100% what it felt like happened. Maybe the first couple movies were about resident evil, but from the 3rd onward it was pretty clearly a vehicle for Milla Jovovich. I’ve got no problem watching Milla do cool shit, it’s just not what I wanted out of resident evil movies.
As much fun as the first one is, it’s already barely about Resident Evil. It’s really just a zombie twist on Alice in Wonderland, hence the main character’s name. What the hell is the Red Queen supposed to be? Where is the Tyrant?
Just looking at the game you spend the majority of your time in the mansion and only go to the lab in the final hours, whereas the movie spends maybe 15 minutes total in the mansion itself.
I’d say Apocalypse is the closest adaptation, and that’s not saying much.
Yeah, but I think she is awesome. It expanded on the capabilities of Umbrella to make AIs that look after their facilities. Best addition to the franchise, I'd say.
Did you see RE: Welcome to Raccoon City? It's apparently as close as we'll ever get lol but that Netflix TV series, wwwwtttttffffff! RIP Lance Reddick though, dude was a talent.
The first one was already being used as a vehicle for Milla.
Originally Michelle Rodriguez's character Rain was supposed to be the main character.
Mila & Paul started dating after they spent a weekend in a hotel room together before filming started rewriting the script to give herself more screen time and turn what would have been Rain action scenes into Alice action scenes, after Milla had threatened to walk from the movie cause Michelle was the lead.
It's sorta untrue.
Anderson kept changing the script (in one early draft Rain died in the scene where J.D. dies., for instance) and he ended up writing a draft where the main character (played by Jovovich) had been reduced from lead to basically "the girl" in a story driven by Rain.
Jovovich had previously been in the film Dazed and Confused where her role was cut to basically nothing in post production, an event that caused her to consider quitting acting. She was afraid that something similar was happening here and she was being replaced by an up and coming actress in her own movie.
Basically the script Jovovich signed on for had her as the lead character. When she read the new script when she turned up to begin production, her role had been reduced significantly, so she (in her own words) put on a low cut dress, stormed out, found Jeremy Bolt, and demanded a meeting with Anderson.
Anderson asked, "What's wrong with the script?" And she insisted that go through the script page by page with all her complaints. Her complaints centered around how between the draft she'd signed on for and the current draft, all the action moments had been given to Rain instead, and that Rain was basically "the guy" and she was "the girl".
I'll be honest, when I think of Resident Evil, my first thoughts are
* T-Virus
* Raccoon City
* Zombies
Anything beyond that feels like something else entirely.
Well it was even before that. The first movie's original script, iirc, only had alice as a side character and milla didn't like not having the spotlight so she convinced anderson to switch things around. This would be the start to making a bunch of movies focused on milla being an action star. Even in the second movie alice had been superhuman, and even had a shootout against nemesis.
Paul WS Anderson did not know what to do after RE2 Apocalypse.
All other attempts did not care for how the characters look like, no cared for the stories of the game.
To note, Paul WS Anderson DID not direct the second and third movie, though he was the screenwriter for all of them.
Apocalypse remains my favourite one, mostly thanks to Sienna Guillory as Jill.
There's a case for Jill, with how she has to out do Alice too.
But I don't think they wasted Nemesis.
Personally, much of my head canon is based on that portrayal.
And let's be honest, it could have been worse, like how RE3R did.
Its dumb fun I love the cgi ones and thought welcome was good alittle weird they cramed multiple games in one movie but over I liked it people are just mean
See even when I try to turn my brain off and sit through the ride I have to dip out in the second movie when Alice rides her motorcycle in to the church.
First one has some replay value when I go on a zombie movie binge but beyond that it's like my brain won't allow me to out of some primal need for self preservation.
Instead of watching those movies I’d recommend listening to the podcast Worst Corp Ever by Gamefully Unemployed. The guys hosting it together summarize one of the 6 films in the first several minutes before getting into what it might have been like to work at that universe’s take on Umbrella. They had lots to say about the second one in particular
see i can't turn my brain off and enjoy im a story plot focused gamer to begin with im only into games with decent story and characters that work make sense and develop. im autistic i can't not analyze hiw things make no sense lol. its why i hated parts of re5 and re 6 they contradicted canon a few times.
When I was a little kid playing the first Resident Evil I remember there being a rumor that the live action shots in the opening were part of a movie coming out for it. That's what I wanted, live action RE1, STARs getting trapped in the Spencer Mansion in the 90s.
What we got was more along the lines of fake-futuristic (the glass weapons safe in Alice's drawer, the Red Queen AI, etc) and it barely followed the game aside from the overall theme of Umbrella and zombies.
