#m0nologuing

This guy is such a fucking loser it's insane. I see fans complain that he was missed potential, that he shouldn't have gotten killed off, we should've gotten a boss fight, etc... and I honestly think all this is missing the point.

Zeno is a living example of The Connections' M.O. - they shamelessly copy Umbrella's creations and fail to understand them because they're even more inhuman than the people at Umbrella were.

Wesker was a fucking supervillain. He had such ambition and intelligence he was like ten fucking seconds away from ending the entire world, and he only lost because Chris and Sheva had an insane stroke of luck. The man toppled Umbrella and controlled like 5 different organizations, all to use them as stairs to climb higher and higher.

The Connections clones this man, and they turn him into a corporate bitch, a bland suit who spends his time aura farming, smoking, and carrying out his bosses' bidding. He's Wesker without the ambition, the genius, the ego, the things that made him one of the most dangerous people on Earth. He almost never expresses any real emotion or want that isn't completely focused on whatever The Connections wants. Even using Elpis to gain more power is seemingly just a task The Connections has given him.

When Albert Wesker learned that he was "manufactured" through Project W he was horrified, and became desperate to prove that he had utter control over his own destiny. Even before that he freely manipulated Umbrella, H.C.F., and TRICELL to serve his own ends. No loyalty to anyone but himself.

Zeno embraces being manufactured. He is openly and firmly an extension of The Connections. He almost never even talks about himself in the first person - just "we," "us," "The Connections." He's shortsighted, aimless, seemingly comfortable in this role. No wonder he seems to take such offense at being called an "imitation" - it just reminds him of the person he's failing to be a copy of.

The real Wesker would be ashamed. The real Wesker wouldn't even humor the idea of having to be one in a group.

IMO this is so much more interesting than the average fan-idea I'd see, "what if Wesker came back as a clone and we got a showdown with him and Chris?" - always just rehashes of past games like RE5 focused more on what's cool rather than what fits the character. To me this is the sort of idea you can't get from fans - only Capcom, I think, would've taken Zeno in this direction despite the risk of irritating the fuck out of many fans who want more.

It also serves as an interesting commentary on Wesker's place in the series as a whole, and why it's not actually a very good idea to try bringing him back as a clone to be the Big Bad Villain of the series again. You can't replicate him. All you'll get is a poor copy.

IMO the radiation stuff, the alcohol, possible concussion, it's all red herrings at best to obscure Simon's visions as nonsense, when in reality it is all the blood, and at most these other factors have just made him more susceptible.

TLDR: A Lovecraftian creature, or God itself, is peering into our world through the Anomaly and erasing everything it cannot see. The blood is a hivemind containing the minds of everyone who's died, as well as the creature. The SM-8 scientist's voice is the woman's mind speaking to Simon through the blood and encouraging him to find the Anomaly before being assimilated into the creature; the creature doesn't want anyone to find out about the Anomaly because destroying it is the only way to stop it.

Everyone has already pointed out that the weird shit begins when blood hits Simon's skin, and I agree that this is responsible for a lot of his visions. We know it's human blood for sure, and that comes with the natural presumption that it's the blood of those who got Raptured. But what about the other supernatural effects of the blood?

I think the blood itself is a hivemind comprising the consciousnesses of who the blood has belonged to and who has died in the blood ocean. At least in the sense of, when Simon hears the SM-8 woman's voice the first time, I believe that is her, or a facsimile of her, talking to him through the blood as part of a hallucination.

That voice is way different from the voices at the end of the movie. The first voice encourages him to find the Anomaly and understand it, while the latter voices are very nihilistic and instead insist that Simon fuck off and die, that the Anomaly cannot be found.

