"You're ALL going to die down here."
The Red Queen is a state-of-the-art, artificially intelligent supercomputer that appears in the film Resident Evil (which is based on the video games of the same name created by Capcom). She was programmed by scientist Dr. Charles Ashford, who modelled the computer's holographic avatar on his daughter Angela. The Red Queen's task was to oversee all operations within the Hive, a giant underground laboratory complex built and owned by the Umbrella Corporation, the world's leading authority in pharmaceuticals and healthcare, but primarily working in the fields of genetic engineering and biological weapons.
Resident Evil[]
When the T-virus was released within the Hive, the Red Queen - required to prevent the virus from escaping to the outside world - sealed the facility and used its defenses to kill all 500 employees who lived and worked within. When Umbrella learned of the Hive's lockdown, they dispatched a team to investigate the facility and shut down the Red Queen AI. The commando squad forced their way in, taking with them Alice and Spence Parks, two security operatives who lived in the mansion above the Hive protecting its emergency entrance. When the team approached the Queen's chamber, four of the squad - including their commander - were sealed inside an adjoining corridor. Lasers activated within the corridor and sliced the commandos to pieces before they were shut down by the team's computer expert, Chad Kaplan. Once the corridor was unlocked, Kaplan and Alice entered the Queen's chamber with an EM surge device that would shut the computer down. A red hologram of a child appeared - the Red Queen's avatar - and warned Kaplan and Alice that they would die if they shut her down. Ignoring the computer's pleas, Kaplan shut her down, and the Hive's power grid went down with her, unlocking all the doors in the complex. The Hive staff had all been infected with the T-virus, which reanimated their corpses and turned them into flesh-hungry undead creatures. Surrounded by zombies, the surviving squad members were cornered in the Red Queen's chamber. Alice decided to reactivate the computer so that it would tell them how they could get out of the Hive before it sealed shut. As insurance, they disabled the Queen's main circuit breaker, which meant that she would short circuit if shut down again. The Red Queen directed the survivors toward the laboratories through the utility tunnels, where they lost Kaplan to the zombies. Spence then betrayed the group and tried to escape with an attache case full of T-virus and antigen samples, but he was killed by a rampaging Licker bio-weapon on the train platform. With Alice, Matt Addison and an infected Rain Melendez locked inside a lab with the mutated Licker about to break in, the Red Queen demanded that Alice kill Rain or she would let them all die. However, Kaplan had survived the zombie horde and followed them up to the labs. Since the Queen wouldn't open the door, Kaplan threw the Red Queen's killswitch and fried her, apparently shutting her down forever.
Resident Evil: Retribution[]
The Red Queen returns as the leading antagonist in the fifth installment of the Resident Evil film saga. Supposedly destroyed in the first film, the homicidal AI merely lost one portion of her network which has multiple branch points across Umbrella's various facilities worldwide. The Red Queen oversees Umbrella Prime, a bioweapons testing facility and clone factory in the Antarctic, continuously researching the T-virus and the various possibilities that could arise in a biohazard outbreak.
As Alice discovers when she awakes in Umbrella Prime, the Red Queen now controls all of Umbrella's remaining resources and is using them to try and exterminate the last of the human race. She utilizes several cloned Umbrella troops and various bio-organic weapons such as Lickers and Axe Men to kill Alice and the rebels sent by Albert Wesker to rescue her and destroy the complex. In the end, the AI fails and Umbrella Prime is destroyed, but the Red Queen remains active elsewhere in the world, working towards humanity's extinction for whatever grim purpose.