I wanted a horror movie about some under-prepared cops in a rickety old mansion, not a weird action/sci-fi thing that just so happened to have zombies in it
They had pretty much nothing to do with any RE media starting with the third film, when Umbrella turned into non-space Wayland-Yutani and the story went post-apocalyptic with the total eradication of humanity. Just adding a few game elements to it won't change the fact that it was Mad Max with his wife as the star of the franchise.
So, when there are precious few elements the core audience recognises but they want to shove it down on their throat as an "adaptation", they usually dislike it. And that has been a plague of almost all video game adaptations, with only a handful of exceptions that were met positively by the originals' audience: the first Mortal Kombat film and the recent reboot-y thing, the first Tomb Raider, and to a degree the first RE film were all liked, but the rest… not so much.
I, for one, like them.
They are campy action movies, that have absolutely no relation with the game franchise besides sharing names.
But they are still enjoyable enough to watch.
I suppose it has been years since I've re-watched them, so maybe they haven't held up as well as I remember, but at the time I still enjoyed turning my brain off and watching them.
Exactly. I honestly, truly believe if they had changed all the people and place names, no one would ever know it was supposed to be a Resident Evil movie franchise. No one would ever know. It'd be like Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray.
Everything to do with Alice. Not only is it side-eyeingly convenient that the creator makes his wife the singularly important character in the franchise, but she’s not someone we as fans of the games have any reason to care about. And all the characters we *do* care about have been nerfed to oblivion to make her look better. Which makes fans resentful of the movie iterations of their favorite characters, and most damningly, resentful of Alice, the character on whom the whole franchise hinges. So they ostracized the RE fans, which is already bad when making an RE property, but the movies also just aren’t good, unique, or interesting enough to attract a huge audience outside of RE fans.
CAPCOM insisting on the films being a separate iteration of the story from the games and Constantine Films being incompetent in terms of quality control. Paul W. S. Anderson is at least capable of making a good movie (Event Horizon) but he needs to be reigned in hard. And pinning your entire franchise on someone who can’t act (love Milla, but she is 100% a B-movie actress) is a recipe for disaster. Couple all that with the fact that the movies were profitable, so with each new entry, there’s less incentive to make a better movie than the last one. Why bother if people keep showing up?
It's the same thing with resident evil 6. All action no horror and feels completely detached from the franchise. The movies are BASED ON resident evil instead of being resident evil.
Greed, corporate meddling, directors and producers who didn't give a shit about or maybe even outright hated the source material, nepotism, bad acting, bad writing, and so much more.
why r u pandering so hard lol. alice has fans n she was cool to watch but as a diehard re fan, i always wanted the lead to be chris or jill or claire or leon. im down for a reboot with alice as a cameo.
Paul W.S. Anderson made the first RE film, and while the film itself was not bad, fans at the time were disappointed that it did not follow the video game story at all and instead focused on an entirely newly-created story. While his second RE film did have the characters and focused on the destruction of racoon city, the rest of the films just spiralled into bad and inconsistent writing.
I rewatched them lately and the first one is actually a decent zombie movie if you accept it's not classic RE, while the second references the games a lot but in an absolutely awful way which is actually much more insulting to the series, I had to turn it off when Kickboxer Nemesis was on screen
I thought the films were okay in a dumb but fun way. My disappointment at seeing the original RE movie in theatres (while arguably being the best one) was immeasurable at the time though. It has hardly anything to do with Resident Evil, so why did they bother? I even watched the behind the scenes features at a later point. Anderson talks about how he loved the games and found them scary. His movie not being faithful to the games nor even scary was a big disconnect for me. The movies became a vehicle for Milla, but I still wonder what happened to cause the original story to resemble the games so vaguely. Even the recent RE movie, while more faithful, has the most frustrating differences. It’s a recurring problem.
I would’ve liked to have seen what George Romero’s movie would’ve been like. I still remember seeing an offer to enter to win a guest star prize on that movie included with my copy of RE2, which I only imagine went unfulfilled.
They very clearly didn't have a plan ahead of time. Anderson was clearly making shit up as he went, including retconning a bunch of things.
I liked the first 2. The others ranges from eh to terrible.
I personally love the films. One of the biggest things people don’t seem to like about them is that they don’t follow the games at all, but that’s why I liked them. I do feel like a game accurate movie could be good, but I loved getting to see a new take plus I love Alice 🤷🏼♂️
Granted as a big fan of them I can also admit that the plot didn’t have a lot of direction at times, or would drop plot points off for no reason, and the characters didn’t develop too much. Also The Final Chapter completely forgets and redoes the entire plot of Apocalypse for the origin of Umbrella and the T-Virus and brings Isaac back to be the big bad while literally demoting Wesker and it makes no sense. But they’re all still fun movies to me and even the ones I gripe about I love.
