by Mike Hilty, Contributing Writer
When I was in middle school, each seventh grader was required to participate in the science fair. My experiment was called “Do Video Games Increase Your Heart Rate and Blood Pressure?” In hindsight, it was a pretty stupid hypothesis because everything can make your heart rate and blood pressure fluctuate, so why wouldn’t video games? I choose subjects ranging from 10 to 15 years old and I choose three video games for everyone to play: an easy one based on the tv series Rugrats, a medium difficulty driving game called Driver, and a scary, hard difficulty one called Resident Evil.
I love the original Resident Evil games for the PlayStation. I appreciated the third person shooter aspect, puzzles, campy dialogue, creepy music, and the survival horror genre. I played Resident Evil 4 and 5, where they abandoned the still shot camera angles for a more free flowing, move-anywhere-you-want-but-still-be-in-third-person style. We also saw the abandonment of the core puzzles that made the game great in favor of more of a melee approach to the zombies, where they come at you in waves rather than pop up out of nowhere to scare the crap out of you. We moved into a more open world-ish, but still a structured story and specific sections to beat before moving on to the next part. We also move to be outdoors for a lot of the story which I thought was a nice touch. Resident Evil 5 was the last one I played all the way through, and where the game starts to jump the shark as well and things get more crazy than usual. The only spinoff I played was Resident Evil: Code Veronica, which was surprisingly helpful to know some backstory.
I also had mixed feelings about the original movie series. For a video game series with a great cast of characters, a semi-structured story, and villains galore, the movies are largely one-note and guilty pleasures at best. The biggest disappointment of the original movie series is that the main character we follow through the entire set of movies isn’t even a character from the game!!!!
We have a double dose of Resident Evil reboots coming out though: a series of Netflix coming soon and a new movie out now. So what do we make of this new movie of a property I love?
This movie is pretty terrible, unfortunately.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City takes place in 1998 (shoutout to the Palm Pilot and the Nokia phone with old school snake on it; those literally made me laugh out loud) where the Umbrella Corporation has a stranglehold of the town of Raccoon City. The Raccoon City Police Department (RPD) is tasked with checking out an incident at a mansion in the Arklay Mountains. The Special Tactics and Rescue Service (STARS) team consisting of Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell), Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), and Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper) end up at the mansion to uncover the truth about Umbrella Corporation.
This movie definitely had some fun moments for fans of the original Resident Evil. The moment they encounter the first zombie in the mansion is lifted directly from the game. Some key items that are vital in the game come up at random points, like the trusty lighter, a map of the mansion, and Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. They even have some great moments from creatures other than zombies that are staples of the Resident Evil games.
There are a ton of things that are problematic with the movie though.
The biggest problem by far is this game is lifting elements from four different games and is trying to make pieces fit together. If this focused on the STARS team at the Spencer Mansion, that would have been just fine. Instead, we also have elements from Resident Evil 2 where Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) comes back to town and encounters rookie RPD cop Leon S Kennedy (Avan Jogia). We keep switching back and forth between these two stories until they converge. Neither of these stories are given any chance to truly develop, so instead of having a cool moment where all the characters come together, I don’t care about what happens to any of them or anything going on. In the words of Ron Swanson, “don’t half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”
I understand that choices are made adapting a video game to film that might deviate from the source materials. Some choices here don’t really make a lot of sense, though. Story wise, some changes were made where we need to recreate the wheel when we have plenty of good story to mine through. Character wise, some characters are short shrifted (which is fine with an ensemble movie like this) and some characters are reworked in ways that don’t make sense. Changing up Wesker and Leon stands out the most, and neither of the changes were good for the characters. If the changes aren’t for the fans of the game and casual viewers aren’t liking them, who are the changes for then? The dialogue in this story is also horrendous. That’s saying a lot considering that the original games have hilariously bad dialogue, and for a movie to be made over 20 years later and still not improve the dialogue, there is a definite failure on the part of the screenwriter.
The final problem is also when a movie is trying to bait a series. Plenty of other properties tease sequels or spin-offs in hopes they will eventually pay off down the road. The issue then becomes that the producers have eyes fixed on the future, but need to live in the now and make one good movie first. Sequels aren’t always guaranteed, especially if it doesn’t make enough money or gets critically lambasted. The fact that there’s also a TV series in play soon should have given Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City a jolt to be good. Too bad it didn’t and it wouldn’t surprise me if this doesn’t get the intended results it wants.
I’m holding out that the Netflix series is good. In the meantime, fans of the video games will enjoy some parts, but this doesn’t even pass muster as a guilty pleasure. This is one to skip.
Grade: F
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