IMO that first voice was closer to that actual person. The second voice was the monster at the source of the ocean. I'll get to that. But I also think the creature(s) Simon sees are likely made of the blood itself. I'm not quite sure how many creatures are actually in the film, I didn't quite get a good enough look to determine if the initial skeleton (which I assume was actually a living creature) VS the creature in the huge tunnel that flees VS the creature Simon kills were all the same or not. But I do think they're made of the blood, based on the fact we know the blood can produce life based on the flora manifesting in the SM-13 in the last act.

But either way I think they're all just the same thing acting through physical vessels: the thing Simon sees in his dream, that huge red eye in the sky.

I think that woman's monologue about God is very telling. Whether this creature is actually God or not is up to you, but I do think it's a very powerful, otherworldly deity. Going by her monologue, about God seeing the universe through a pinhole and struggling to understand it just with that view, I think the Anomaly is the pinhole. I think this God, it somehow found a way to peer into our universe, and either deliberately or just through perceiving us, it erased everything it couldn't see - the planets, the stars. Maybe it really is God, and it has decided in its divine judgment that the universe needs to end. Or it's just an alien thing that inadvertently destroyed whatever it couldn't see through the Anomaly.

(I like to think this creature isn't necessarily deliberately malicious, just acting in its nature. It peered into our world and could only see our manmade space stations, so everything else was erased. Now, all it sees through the Anomaly is blood, so that's all it understands, and maybe it wants everything but the blood to be erased yet again, and is pissed that isn't happening.)

Anyway, I think by doing this, the blood oceans manifest as the consequences of what this thing has killed, and now it is part of them. The thing IMO doesn't have a physical form, it's inside the blood, it is the blood, so the creatures Simon sees are just a byproduct of the blood's nature, congealing and creating monsters that either are just animals, or act as vessels for the God to act through. When Simon sees the vision of that huge red eye, that's the closest he comes to truly seeing it, and that's just a form within the blood, or its mindscape, or whatever.

(Thus, Simon only kills a vessel at the end of the movie, not the actual entity behind all of this. Still a badass move, though.)

Going by this, the vibe I got was the first time Simon speaks to the woman's voice, it feels like maybe that's actually her, breaking free from the hivemind for a minute, or maybe not fully assimilated, to encourage Simon to find the Anomaly - in death, she understands that the creature and its effects can be stopped by destroying/closing the Anomaly, because that is how the creature sees into our world. But when she says Simon's name she's become fully one with the creature, and so now the voice taunts him and tries to get him to give up, because it knows the humans' only hope of stopping it is learning the Anomaly exists and finding a way to close it.

So yeah that's what I think. Ultimately Iron Lung's story is surprisingly optimistic despite the very depressing source material, because to me it feels the ultimate point of the narrative is that humans continue to fight for a better world in spite of hopeless circumstances. The Consolidation of Iron is acting amorally, as has Eden, but this is bigger than Simon. Simon's hopeful monologue about the Quiet Rapture is telling - where he ponders if maybe it's them who disappeared and the rest of humanity is looking for them. I don't think he's right, but it displays the primary theme here, that even with everything going on Simon still clings to hope. In the face of something bigger and more sinister than he can possibly comprehend, Simon ultimately chooses to make his final moments about the greater good.

Ultimately Simon wins, rejecting the crimes the creature and the COI taunt him with, giving humanity hope. Maybe he didn't stop whatever the creature is that's behind this, but he at least gave it a hell of a middle finger before going out with a bang and giving humanity the tools to eventually stop it themselves.

I just wanna say I absolutely love Craig Burnatowski's Wesker and it makes me very excited to see him in a Code Veronica remake.

I miss the accent, right? But this Wesker brings a level of realism and fear to him that I really like. It's very easy to portray Wesker as a supervillain - CV and 5 did that, and he's great in those. But 4R takes a different approach. We don't even see his powers here, but we hear a lot of what he's like.

"Change of plans. Of course, you're free to refuse..."