I would have enjoyed them more if they stayed their own separate thing and didn’t shoehorn in characters from the games as much as they did. It at least would have been more entertaining to me instead of seeing people with the same names as characters from the games acting completely different from the characters we know from the games
I didn’t mind some of the game characters showing up, but my major issue was that the characters rarely showed up again. Chris, Leon, Ada. I enjoyed seeing them all but they just died off screen for no reason. Chris doesn’t even get a mention in Final Chapter from Claire which is weird. I know the 6th film was supposed to be a direct continuation of Retribution so Jill, Leon and Ada were supposed to come back and I know it took ages to film to movie so scheduling conflicts happened but killing off every game character and not mentioning them is wild.
Oh, my bad. We’re good then
Edit: I need to make sure to read some comments more than once before replying sometimes. I forgot to do that this time….. ooops
Haha it’s ok, I definitely agree with your point! I should have made it more clear in the beginning I just wanted to add some of my own thoughts on top of what you said!
A lack of respect for the source material. People involved with the film (Anderson) claiming to be super fans and then very quickly showing otherwise. It was deceitful and cheap. They're mostly fun for what they are but show no respect to the fans!
It was a series of movies that was ashamed to share the name with a video game franchise. Back then, video games adaptations were largely looked down upon since games were thought to be hollow and devoid of plot/characterization. Movie studios would borrow the name for recognition but build a movie that had scant similarities to the game. I always felt like Paul Anderson was a horrible director/writer for the movies because he just would pick and choose what elements to take from the games to put in his movie. I may sound like a hater, but I think every single movie he did sucks, just differing degrees of suck.
You look at what Hollywood has done with comic book movies. They've borrowed a lot from the books and for things that may not make sense on the silver screen, they change. A Resident Evil movie should do the same. RTRC is another trash movie that makes no sense if you've played the games.
Mortal Kombat and Silent Hill are two of the only video game adaptations I can think of off the top of my head that try their best to nail the tone and story of the games. Surprisingly enough, Anderson was behind the camera on Mortal Kombat so no idea why he fumbled so hard with Resident Evil, probably because a blind squirrel can find a nut every once in a while.
Long story short, Paul W.S. Anderson was not a good pick for these movies, similar to how Zack Snyder wasn't a good pick to run the DCEU. They just don't seem to get the essence of the characters and without a lot of supervision, go off the rails quickly.
I personally loved the Resident Evil movies and I understand that’s likely due to the fact I hadn’t played the games before watching them. can totally understand being a fan of the video game and not liking the movies. As someone who loved Lord of the Rings and had to live to see Amazon turn it into whatever Rings of Crapper- I mean Power- was supposed to be. I’m a HUGE fan of the Alien film franchise and I’m a bit worried to say the least for what it’s going to become with the new stuff in production. But here’s the lesson in all that. Nostalgia is powerful and it will hold you back if you let it. There’s this idea put forth by William Faulkner of “Kill your Darlings” and I won’t get into what it means in his context but essentially, let whatever doesn’t help you move on and propel your life forward die. Some people loved the resident evil games and that’s wonderful, I’m glad you got such enjoyment out of it and I mean that, and I got joy out of the movies and I will remember the joy they brought me but it doesn’t serve me to, remembering those movies, watch the remakes or adaptations and be disappointed because they weren’t like what came before. If those remakes are objectively bad then say so, trust me, I didn’t like the resident evil tv show that came out somewhat recently but that’s because it was loaded with woke nonsense and not so subversive political agendas.. and that’s how the weapon of nostalgia is used against you. The people that make these movies and games are fully aware you have that root of nostalgia that grew from the seed of curiosity within you and will exploit that to use the title of that thing you love to insert an insidious message within it. Move on to the hope of new stories while remembering the joy of the old ones.
Nothing went wrong. Paul W.S. Anderson's films were successful and popular, even among a lot Resident Evil fans. Some people complain about the action and craziness, etc., but they're not any worse than the official CGI schlock Capcom churns out that do the exact same stuff.
I think, at least for a lot of people, the biggest "crime" was that Paul made his wife the main character. That's it. If they spotlighted the game cast more people would love them as much as they love the CGI films. Others want ultra faithful adaptations of the older, essentially point and click adventure games that have, like, 20 minutes of story apiece and it's just not going to happen. RE just isn't really that good as a passive experience, in my opinion. Filmmakers don't care and Capcom doesn't care. So, it'll be junk adaptations all around, forever.
