Editorials
‘Umbrella Chronicles’ is the Most Underrated ‘Resident Evil’ Game
After the incredible success of Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube in 2005, Capcom took their sweet time coming out with a fifth entry in their survival horror franchise (Resident Evil 5 had one year of concept and planning and then three years of actual development before being released in 2009). Since that game would be released on the Playstation 3 and XBox 360, Capcom still needed to develop a game for the Wii. That game would be the on-rails shooter Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, which they co-developed with Cavia.
Interestingly enough, The Umbrella Chronicles was meant to be more like Resident Evil 4, but when the Wii was revealed to have a different control system, Capcom adapted the game to suit that platform’s controls.
From IGN’s 2007 interview with the game’s producer Masachika Kawata:
“At the initial stage of development, Umbrella Chronicles’ play system was similar to Resident Evil 4’s,” producer Masachika Kawata told Famitsu in a video interview. “But, it’s extremely difficult on Wii. Too complicated to enjoy. Wii users like easiness. Umbrella Chronicles is not only for game enthusiasts. Complex operability can be an obstacle for Wii users. We want players to enjoy the game’s horrifying and creepy world and its thrilling shooting action. By reducing enthusiast-only elements, players can purely enjoy the world.”
That statement is a little insulting to Wii users as it generalizes us as being particularly lazy, but it is what it is. Wii users were given The Umbrella Chronicles and PS3/XBox 360 users were gifted with Resident Evil 5 two years later (Resident Evil 5 is actually the reason I bought a Playstation 3 after years of being a Nintendo kid).
When discussions of the Resident Evil franchise are taking place, The Umbrella Chronicles and its sequel The Darkside Chronicles are rarely mentioned (including on this site). This is a travesty, as it’s actually the best installment outside of the main series of games (and it’s certainly better than Resident Evil 6). Why isn’t the game mentioned more or celebrated as a successful alteration on the tried-and-true Resident Evil formula? I am sure I don’t know, but I’m going to change that with this article. #JusticeForTheUmbrellaChronicles
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles essentially serves as a Sparknotes version of Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Each of the various episodes in The Umbrella Chronicles (each main game received about 3-4 episodes), you were caught up on the storyline of the main Resident Evil games. It was a puzzling decision to exclude Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil CODE: Veronica and Resident Evil 4 from the game, but they would get their attention in the sequel Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles (a fun but lesser sequel that made head shots easier but increased the amount of dizzying shaky cam mechanics).
In addition to abbreviated versions of those games, The Umbrella Chronicles also put you in control of series villain Albert Wesker in an original storyline that shows how he survived the events at the mansion in Resident Evil and what he was up to before Resident Evil 5. The game also featured a sequel episode that featured Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine as they and other armed anti-bioweapon activists investigate the Umbrella Corporation’s final stronghold in Russia. There are plenty of rewards for longtime Resident Evil fans hidden in The Umbrella Chronicles.
The Umbrella Chronicles puts you in control of the main two characters of those main games (Billy and Rebecca, Chris and Jill, Jill and Carlos) in an on-the-rails shooter where all you have to do is use the Wii-motes to shoot the monsters that attack the screen. To make the game even more fun, Capcom and Cavia added co-op gameplay, giving the game a House of the Dead feel. To prevent the game from getting boring, the players’ tasks weren’t limited to just killing zombies. You were graded during each episode based on the number of critical hits (aka head shots) you dealt, the number of files you uncovered, objects you destroyed, and how long it took you to beat the episode (this would be determined by how long boss fights took you). For being a rail shooter, it’s a really immersive experience that sucks you in. the unlockable files make the game more addicting than most games of its kind.
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles was criticized for the difficulty of the head shots, but once you practiced a bit it actually became very easy (head shots only counted if you hit the zombies at the very tip of their forehead). Also, once you find all of the secrets there isn’t much replay value other than having a fun game night with a friend. That being said, it was still a fairly long game. While one playthrough takes about 7 hours, it could take you over 20 hours to find all of the collectibles and unlock all of The Umbrella Chronicles’ secrets.
Is The Umbrella Chronicles the best Resident Evil game out there? Hardly, but it is certainly the best game that is not in the main series and it deserves to be discussed more often. Did you play The Umbrella Chronicles when it was released nine years ago? If so, what were your thoughts? Share your memories of this underrated game in the comments below!
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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