The latest installment in the resident evil film franchise is heavily based upon the resident evil video games, it does not follow the original story of the previous films where Alice was the main focus of the movie, instead, this movie stays very true to the video games almost to the point where it is a film flaw because people who never played the games may not understand what’s going on in each scene or what the whole hype is.
I enjoyed the film as I am a huge resident evil video game fan. I have played every resident evil game, even the ones that stray from the main series, such as code veronica. Being a fan of the games definitely makes for a bias when viewing the film, but it truly was one of the best on-screen video game adaptions. Even though Welcome to Raccoon City has little to no character development, the fact remains that gamers did not need to be introduced to the whole back story as they knew it already, they just wanted action and chaos.
By now, viewers will have no doubt guessed that this adaptation will take place in the infamous Raccoon City, where the evil Umbrella Corporation has left the city in ruins after achieving its nefarious goals and moving on. That’s exactly what you get, and we even get the evil version of Wesker. No giant crocodile, though!
The scene where the truck driver gets infected was damn near perfect, absolutely a tribute taken right out of the game and the Resident Evil 2 HD remake; this scene alone sold the movie as the ultimate tribute to the franchise to me. The timeline was also correct they never shot into the future instead they kept to the true time-line where people still used old Nokia phones as seen in the scene where the helicopter pilot is playing snake on his phone.
The real letdown was the crappy CG animation for some of the monsters, but hey, I still loved the film. It was a trip down memory lane and reminded me of being a young teenager playing RE in my bedroom with my best friends.
I’m sure that the film is/was being destroyed by critics as they also destroyed ‘Silent Hill’ as they did not understand the context of the film they were watching. Many other fans were probably scratching their heads wondering where Alice is, but really if you are a true PlayStation 1 gamer right back in those golden days of first-era 3d gaming, you watched this film. I understood everything that was going on in the movie as it was an authentic tribute to the games using real-life actors.
The bottom line is that if you always wanted a true resident evil experience, with all flaws included then this is the answer after all these years we get a definitive game style film. I hope that the negative reviews don’t stop future variations and continuations of the reinvigorated Resident Evil.
Want to know what happened to Alice?