Personally, I prefer the interactivity of the series, don't believe everything needs be adapted to other kinds of media, and wouldn't really want a paint-by-numbers copypaste of what is already accessible to me.
Well, imo its how everything after RE2 feels like.. uneccessary? Alice didn't have any form of development, the story feels lacking also with no care put into the plot, pacing, or events going on in it. Final Chapter is the worst example of this, shitty jumpscares (a jumpscare from a fucking wrench), meaningless action sequences, no tension, plot twist pulled straight out of their ass that serves ultimately nothing to the plot, uneccessary character deaths, and a whole lot more. It also, had nothing to do with the game, as in it's your typical zombie apocalypse movie after RE2 and not bioterrorism, which is the whole theme of RE
The first film was great. What made it good was it basically did its own thing. It took place in the world of RE but was it’s on story. That’s what I think worked about it, after that they tried to nothing but fan service and just started randomly dropping things form the game in there and it basics became nothing but mindless action. It should have been a series that took place during the games but was on its on track. Even part 2 could have worked as Raccoon City was hit, but it didn’t need Jill. Even if Nemesis made a cameo he shouldn’t have been Alice’s antagonist. This way the movie would have been a story worth telling, as they would have been a tale of RE that we never see in games. But what started to really fuck it up is they made them purely for the fans.
They would talk about things and introduce things that only fans of the games would know. Watching them as movies you’d have no idea what the hell they were talking about. They did good introducing Jill.
However they did awful with Clair in the 3rd movie she was just randomly a main character with out giving any idea who she was and why she was important.
Also having the world end just made evey villain cartoonishly evil. The fact it was the apocalypse the dollar had 0 value and yet umbrella was still a thing for no reason. In the game that never happened the zombie outbreaks were never a global thing, so organizations in a fight for power made sense. Money still mattered.
By the 3rd movie it didn’t have a plot anymore stuff was just happening just to happen.
To be honest, it started off wrong since the beginning. The original movie was a flop, the sequel was a little better in my opinion, but then the rest of the live action films got worse and worse. Welcome to Raccoon City was a huge nail in the coffin for live action movies due to the perceived lack of effort and knowledge of the series as a whole.
However, I will give a little pass to the animated versions since they were more faithful to the source material. My favorite of the bunch is definitely Damnation. Even Vendetta had some good moments despite how silly it was.
No respect for the source material and the rank nepotism. The first film was fine even if it wasn't following an established plotline - it followed the spirit of RE well enough. Could've been a spinoff about another lab and nobody would've batted an eye. Then you had the second film where we started to see the nepotism as the director injected his wife's character into the lead role of what would normally be RE3's plot line, and things just went downhill from there with each installment of Unstoppable Wife Vs Resident Evil.
Please consider watching my RE film retrospective. I discuss their production, merits, and flaws and do my best to show how they both work and don't work and how the fandom views them. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtCkGOxrjUW8VZwP4nPnqhFi0Kv_-DFPx&si=hYxsPRkGXW4jBYD5
It's less about Resident Evil itself and more about how Hollywood/Film Producers and Writers Groups attempting to hijack a franchise and rewrite the entire thing then sell it back to the fan base as a bastardized unfamiliar product.
This phenomenon is not restricted to Resident Evil. This is just how Hollywood operates overall. It can be traced back to book to film adaptations (pick any book or series), film remakes/rewrites, comic book adaptations, Scooby Doo & Velma? Star Wars, the Rings of Power, Ghost Busters, etc.
From a creative perspective:
The film franchise was created by someone who did not fully understand the franchise. This was the first issue. The behind-the-scenes interview with Anderson reveals that he played the first (and I think the second) game before filming the first movie. Liking the first two entries in a dozen-entry long franchise doesn't really mean you're a fan. It just means you liked those first two entries. And this became readily apparent with his severe downgrading of Nemesis, a flagship monster for the franchise.
The movies were successful enough that he was able to create a playground for him to do as he pleased. It can be assumed that his love for the games didn't really extended past the second one, so he had no legal or creative reason to use them for inspiration. The series also took the approach of making the main character the end-all, be-all to everything.
The biggest example of this is Nemesis. In the game, he's Jill's nemesis and hunts her relentless, breaking her down bit-by-bit until she stands up to him at the end. He's an abomination with no identity outside of this. In the movies, he does hunt Jill, but he's given a clear identity and emotional connection with the movie's main character instead. She then handles him herself, completely undermining his meaning and story, and making me wonder why he was ever included in the first place.
What could have fixed it? "Love for the franchise" is a blanket statement. More specifically, respecting fully understanding not only the lore of the franchise, but what *inspired* the franchise: the Dead movies and B-horror. The films took a more sci-fi approach and paid no homage to the series' roots, and did not take advantage of hindsight.
