The Red Queen is described as, “[s]tate of the art artificial intelligence. She’s the computer that controls the Hive.” Placing a computer in charge has its benefits: the program isn’t going to see things in shades of gray. She describes the virus as “a major medical breakthrough,” listing both the positive and the negative traits of it. She tells the team that the release of the T-virus presented “an uncontrolled pattern of infection” which mutated quickly and is “almost impossible to kill. I couldn’t allow it to escape from the Hive. So, I took steps. You must understand, those that become infected, I cannot allow to leave.” That’s a pretty big threat, and there’s no time for feelings in a situation like this. As such, the moment that the T-virus is released, she buckles down and does her fucking job: she seals off the Hive, making sure that the threat – which can and does destroy all life it encounters – is contained. While the team refers to this as going “homicidal,” you have to admit that she’s doing her job tremendously well. She quietly and nonchalantly goes about locking doors and releasing a toxin gas throughout the underground facility to ensure these ends. No one is left alive, and it doesn’t matter if it’s your mother, brother, cousin or daughter. The Red Queen must weigh a global viral distaster that would impact billions of people versus the couple hundred employees that are trapped underground. In the grand scheme of things, from our safe little seats, we can see the wisdom in the team perishing. It’s the responsible thing to do, even if people die.

The team, however, doesn’t see this larger picture, and instead focuses on their own attachments and survival. Upon arrival, their main concern is security protocol before they immediately descend into the Hive. The logic behind this is mind-boggling: who the hell grabs an agent with zero memory of who she is and the history of her mission before traipsing into an underground cavern that has been sealed off by the main computer system? Did no one think to run a script remotely to see what set it off? Obviously not. This team is far more focused on their objectives as opposed to the common sense aspect of their actions. By the time they realize that the Hive was sealed off for a damn good reason, they’re in the thick of the labyrinth and have already confronted the ramifications of a viral outbreak that could end life on Earth as we know it. Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) sums up the situation with the only shred of clarity to come from the group: “Containing the incident was the only fail safe plan they had.” However, Kaplan (Martin Krewes) isn’t so sanguine about their lot: he wants to know why they weren’t informed of this ahead of time, and spends the rest of his screen time trying to help the rest of the group survive the escape. Rain doesn’t even fully let it go, referring to the ability to switch off the Red Queen as “insurance” that they get back up to the surface, despite that this group has witnessed firsthand how bad this virus is. No one is thinking clearly about what’s at stake at this point: they’re in survival mode. This comes to a head when Rain, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and Matt (Eric Mabius) are confronted by the Red Queen when they request codes to get out of the Hive. “One of your group is infected,” she tells them. “I require her life for the code… I’m sorry, but [letting her live is] a risk I cannot take.” Rain offers up her life, but Alice won’t let her die, holding out hope that the antivirus can save her life. To Alice, the bond that she has formed with the group matters more than the prospect of the antivirus failing. A woman she met a few hours ago, who is neither love interest nor friend, matters more than the billions of people on the planet who could be turned into zombies as a result of her actions.

The impact of a failed antivirus could devestate the world, and therein lies the key issue: rather than accepting that their entrapment and deaths could result in containment, this group insists upon getting out alive at all costs. This includes the possibility of T-virus exposure, which the Red Queen assesses as unpredictable: the computer system knows the ablities of the virus, and as such, it knows enough to wish to contain it. This isn’t a bad thing – this is survival at its finest. Not the group of people that selfishly want to go home at the end of the day; the computer program is playing den mother to the planet by realizing that in killing a group of people, it will contain the damage to a massacre of hundreds as opposed to billions. As much as we don’t want to admit it, we have to cut off the necrotic tissue in order to save the body; these people happen to be healthy tissue that’s in the immediate area of the infection, and they have to be sacrificed for life to continue. The counterpoint to this is tricky: in the end, another team is going to reopen the Hive and go in. That we can chalk up to bad writing, though. The heart of this issue is the notion of altruistic sacrifice. These people can either die or run the risk of releasing a raging virus. No choice is good, but at the end of the day, damning the world to a zombie apocolypse far outweighs the notion of you going home and having dinner. The greater good gets ignored for the chance of the individual to survive, which is pretty fucking selfish if you meditate on it for a few minutes.

In a moment of exasperation, Rain declares, “That homicidal bitch killed my team!” While that may be true, the Red Queen was doing what she was programmed to do: assess the situation and make a judgment  call in order to keep life safe. The Red Queen had to weigh whether or not the lives of a relatively small group of humans outweighed global infection. We may not want to admit it, but her decision to kill everyone and everything in the Hive was the correct one. It may be sad to the friends and families of those individuals, but in the global picture, it was the only choice to ensure continued human survival. And if everyone had just sat and thought about that for ten minutes, maybe we would have been spared a full hour of crappy film and a never-ending litany of bad sequels.