yet delved much into the video games I grew up playing. But I am a big fan of the “Resident Evil”/“Biohazard” games by Capcom.
The RE franchise is a series of science-fiction stories, in which mad scientists play God with biotechnology and mutagenic pathogens, creating various monsters and superhumans. The goals of such research have been to cheat death, advance eugenics, and utilize the monsters as bioweapons. The protagonists also have to confront various criminals responsible for aiding these mad scientists and/or seeking to benefit from their creations, such as bribed government officials, black market traffickers, mercenaries, crime lords, cult leaders, terrorists, and world dictators. The plots are also wrapped up in homages to many of the classic horror films and b-monster flicks. I have enjoyed many of the franchise’s stories, characters, and lore, which exhibit varying ratios of grounded horror vs. blockbuster action and serious drama vs. campy escapism.
While the Resident Evil franchise has not exactly been graced when comes to live-action movie adaptations, there is one animated film I really enjoyed, “Resident Evil Damnation”. It is the second movie in Capcom’s lineup of animated spinoff films, which are connected to the video games’ canon timeline. The plot of RE Damnation involves U.S. agent and recurring game protagonist, Leon Scott Kennedy, who is dropped into the fictional Eastern Slav Republic, where monsters from the games are being used as bioweapons in a civil war. And like with Godzilla, I perceived plot points which could be dissected through the Catechism’s doctrines of Just War, etc.
To make the plot easier to explain, I will give a rundown of the four monsters appearing in this film (and attach pictures of them alongside the three major characters):
1.) Tyrants — In an attempt to create mass producible super-soldiers, human fetuses were grown in-vitro and infected with a mutagenic virus, which gave them superhuman size, strength, speed, healing, and growth rates. The resulting Tyrants were then conditioned and trained to serve as emotionless killing machines, who mutely and ruthlessly carry out any orders they are given.
2.) Lickers — These more ghoulish and animalistic beings originated from humans, who were infected with the same virus used to create the Tyrants but failed to mutate properly. The mutations instead left them with quadrupedal frames, flayed appearances, massive talons, a lack of eyes, an ability to hunt by sound, and long prehensile tongues.
3.) Las Plagas Parasites — A fictional species of mind-controlling parasites from Spain, which can turn the hosts they infect into puppets, whether they be humans, animals, or even other monsters like Lickers. The parasites and their possessed hosts operate collectively like worker bees, through a seemingly telepathic hive-mind.
4.) Master Plagas — The “queen bees” of the Plaga hive-mind, which initially cooperate with their human hosts, allowing the person to retain his free will and even mentally command the horde of parasitized hosts himself. But if the Master Plaga is allowed to grow and mature unchecked, it will become intelligent enough to command the horde on its own, then slowly turn its own human host into another puppet and mouthpiece for itself.
Leon is initially sent in to help the Eastern Slav Republic’s female president, Svetlana Belikova, stop a faction of rebels employing bioweapons against their government, but he soon learns that the conflict is not so black-and-white. After a brief skirmish, Leon is captured by the rebels and gradually learns more of their perspective. In particular, he gets to know the rebels’ soon-to-be leader nicknamed “Buddy”. It turns out Svetlana is running the country like a tyrannical dictator and has heinous war crimes on her hands. One such crime happens to be bombing an elementary school, where Buddy used to teach, alongside his fiancé killed in the attack. Since then, the once pacifistic Buddy has become a fanatical revolutionary bent on overthrowing Svetlana through any means necessary. With the rebels losing the war and seeing their plight ignored by the world, they turned to purchasing illegal bioweapons like Las Plagas parasites and Plaga-controlled Lickers, as their final desperate strategy.
One of my favorite scenes in the film actually involves Leon and Buddy confronting each other inside a Catholic church, as monsters are running amok outside and Svetlana’s bombers are swooping in to level the entire area. In one shot, Leon and Buddy stand arguing on opposite sides of the altar, with the monstrance standing in the background between them. The revolutionaries have temporarily lost control of their monsters, which are now indiscriminately killing or infecting government soldiers, rebel combatants, and civilians alike. Even Buddy is horrified to see one of his own friends get infected and possessed by a rogue Las Plagas parasite, requiring him to be gunned down.
During said scene, a clash of ideals between Leon and Buddy occurs. Leon tries to reason with Buddy and expresses sympathy for his cause, but declares that his faction’s use of bioweapons has defiled their cause and made them the greater evil in his eyes. Leon has witnessed his own town of Raccoon City ravaged by a zombie outbreak, the gruesome collateral damage of these monsters is on display all around them, and other RE stories emphasize how even creating these monsters in the first place is a crime against humanity. For Buddy, however, the stakes of overthrowing Svetlana have become too great and hopeless. He will even use bioweapons as his means to that end, believing that her atrocities justify it and he has nothing left to lose now: "As far as I am concerned, there is no difference between this and using B.O.W.s (Bio-Organic Weapons). If you want to keep this from happening again, put down your gun... Well then. That is my answer, and your answer". As the church is bombed and begins to collapse, Leon and Buddy flee their separate ways. Buddy resolves to infect himself with a new Master Plaga, so he can regain control over the horde of monsters and lead one final charge on the capital, while Leon resolves to stop him.