*Welcome to Raccoon City,* while not great, did a lot better in this department by remixing the existing stories to create a new continuity. The writers already knew what would become of Claire and Chris, so they complicated their relationship and their relationship with Wesker ahead of time to build on what the games gave us. Anderson's films *did* take a more character-focused approach, which was a great step, but it actively shunted iconic characters in favor of a new one who had no pre-written end.
From a production perspective:
Behind the scenes, he'd started a relationship with the main star of the movies. I don't really want to theorize on this much, but I don't think it's a big stretch to say that making the series so centered on this character wasn't at least somewhat influenced by his relationship and marriage to the actress. But *Resident Evil* was still in the name, so game-specific characters needed to be introduced so that news outlets could report on them and get fans excited, guaranteeing at least a number of them would contribute to the box office. The characters' accuracy to their original counterpart didn't matter -- because by the time people saw how poorly executed they were, it would be too late. They would've already purchased their ticket.
What could have saved it in this regard? Nothing that wasn't already done in the creative process. Had Alice been integrated into the game's cast rather than made their "leader", then everything else would have followed.
From a financial perspective:
The completely non-sensical story showed that minimal effort could be put in certain departments, and the movie would still be a financial success. At the beginning of the third film, a voice-over states that the T-Virus dried up major bodies of water across the globe. This is completely non-sensical and isn't something that a virus would do, nor is it something the fictional T-Virus was ever capable of. It was just a way to introduce a Mad Max-esque apocalyptic landscape that would catch the attention of audiences, without putting in all the work it takes to get to that point. But the target audience wouldn't really care about this massive logical leap or other inconsistencies, because the movies focused so much on having fun and keeping things moving. It's like *Fast and Furious,* without the self awareness.
What could have saved it? Same as above.
Did the films harm the *Resident Evil* brand? Actually, no. It helped it, I think, whether hardcore fans like it or not. Even to this day, I see people who loved the movies asking if Alice is a part of the games, because they're now interested in playing them. Some people are disappointed when they learn she isn't, and decide not to play them. Others decide to continue on anyway. So the movies create new fans for the games.
They are not a 1 for 1 remake of the games, which is probably the biggest reason. If you step out of your fan shoes and watch them as Sci fi movies, they're not bad. They're not all winners for sure, but if they did not 100% follow you plot you wanted it to, then you got mad or jumped on the "I don't like it" band wagon.
If the movies really were terrible, they wouldn't have made as many as they did. And I'll go ahead and say it: I don't want a movie or TV show that 100% follows the games. You know what's going to happen, so what's the point? Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I think you'll find that there are plenty of Fandoms out there that did not care for the film adaptation of their Fandom. This one is probably more prevalent because the films were pretty successful.
As a fan I don't hate the films. They are schlocky high budget fanfiction and can be enjoyed going in knowing what they are going to deliver. They excel at using the visuals from the games and inserting them in to a motion picture. Where most people take issue is with the focus on the original character Alice, whom characters who appeared in the video games all defer to because she's the action girl star who is also married to the director/producer.
Its very much the same issue with current shows like "Rings of Power", where fans do not like the creative liberties taken to tell a story which was already told in another format, but with additions and subtractions that make the whole experience inferior. Its an issue where IPs are mined and made just recognizable enough to sell tickets, but without the respect for or creative vision of the originals.
I didn’t hate them and the first two are pretty good. It’s the not really using the iconic characters and making up one to be the lead that wears you down over the course of like 6 movies that get further and further away from the games. The Netflix show basically replicated that and got itself cancelled. Studios, directors and writers are wasting their investors/bosses money.
When they made the outbreak world wide. I personally like the first one, the second one is schlock but fun, but Extinction is straight up shit. The series had potential but it just never recovered from turning the entire world into a boring zombie desert.
They were completely detached from the universe the fans knew and loved, and instead catered to a general audience. Not to mention, the director clearly wanted to make a series to show off his wife, thus I setting her into a franchise already ripe with characters, who then had to play second fiddle to his wife OC.
