As much as Resident Evil changed over the years, a few things remained constant with the series’ general attitude toward society. 1: Corporations, bad. 2: Rich people, even worse. 3: Corporate scientists, also bad. The themes usually don’t go much further than that. But Resident Evil Requiem has a more carefully thought-out critique of capitalism and selfishness more broadly, and it’s a timely one as well.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for the entirety of Resident Evil Requiem‘s story.]
Victor Gideon, one of Requiem‘s primary antagonists, is the focal point of Capcom’s critique. He wants to realize Oswell Spencer’s presumed goal of preserving the consciousness of a “superior” person by transplanting it into another host to make new generations of “elites,” not unlike other, real-life tech and business moguls. You find out later that the Raccoon City Orphanage was a front for these experiments, with dozens of freaky little murderbot clone kids created just for this purpose. Central to Gideon’s plans is the idea that people’s memories and essences are somehow stored in blood, hence all the blood-related work he’s doing in the Rhodes Care Home. (It’s not just Resident Evil hokum, either. The idea that blood contained part of the human spirit and could transfer it between hosts persisted for centuries during the Middle Ages.)
The ideal result is a person who’s still an individual, but who’s inclined to think like Spencer, know what he knows, and, presumably, end up behaving like him too, if the way Gideon talks about Grace is anything to go by. The whole operation is a bit like a gruesome algorithm that takes pieces from everyone’s experiences, then throws a predetermined bias in to create a result that benefits the creator more than anyone else. “That’s just like social media,” you might say. And I think that’s probably the point! A handful of nasty, bad-faith individuals trying to decide what people think and believe.
The connections get even more explicit in the care center’s basement, where Gideon and his team put people through a mulcher and extract their blood for these experiments. And if you go with the blood theory Gideon and The Connections are operating on, they’re not just taking people’s lives. They’re using the essence of their existence — their memories, their souls, everything that makes them alive — and using it for their own ends, like a plaything. “The little people” have never mattered in Resident Evil and have always suffered through no fault of their own. But Requiem goes out of its way to show just how grotesque it is when one person has that much power over the lives of others, using not just nameless civilians, but vulnerable people thinking they’re getting the help they need, only to turn into monsters when someone decides it’s time.
Requiem‘s storytelling takes a long break once Leon Kennedy reaches Raccoon City. But fast-forward to the bottom of the ARK lab in the aptly named Pandora room, when it seems like all is lost — and it’s then that Grace realizes hope is the key to undoing the harm so many others caused. Literally. Spencer made it the password to unlock his special Elpis creation, a cure for the zombifying T-virus. I don’t think Requiem retcons Spencer with all this. Guilty old men say lots of things when their consciences catch up with them at last. But whatever Capcom does with this development in the future, I also don’t think it undercuts the critique of greed and power at the heart of Requiem. The point is that hope, the tiniest suggestion that maybe one small thing you can do for just one other person might make a difference, is what matters. Not what you can get from them or what they might do for you after you lend a hand. Not what you can extract from them against their will, just because it’s in your power to do it.
Hope is why Leon helps Grace (he even says at one point he just wanted to help one person if he could, to feel like he made a difference); it’s why Grace helps Emily. It’s why she risks unleashing Elpis in the hope that it might cure Leon and help others, too. And that hope and the action it inspires is what undermines Gideon, Zeno, The Connections, and everything Umbrella and Spencer did in the past. It doesn’t fix everything. But it’s the start of fixing something.