He says while holding a gun to Ada. This isn't even, like, a subtle or clever move - it's a very blatant and deliberate show of power over this woman, and something that Wesker does like Leon rolls off one-liners. It's his whole thing, really - exercising power over people "weaker" than him. Ada isn't a contractor or a partner or whatever - she's not hired. Maybe on paper she is, but in reality she's a tool Wesker gets to throw around how he pleases. He doesn't have partners, or friends, or allies. Everyone is either a tool or an enemy.

Luis: "Hey, who are you working for anyway?" Ada: "You're better off not knowing. Trust me."

Separate Ways gives off a very scary view of him is what I'm saying, not RE5 scary where he's a big bad supervillain trying to end the world, but a "holy fuck I don't want me or my friends or my family alone with this man" kind of scary.

You know. Like an abuser.

Because like, that's what he is, you know? Wesker loves exercising power over people, he does it constantly. He groomed Excella in RE5 from a young age to be dependent on him in basically all of her business ventures and career, and manipulated her infatuation with him to keep her loyal - but to him she was just a tool. The way he touches her is genuinely unsettling - yeah, sure, she's evil too and all that obviously, but the way he treats her makes it clear that he is very much enjoying casual displays of control and power over this woman. It's just fucked up.

(Side note: Like, this is kind of how I see the Rebecca photo thing. It's the only way to see it that doesn't make me roll my eyes. Some people joke about it like "haha get it Rebecca's hot," which is gross, and others think it's just not canon, which I think they've focused on it enough that it probably is. My take is just that Wesker is a creepy piece of shit, and as the youngest rookie of S.T.A.R.S., Rebecca was the most vulnerable person under his authority, and thus he would have a perverse interest in her. A showing of Wesker's awful personality is how I see it.)

I think there's an argument to be made that some of this shit is gendered, which, you know, makes sense, but I think Chris is a shining example of it too. I do kind of see Chris/Wesker as a dynamic eerily similar to Leon/Ada* and with a not insignificant amount of homoerotic undertones to it, but it's not, like, Cool and Sexy. I think Wesker has the same kind of obsession with Chris as the kind of obsession that led him to have a weird picture of a freshly-18-year-old subordinate in his desk. It's just not an age thing with Chris - rather, it's the fact he knows he haunts Chris's mind, and he gets a kick out of it.

"Let's just say I'm a ghost... coming back to haunt your dear brother."

(A reminder: REmake deliberately has a detail that shows Wesker frowning when Jill meets him in the Old Residence. But when you play as Chris instead, he explicitly smiles to himself before turning.)

I don't think it's a strictly sexual thing (though I do think that's an element of it). But I do think it's the closest thing he can have to a "crush." I think Wesker is incapable of having any sort of close interpersonal relationship, sexual, romantic, or otherwise, that doesn't involve him hurting or wielding power over them. In CV he reminds Chris several times of their past dynamic pre-RE1.

"Chris! Since you're one of my best men... I'll let you handle this."

I'm getting off topic, my point is: Wesker's one of the best characters in RE, and IMO that's not just because he's, like, a badass villain or whatever, but because he genuinely has a lot of presence as a villain, in the narrative itself - Chris especially, but with 4R we get this huge vibe of just how uncomfortable he seems to make Ada, and Ada's pretty fucking hardened - if she's that freaked out by him, there's a fucking reason for it. He's a scary fucking guy, to everyone around him, no matter how bad they are.

Burnatowski's voice for Wesker captures this side of him a lot more than D.C. Douglas or Richard Waugh. Theirs are more on the supervillain side, which I also love, but I am ready to hear more of this Wesker... being on his good side gets you threatened at gunpoint. Imagine being on his bad side.

Wesker's treatment of Excella and Chris is vile - but his voice was more lofty and cartoonishly evil, and you could separate them. Burnatowski's Wesker feels exactly like the man in those scenes.

He's a manipulative, scary, blatantly abusive man whose actions and words show a complete lack of compassion, cordiality, or empathy. We see how he wields that power over other individuals, and then we see how he aspires to wield that power over everything else on the planet.