Review of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) by Inmh — 27 Nov 2021

I consider myself a Resident Evil fan, though not a longtime one. But I'm not so particular or purist that an adaptation has to be 1:1 from its source material; obviously some things have to be trimmed and reworked for flow and budgetary restrictions. I get this.

But this movie confused me.

On one hand, there were some things that had exquisite attention paid to the little details: Claire's outfit, for instance, is adapted right from the RE2 remake down to the little feather necklace she wears. The Raccoon City PD building was identical to the game. But these lovely little details are overshadowed by some of the most BAFFLING choices made by the filmmakers. Choices like making Chris and Claire have a personal history with William Birkin, reducing Leon to incompetent comic relief.

And how can I forget the fact that they had the first and second games occurring concurrently? I had hoped that the mansion scenes would play out before the scenes with Claire and Leon for some semblance of chronological order, but instead they literally just mashed the plot (SOME of the plot) from the first two games together. I do not understand this bizarre attempt at combining RE1 and RE2. Why not adapt the first game to film as best as you can, and then adapt the second later- you can even combine it with RE3 since they take place within a few days of each other! This had a lot of potential, but these little Easter eggs and references to the games actually highlight how badly the film is put together: "Yes, we know all these details about the game, and yet we STILL chose to have it play out on screen this way.".

Not great.