The Umbrella Corporation's genetic experimentation and viral weaponry came back to bite them—literally—when the zombie-causing T-Virus was released in their underground lab in Resident Evil. The virus could not be contained and eventually seeped out, destroying Raccoon City in the film's sequel. Within five years (and the series' third installment), the world as we know it was gone, causing those responsible to take refuge underground—where they still reside in the franchise's fourth film, Afterlife, out September 10.
Director Paul W.S. Anderson has an especially long history with subsurface spots. "I've always been interested in underground spaces," he says. "My grandfather and his grandfather were all coal miners. When I was younger, I went down in the coal mine. I guess that underground spaces are in my blood in a way."
For the first film, Anderson knew he wanted to shoot in real underground spaces; he traveled all over North America, Canada and Europe to find the perfect lair for the evil Umbrella Corporation. The director ended up in Berlin, where he and his crew shot in nuclear silos and decommissioned German nuclear headquarters. "The first Resident Evil game was a kind of juxtaposition between high-tech underground spaces and a Gothic mansion, which I found really interesting," he says. "The train that takes them to the mansion [in the first film] was taken from the video game, which is one of the reasons why we went to Berlin. We found this fantastic U-Bahn station that was beneath the Reichstag that had not opened. They built this fabulous space and you had this station that was fully complete, which I thought had a fantastic and very austere look to it."
But in Afterlife, Anderson switched gears, using above-ground spaces to give the Umbrella Corporation's subterranean lair a larger overall appearance. "We shot in a university building in Toronto, which had been designed by Norman Foster," he says. (Foster also designed the Hearst Tower, the home of the Popular Mechanics offices.) "It had a fantastic atrium that had these huge floating pill shapes in it. Inside the pills were conference rooms. We shot at night so there was no ambient light coming into the glass, and then with visual effects replaced the glass with concrete walls."
Even though Anderson did not consult experts of underground chambers, certain qualities of his over-the-top spaces are based in reality. Brian Camden, an engineer at Hardened Structures, works on projects that "range from hardened aircraft hangers, 2012 bunkers in California and just about everything in between," he says. Likewise, Robert Vicino is a founder of high-end fractural bunker communities called Vivos.
While underground cities seem far-fetched, "You'd be surprised," Camden says, at what exists around the world. He's worked on projects that are as large as 100,000 square feet. Vicino sells spaces for 200 or more people that can range anywhere between 20,000 square feet to 250,000 square feet—because according to FEMA's standards, each person should have at least 66 square feet of personal space. Camden and Vicino have built bunkers that included libraries, bars, detention centers, greenhouses, suites with living rooms and even trains. And as in the Resident Evil series, many of these bunkers have multiple levels. "If it's a military project, it'll be several levels," says Camden.
"The domestic ones are two stories each," Vicino says of his structures. "A typical facility in America is 35 to 40 feet below the ground. You only need about 10 feet to dissipate radiation. The U.S. government has them down about a mile, but the deeper you get, the hotter it gets, so it's a trade-off."
One way that Anderson's films differ from reality is that you can't actually get trapped in a bunker. "There is one main and one secondary exit," Vicino says, "and there are a number of escape tunnels if everything else is blocked off." Camden does the same for his own facilities. "We have a primary entrance and we put one or two escape tunnels out in case the primary entrance is blocked," he says. "If you can't get out the front door, you got to have a back door. Otherwise, you've built yourself a very expensive tomb."
As in the movies, entrances are blocked off by bookshelves, rock formations, or hidden walls. "If they find the entrance, it has a massive blast door on it and there's very little chance they'll get through it," Camden says. However, like we've seen in the Resident Evil films, 50-ton steel doors can shut permanently. "Once it's sealed, it's sealed," Vicino says of the doors to his facilities. "We close the door at the last possible moment. What that moment is, I don't know. If the blast detector has told you that a nuclear device has gone off, the door will shut quickly. If it's an asteroid, it would be a few moments before the strike." And the fact that a plague like the T-virus is airborne when first released probably wouldn't be too much of a problem for real bunkers. "All air that is brought in the facility is filtered through extensive NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) filtration systems," Vicino says. "And so, it doesn't matter what condition the air is outside—radioactive or otherwise."
