Resident Evil: Afterlife – Dramatically Rehashing Racial Stereotypes in Slow-Motion

by Liz Kim

I know Resident Evil has been out for a while now, but parts of it have been really bothering me, and I felt the need to share!

First off, I have a really high tolerance for mindless action movies, because they are fun and are good brain-popcorn when you have the munchies for something non-serious. Many of them are totally underrated, and I have respect for movies that know what they are and what they intend to do: entertain.

So I went into Resident Evil with lots of excitement: the trailers were pretty sweet, I love Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter (extremely kickass women), and had recently found out that there was going to be a side of Wentworth Miller as a surprise bonus. Wondrous.

Now I really don’t expect movies like this to have any deep message or be socially progressive, and I expected gratuitous, scantily clad slow-mo shots with the leading ladies, all par for the course. I was just glad there were leading ladies being action heroes at all. But I didn’t expect it to also be racially stupid. And for a zombie post-apocalyptic fight-for-your life-as-time-runs-out movie, it was just…BORING. There weren’t even enough redeeming action sequences or interesting plot lines to make the awkward racial stereotypes worth it.

From Chinamen with Thick Accents to Weak-Mousy-Assistants-who-Can’t-Fight-for-$h!

The “not enough Asian-Americans in movies” movement has been around for some time (mainly because it hasn’t really gotten much better in the last two decades, sadly). So whenever I see any Asian person in a commercial, tv show, movie, etc., I get so excited! Represent! Woot! Enter “Kim Yong” (also, who makes these names? Is Kim his first name? Or just his Korean last name? Because last time I checked, ethnically Korean first names don’t really start with Kim. And if it’s his last name, why did everyone call him “Kim Yong” the whole time when he was clearly very American, and not a foreign Korean national like Kim Jong Il or something? I just….confused.)

Whoops sorry for side-rant.

My real point is that Kim Yong was basically portrayed as a sad-sack, subservient subordinate to this jerkface bigshot producer. As pointed out by another character, even after the zombie-pocalypse, Asian Guy somehow never quite grasped that White Producer-man was no longer really his boss, and he didn’t have to follow him everywhere and do what he said. At this point, me and my sister were like….bahhhh eye roll, but we went with it and thought, maybe Asian Guy gets more awesome and redeems himself and is not just a cardboard cut-out of a weak Asian-American man (hopehope)!

Alas, no such luck. Even when Asian Guy shows that he indeed does have a moral compass and won’t leave everyone to die, he still kinda really sucks. As we get ready for an awesome action scene of guns and zombie guts, every character gets their own slow-motion gun toss, proper gun-wielding stance, and epic camera angle of them putting on their “BRING IT ON, ZOMBIES!” game face, oh, except for Asian Guy of course. Because Asian Guys aren’t brave, silly!! They don’t deserve guns, because they can’t use them! They just get to stand behind all the strong people and cower – yes literally cower – with their hands over their faces. Errrrrrf at this point we were…unhappy to say the least.

And it’s a pretty sad day when I sigh with relief when Asian Guy finally dies. Want to know how he died? (*spoiler alert*) He was too scared to go into the tunnel that everybody else was climbing into in order to save themselves. Choice was tunnel or death, and instead of go into the dark, creepy tunnel (oooo scary), he hesitates and decides to stay behind. And BAM, he gets killed by this bizarre monstersized superzombie. At least when he died he couldn’t portray more stupid stereotype qualities. C’mon, I thought we were kinda past this bullcrap in the film industry. Man.

I know this is fiction, “just a movie,” etc. But that’s exactly my point! Movies both create social norms and portray social norms. And this ain’t the norm that I want to see. I get that Kim Yong is just one type of character in a movie, this type of character needs to be portrayed too, and that if he were a white guy, I wouldn’t be annoyed at all. But the bottom line is, it’s not like there are 10,000 awesome Asian-American roles out there to counter this one. Asians aren’t really portrayed as running the gamut of general human stereotypes, sadly. This is kinda all we got. Emasculation-nation.

All Black Men are Basketball Stars

So just as we have the cardboard cut-out negative Asian-American stereotype in Kim Yong, we also have the cardboard cut-out “positive” African American stereotype: a strapping, muscular, bad-ass-mother-f-er black basketball star! Talk about the most overused stereotypes in media…hypermasculine black man and emasculated Asian man. YAWN.

I guess it’s comforting for other races to concede the “strong/athletic” card to black men when everyone else gets to be “intelligent” and “creative” and otherwise normal humans. As Dot Com wisely said on 30 Rock, “maybe someday we’ll live in a world where you ask us to pretend to be scientists.” It also stems from/contributes to that good ol’ fashioned slave-owning mentality that Black man = Beast meant for toiling in the hot sun and raping your women. I know at first glance the whole black basketball star thing may seem positive, I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a strapping black action hero, but let’s stop showing repetitive hollow racial stereotypes and just show people as random people! There are all different types of people in the human race, and the exceptions outnumber the stereotypes. I guess the counter-argument would be that I am also guilty of “seeing” race and making too much out of it, when all people should be seen as equal (“he’s not a black basketball star, he’s just a basketball star, you racist!”). But that’s not all on me. Instead of forcing me to see dude as a “Black Dude” and guy as an “Asian Guy”, let’s really make racism claims irrelevant by showing more people who don’t conveniently repeat the same stereotypes.

Humans vs. Zombies (this is a real concern, people!)

So I would hope that at the end of the world, when humans are either fighting robots or zombies, that we wouldn’t turn on our fellow misguided humans who may be on the wrong side. (Woah, this is kind of like a meta-argument against intra-minority hatred). I for one found it really disturbing to see Alice blindly kill all of the Umbrella Corporation’s human worker drones in the opening scene. (Also, it didn’t feel so great to see White Villain Val-Kilmer-lookalike blow up the Japanese facility, killing thousands of expendable Asian Guys, and safely fly out scratch-free, but that’s besides the point). Why couldn’t Alice just use sleeping gas or something? Or tranquilizer darts?! I’m ALL about killing zombies, but why kill the few humans that remain on the earth? Just seemed wrong.

Please Stop Overusing Slow-Motion

I am a sucker for slow-motion. It looks cooool. But when the ratio of normal speed to slow-motion becomes almost 1:1, um, I think you are in troubs. It kinda loses its effect and just becomes….”ok so it’s taking about 30 seconds for Val Kilmer’s sunglasses to get tossed to the other side of the room…….OMG JUST HURRY UP ALREADY I’m so booooooreddddd and I kinda have to pee.” Which is not a good sign in a zombie action movie. Slow motion is a beautiful creature! Beautiful in its rareness. Too much of a good thing ain’t always a good thing.

Final Takeaway

In conclusion, yeah. I didn’t really like this movie. At first glance it looks like a well-rounded, racially diverse cast, but its just more of the same old Long Duck Dongs and Shafts.

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