Resident Evil is racking up record review scores and overperforming at the box office this weekend. There are a variety of opinions about the film, and one common one appears to be debate about how the ending was handled, whether it’s perfect or a big miss.

A common thought among the latter camp seems to be that the last 15 minutes or so offset the rest of the movie being good, though to talk about this further, we’ll have to get into spoilers , obviously.

The entire storyline of Resident Evil is Austin Abrams’ Bryan transporting an important medical package to Raccoon City, where we eventually learn it’s the last piece of a cure to alleviate the widespread mutant zombie plague in the city. Suddenly, it’s a hero’s journey given to a man who is the furthest thing from a hero, and by the end, that takes an entirely new form. Literally.

Bryan does get to the lab, but seconds away from finalizing the cure, his zombie bite, which he suffered at the hands of a mutated girl hours earlier, begins to fully take him over, and against his will, he begins slaughtering the scientists as the vaccine is bounced around the room. It would cure him (at least in theory) and then could be spread around the city as a blanket remedy.

This does not end well. Bryan’s ultra-mutated form kills and consumes the scientists, creating a mass of limbs and faces in addition to his own. At the last second, right when the cure is about to be jammed into him, it drops a skyscraper’s height to the ground. The virus consumes fully him, and he’s now squaring off against National Guard helicopters with a roar.

It is a bleak ending to be sure, but it also feels like the way things should have ended. The movie is gruesome disaster after gruesome disaster, with all shown characters killed at some point. Bryan “dying” by being consumed by the virus completely is the bookend to that, and the tone and direction of the movie. Even then, it does feel like the right kind of surprise.

Considering the alternative is just strange. So, Bryan gets the cure, morphs back into himself. The cure is spread through the city and the townspeople celebrate like it’s Christmas morning, minus all the gore and blazing fires around them. A happy ending like that would not be earned, this isn’t that kind of movie, and that was clear about 15 minutes in. And the last 15 minutes are in keeping with everything in between that.

Obviously, taste and opinion are subjective, so I’m kind of joking in my title, but I really do think that Cregger made the right call here, a departure from his other films where the “right” people mostly survive and the villains die. Resident Evil didn’t need to do that, and it doesn’t.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .