LogFAQs > #968698726

Movie 11- Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

I'm an enormous Resident Evil fan, mainly of the older entries of the series. The original Resident Evil 2 is my favorite video game of all time, with the REmake coming in very close behind it. What I am not, however, is a fan of Resident Evil media outside of those games. The Paul W Anderson movies suck. The 3d movies are a little better, but not by much The Netflix series was a total mess and deserved its fate. And then, lost in a sea of all that crap, there's this movie which I didn't even try to watch because of the reaction to it when it came out. However, I got a good deal on a STARZ membership recently and this was on there in their Halloween section, so I finally decided to give it a try.

This movie is a mess, but in a very strange way that doesn't apply to any of the other RE films, or even more recent video game adaptions. It's maybe the only piece of live action Resident Evil media I've seen where it felt like the person who made it was more than slightly aware of what the series is beyond seeing pictures of main characters or monsters and trying to make their own original shit around it, which makes it even more confounding that they attempted to squash together Resident Evil 1 and 2 into one concurrent storyline. I suppose that's not a thing that would be entirely impossible; tough, and you'd have to write out a whole lot of things, but doable even if you probably shouldn't. Just... Not this way.

The two plots are not only separate, they are very distinct from each other. The main thrust of the film overall is definitely the RE2 stuff set in the city, and it really feels like that's the story they WANT to tell. On its own it would be a serviceable adaption of the story but it's forced to spend time huddled against a more aimless slapped together RE1 adaption which gets a lot less affection and is mostly people running around in the dark shooting zombies. Because of this, neither of them gets the time to breathe at all, and they feel like a lesser product as a result. Characters skip large portions of their arc (if they get one at all) and when they say or do things intended to be revelatory or important, you're left wondering why you should care at all.

I think there was a good movie in here. Outside of some real cringy moments (usually involving them trying to use music diagetically and coming off really stupid) there's some all right scenes here and while they are fast and loose with plot specifics, it's not in an obnoxious way. It kind of reminds me of (ironically, considering who made it) the old Mortal Kombat movie. But its spinning about a thousand plates over its head and by the end I don't think it manages to keep a single one of them from dropping and breaking by the end, so any potential it could have had is squandered. Too big a cast, too many subplots, too many big moments to cover, not even a quarter of the time needed to do so in a way that's satisfying. Avoid it. 4/10