The following day, when Leon infiltrates Svetlana’s palace amidst the battle, a major plot twist occurs which turns the story into a three-way conflict. Leon discovers that Svetlana herself was the original person stockpiling the bioweapons and has even manipulated things behind the scenes, so the rebels would acquire them. She hoped that the desperate rebels would use them, giving her the perfect propaganda piece for the United Nations. She would be seen by the world as the heroic figure, while the other countries would be spurred into crushing the rest of her enemies for her. And the rebels have taken her bait… hook, line, and sinker.
As a final trump card, Svetlana unleashes her own trio of hulking Tyrant super-soldiers with orders to kill both Leon and Buddy, forcing the pair to reluctantly fight together against the greater threat. Seeing Buddy as one of the only witnesses left, Leon begrudgingly helps him to fight the Tyrants. What follows are multiple action-packed set-pieces, where the two of them escape the facility underneath Svetlana’s palace and continue to fight the Tyrants outside in the streets. The three Tyrants tear through the rebel forces, requiring Leon and Buddy to use hails of bullets, fuel container explosions, a rocket launcher, packs of Plaga-controlled Lickers, and even a tank… only to succeed in bringing down one of the Tyrants.
In the end, the only saving grace is that Leon’s connections keeping track of him managed to get the alert out, that Svetlana was the one originally stockpiling the bioweapons. Right as the two remaining Tyrants are about to kill the exhausted Leon and Buddy, they are annihilated by incoming aircraft. Thanks to the efforts of Leon’s various connections, the other countries are instead intervening to bring Svetlana’s forces to heel rather than her enemies. The epilogue begins with Leon and Buddy overlooking the aftermath.
During the final scene between Leon and Buddy, we see the latter reaching the brink of despair and only be saved, when Leon intervenes with a rather life-affirming speech. Buddy sorrowfully concedes that their use of bioweapons was in vain, only playing into Svetlana's hands and resulting in the deaths of all his friends and many more civilians. With his Master Plaga parasite still growing inside him, Buddy is about to kill himself. He believes that would be a better fate than either losing his humanity to the parasite or removing the parasite from his spine to become permanently crippled with "nothing left" to live for. However, Leon snatches away the gun: “I'd feel the same way if I was you. But the option of taking our own lives no longer belongs to us. Once we start using these (the gun), we owe it to the people who died alongside us. We have to continue living. Even if it means living the rest of our lives without the use of our limbs. That is my answer and your answer, Buddy”. With that, Leon aims for Buddy’s spine and shoots the parasite inside him.
In a mid-credits scene, we see Buddy living on in a wheelchair, but surrounded by schoolchildren whose prosperity he can find new purpose in. Rather than affirming Buddy’s impulse to take his own life, Leon saved him and ultimately gave Buddy the chance to find more reasons to live. That is, despite Buddy going through all that loss and now being paraplegic for the rest of his days. Particularly from a Catholic perspective, this ending for Buddy could reflect a rather uplifting and resonant closure.
Overall, a lot of same morals promoted by Catholicism can be interpreted in the story of “Resident Evil Damnation”, including what violates the doctrine of Just War, the harms of trying to achieve a good end with evil means, the life-affirming attitudes expressed by Leon near the end, and the laundry list of bioethics violations portrayed as in any typical “Resident Evil”/“Biohazard” plot. Similar to what I brought up in my Godzilla post, some of Catholicism's tenets on Just War are that the declaration of war cannot produce worse evils than the ones to be eliminated, every individual act of war must still be morally licit, and that "Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man... A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons - especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons - to commit such crimes". The story proposes another reason why one should not use evil means to achieve a good end, for it may initially seem like the only way to defeat one's enemies, but then end up playing right into the enemies' hands. The resolution to Buddy's story is theologically satisfying. And since the Catholic Church does exist in the Resident Evil universe, I imagine the Pope's fictional counterpart(s) would have a field day calling out all the misuses of science: the creation of deadly mutagenic pathogens, eugenics research, criminal experimentation, the trafficking of humans to be used as test subjects, the manufacturing of unborn humans in labs for such research, and the turning of human beings into weaponized monsters.
In conclusion, here are some clips from the movie I broke down:
1.) RE Damnation's Japanese Movie Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVTdoGPFS34
2.) Leon's Skirmish With the First Licker and Capture By Rebels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgb0bDq123o
3.) Scene of Las Plagas Parasite Infecting Soldier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOKhp64IGz0
4.) The Infection and Death of Buddy's Friend, J.D.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzUC4HJNmLw
5.) Leon vs. Svetlana vs. Buddy Underneath the Palace Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDbpJN3e9Mo
6.) Leon vs. Svetlana vs. Buddy Underneath the Palace Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIfEGVWmVe8
7.) Svetlana Unleashes the Tyrants Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLLU72E4FpM
8.) Svetlana Unleashes the Tyrants Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPwG8ZE27CY
9.) Leon and Buddy Fight Third Tyrant in Streets Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckvIk866Db8
10.) Leon and Buddy Fight Third Tyrant in Streets Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egB0yiLhP2U
11.) Abridged Clip of Military Saving Leon from Other Two Tyrants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXsyOtrquAA
12.) Leon's Final Exchange With Buddy and Buddy's Mid-Credits Epilogue Scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unLNMFjI9Ss