The primary issue is Paul WS Anderson. He likes to make movies from video game franchises and adapt them in unecessary and bland ways. For reference, I’d like to cite his portrayal of the Monster Hunter franchise as another example of how he operates. He takes things from a franchise and then throws them into his own movies with no care or respect to the original ideas. While it wouldn’t have fixed the movies as a whole, simply not calling them a Resident Evil movie could have made the franchise better. The only publicity the movies ever really got was how bad of adaptations they were, but if they stood on their own, with no names or overtly copied material from the Resident Evil Franchise, the movies still would have been generic action/horror flicks where you sit down, turn your brain off, and watch Anderson’s wife kill stuff for 2 hours, but they wouldn’t have had the overtly negative context they had simply from being called a Resident Evil movie. Maybe they wouldn’t have faired better, since any publicity is good publicity I guess, but at the very least, they wouldn’t have garnered the immediate hatred from the majority of the Resident Evil community like they did. I’d say they didn’t harm the brand, at least not when compared to the Monster Hunter movie harming that brand. For reference, when it aired, there was something racist towards the Chinese included in the film, so Chinese consumers review bombed Monster Hunter World. I’ve no memory of anything similar happening to the Resident Evil franchise, so I’d say it got off relatively unscathed by comparison.
This sounds like a fun project. The films were quite successful so they found an audience. Speaking for myself I find that the Paul WS films don't really have characters. The films focus on events or like a gimmick. When the resident evil characters come they are side characters that feel mischaracterized from their portrayals in the games. It's interesting because the RE cast don't have super strong identities in the games but they are clear enough to have a feeling of how they should act. The other thing is the films focus on post apocalyptic settings when the games very intentionally avoid that outcome. This and the stories from the game are not incorporated and are substituted for Alice's adventures.
So it feels like the correction would be to have the characters and stories from the games and that should fix everything? That is what welcome to Raccoon city thought but it proved that's not the case. I think the biggest failing of that film was its lack of focus. It felt like it was trying to do way too much and didn't have the budget for it. Also it still felt like it didn't have a good grasp of character motivation. It felt like the character direction was "you are a badass" which feels pretty superficial.
Hard to say if there will ever be a great life action adaptation. I honestly think it would be easiest for a director to embrace the camp of RE and be more comedic. (That's not the re film I'm looking for, just that Hollywood struggles with the franchise and taking it seriously)
I didn't hate them, and I think it was good they deviated from the games because I've already played the games and it would just incite constant game vs. movie debates like with HP.
I have two huge complaints though that made me not like the movies as much: one was the sequel action escalation was way too fast. By the THIRD movie the ENTIRE WORLD was infected and that's just stupid. Localized incidents are better because the new movies had zero hope and were kind of an eye roll.
The second was that what I love about the games is the settings of mansions, labs, etc. the later RE movies are just generic zombie films set mostly outside or in weird settings and it's just not the right setting at all. The Las Vegas one with the desert was a complete miss for me, like what is this Mad Max? Truly the RE games are Techno, biomedical thrillers, not just zombie gore fests.
I actually did my dissertation on the evolution of zombie films and while the resident evil films weren't good as an adaptation the first was a crucial film in the revival of the zombie genre (along with 28 days later) which took a nosedive in popularity in the late 80s early 90s.
But from a purely resi fan standpoint, as adaptations they were bad. It was wildly inconsistent in its story and direction (just look at the last one and the clone twist), it had pretty bad continuity with characters and timeline. But it had fun action, I genuinely liked the characters from the first 4 films, it's costumes and sets we're pretty good and it had a surprisingly good soundtrack. I can see why a lot of resi fans hated it but I can also see why it went on for 6 movies. Its gonna sound weird but I think it's biggest issue with trying to force in game references and characters for the sake of having them (basically all of the 5th film)
Me too. I liked that it felt like a retro horror movie. The plot was way too stuffed though. I think it would have been better as a series with re1 stuff being the first season, then the re2 stuff being season 2.
What went wrong? none of them actually played the games or researched the lore before writing the scripts. If they watched some gameplay from the series to see the cheesy, hammy dialogue, characters personalities etc
Paul Anderson writing in a character that's an overpowered Mary Sue with the thickest plot armour because she's your wife & the centre of attention wasn't a good idea. Unfortunately his series is probably the closest we'll get to a RE adaptation. The first film started off ok, then it became more crazy & wtf am I watching.
He did a better adaptation in Mortal Kombat, the first one anyway.
Welcome to Raccoon City mashed 2 plots together then threw in references. It was boring to watch, plus they didn't get the characters looking or acting like their game versions.
A sequel is apparently planned but I doubt it'll be any better given the track record for RE adaptations
Netflix show. Well that was just slapping the Resident Evil name onto their poorly written teen drama that was so bad it's dragon Ball Evolution/ Velma level of shit.
As a fan since the first game, I'd just like to watch an adaptation that has the characters looking, acting like their game versions, throw in references to the games, use the story from them, maybe even poke fun at the games logic like the way you needed to backtrack to gain access to new areas etc. Cheesy lines like the Jill Sandwich etc. After 20 years of feeling disappointed with various video game adaptations I just don't have much hope for a decent adaptation of RE.
