Review of Resident Evil: Degeneration (2008) by Lewis C — 21 Jan 2009

I'm pleased whenever a video game developer decides to make their own game from CGI, instead of turning over the property to an outside studio that may or may not know how to make a decent movie from the property. Resident Evil: Degeneration doesn't manage to be as good as SquareEnix's Advent Children, but it does serve as an equally good alternative to the live action Resident Evil movies.

The CGI is very sharp, but the character models still have that unnatural jerkiness that keeps the realism from being too immersive. I've almost given up on seeing that problem solved in my lifetime. That doesn't stop some scenes from looking almost photo-realistic, and the faces of the people are very expressive. It all looks like a high-quality, video game cut scene. And I mean that in a good way.

It was refreshing to see that the story in this movie actually ties into the canon Resident Evil plot, and completely ignores whatever the hell the story of the live action movies is supposed to be. It would have made a good plot for an actual game. The movie is divided up into two distinct halves, and I definitely prefer the first half over the second. The movie starts to drag on in its later half, and a lot of the finale is just one long chase scene. Yes, that is straight out of the games, but it could have been implemented in a more exciting way.

Capcom shows some potential for good movie-making here, but they don't quite have their craft perfected yet. The voice acting was good for the most part, but sometimes the audio was not synced very well to the mouth movements. There are some pacing problems, and the plot and script could have both used a little bit of a rewrite. This is a good first effort, but in the end it amounts to little more than an extension of the story and a way to help drum up excitement for the upcoming RE5.

It was nice to see Claire and Leon back in action together, and I thought that the new characters that were introduced were interesting as well. Hopefully, Capcom can use what they learned here and make another Resident Evil CGI movie that is a little closer to the outstanding quality of the game series.