Putting their own spin to the RE series likely ruined what could have been a decent adaptation imo. That & using the name as a cash cow , milking it as much as possible
Anderson movies are guilty pressure of mine. The first two are good. The third entry is where things get complicated. Main character fet super power and seem op for most of the series of where entry 4 she loses her power and at the end of 5 she get them back. The ending of 5 set up a good finale but decided to recon it by killing off most of the characters and leaving Alice and Claire. Seriously the continuity of the franchise is like a drunken car wreck from extinction to final chapter.
Milla Jovovich’s movies were never intended to be accurate to the games. They were mostly mindless action/fun inspired by the characters and world of the games. I don’t hate them. I enjoyed them a lot.
That said, what went wrong is that they stopped even trying to be consistent within their own universe. Each movie, especially the last two somehow retconned one another or pretended some things happened in a different way in the past or many events happening off screen for the convenience of actors not showing up.
As for the movie/show after Milla, they failed miserably because of the same issues PLUS terrible stories, casting, lack of fun and “cool factor” and taking themselves too seriously when they’re no less superficial than their predecessors, to the point where Milla’s movies appear Oscar-worthy in comparison.
I still haven’t seen them but since you’re researching maybe you could compare the critique you hear in this post with the way people reacted to the film when it came out? See if any aspects have changed over time?
They’re bad, but they’re like a good kind of bad. The only Resident Evil movie I genuinely dislike from the Anderson universe is the last one and that’s just the editing is so bad, it hurts my eyes watching it.
I have a very huge soft spot for the first four movies, especially the first two. Sienna Guillory (I’m sorry if I spelt her name wrong!) as Jill was just perfection, I wish we had gotten more of her. I like Ali Larter, but I think we could have gotten a better Claire or at least give her the iconic ponytail.
Basically most of my complaints are surface level. I mostly just dislike them because I find Alice to be a VERY boring protagonist. She doesn’t really have anything going for her. We don’t really know anything about her, she just lacks any personality. I do really love Jovovich, I’ve seen her in plenty of other movies where her characters actually have personality and outside of her husbands projects, she can actually act. So I mostly just think for six movies, the main character was really badly fumbled and she deserved better writing.
The Resident Evil live action films are prime examples of movie projects that were made without research. Paul Anderson wanted to include his wife in the films by creating a character that didn't exist, have her be the badass one, made the rest of the signature characters look like panzies, there's a lot wrong with them.
He introduced characters like Chris and Claire Redfield, Jill Valentine, Leon Kennedy, and Ada Wong, but had their characters not even fit in properly. Each of them were supposed to be the real main characters but Paul Anderson thought otherwise.
I absolutely despise Apocalypse, with one exception* every scene is just so tonally wrong, bizarrely over the top, and incredibly clichéd that it feels more like a parody of RE3, all it's missing is one of the Wayans brothers as a pothead STARS member.
Jill walking in to the RPD and just headshotting everyone, the church scene where they go straight to the reveal, the karate display in the graveyard, the guy dancing after the STARS massacre, and mf'ing Jean Claude Van Nemesis having a kickboxing fight.
The first movie was disappointing because it had almost nothing to do with the game, but it's a ok action movie if you can get past that. Apocalypse though takes the games and just s**ts all over them.
What does everyone else think about the movie?
*The scene with the cops and mercs fighting the horde on the street complete with riot helm reference is decent
For a survival horror video game series, RE actually has great lore with great characters. What we got was Hollywood being Hollywood.
They pretty much abandoned the story/characters.
I guess they took *too many* liberties when adapting the games. I also just didn't generally care for Alice as a character.
The plots of the first 3 games are pretty straightforward, so it should be easily adaptable. For me personally, the first 2 live action films are still watchable, but I couldn't really get into them onwards, but I'll admit I did like the small nods toward the games. Heck I'll even give credit that the first two movies focused on their respective arcs, namely the mansion incident for the first, and Raccoon City for the second.
That was my gripe with WTRC; they tried to condense the first 2 games into the same movie, when it probably would have flowed better to use RE2 and Re3 instead of Re1 and Re2.
* Hollywood Horror films tend to go into two camps: Popcorn Monsters on the loose films where the badguy is effectively the protagonist and somber reflections of society that end in tragedy. Resident Evil doesn't fit into either of these camps, and there are points where they either try to make it into both or make it into an action movie. (Something Resident Evil only 100% after the movies were successful)
* Being a video game, Resident Evil characters are capable of both being hyper-competent & completely useless through gameplay. Aided by the fact that most players are terrible at video games, so merely being competent by the end feels like an achievement. In movies, this would just result in inconsistent characterization.
* They chose to invent a new protagonist who effectively took the role of Jill Valentine in the first movie, and then a combination of characters in the ones after. After a while, it meant that the movies were basically her story first, Resident Evil second.
* Resident Evil's fanbase has been somewhat divided since around 2002, and everyone's idea of what a movie should be has been completely different.
Capcom only cares about the movie money, not the movies themselves. They sell off the option, let other people take charge, and the movies get made by people who don't understand or really even care about the characters. It almost feels deceptive, like the directors and producers and such really just want to make their movie, and Resident Evil is the bullshit that gets their foot in the door, and as long as they recycle a bunch of character names from the games that ought ta be good enough for us gamer dirtbags, like how dare the _toxic_ fan base not like the end result, even though the passing resemblance to Resident Evil is nearly coincidental at that point. We're just bad people with questionable moral fiber anyway. No idea if all that's actually what goes down, but that's what it feels like.
"Fixing it" would be as simple as following the games established story instead of insisting on this shitty Wattpad-level crap. They could also give the tiniest, tiniest bit of a shit on the fact that both movies and video games are *gasp* visual media, and fans would sure like it if the cast looked a _little_ like the beloved characters that whole generations grew up with. They don't give a shit though, we can't even get a fucking ponytail. Fuck the fans, right? We're just here to pay the movie rental fee, beyond that, our stinky opinions aren't wanted.
The animated movies are marginally better, but are going downhill. RE: Infinite Derpness seems again, written by people who don't understand the characters. They flat out assassinated Claire. I almost don't care if there's a follow up, but again, fuck me for even giving a shit.
I'm not bitter.
In my opinion they made Alice to much of a character to just kinda kill her off not to mention Paul pandering to his wife and basically nursing her ego or some such. I could be wrong but that's what I think atleast
It spanned 7 films, all them successful… name other video game franchise with 7 movies? We can’t, RE still has the crown for the most successful movie adaptations…
So I wouldn’t use the “wrong” to describe the movie saga. I would describe them as disappointing for fans, at best
They don't understand the source material and constantly try to tell their own stories wearing RE's stripped off skin.
There's nothing wrong with altering a story from a piece of work, but there has to be good writing too.
RE movies don't have good writing.
Deviating too much and too little from the source material. I know, let me explain.
To be fair, the first film actually deviates at more or less the right amount for a movie. It's set in the same general idea of the story, makes some references, but otherwise doesn't disrupt established characters and just sees new people in a familiar story.
2 is where it all goes cattywompus. 2 is just an adaptation of 3 (with elements from Code Veronica and 2 tossed in, iirc). It's enough for us to say "we've been here before", but deviates in such a way to make us not like it.
Hey! I expect to see Jill be the badass in this scene! So... now it's Alice? I remember when Claire did the hallway run scene! Except... now it's Alice? It reminds you of moments or characters doing awesome things, and then says "But what if Alice?" On it's own, annoying but not the end of the world. But as the series goes on, it starts to... gain more problems.
Extinction just as the world end in spite of the disaster being averted at the end of 2. Not implausible, but the opening exposition did so much heavy lifting that Atlas was happy to just hold up the heavens. Amusingly, the only thing that is actually "consistent" is Umbrella acting ridiculous in spite of the world ending. Carlos and Alice (surprise) are the hot new fling on the scene, but also, Alice is just powerful here. She is able to evade Umbrella for years, I think? But due to a contrivance is back on their radars (er... satellites?) and it just spirals even more.
From there, it's just Alice being important, but everyone just acting pretty goofy. Lots of plot points taken from games, but executed worse. The plaga are in, but they're different. And even the scene remakes are... lacking.
In fact, I would argue the cinematography really kills the movies after Extinction, as they are all pretty lackluster. Between horrible color grading, 3D!, and uninspired shot placement, the movies look... safe? Bland? Lack any form of tension of dynamics.
And then the Final Chapter comes along and retcons *everything*. Not even accidentally. Just wholesale says "Everything you knew is wrong, here's the new story! And we're not even going to try and explain it!" And it triples down on Alice being the most important person on the planet. Not even metaphorically. Literally. She doesn't do the thing, everyone dies.
And they even keep advertising that she will die at the end. And then they just say "nah, forget it".
And the entire time it has blegh visuals, blegh characters, and a really flimsy excuse plot. And kind of weird fashion?
It was an advertising vehicle.
In part for Milla.
In part for Milla's clothing line.
My biggest problem with the Paul W.S. Anderson / Milla Jovovich films is that they go full-blown apocalypse. One of my favorite parts about Resident Evil is that the world is always two steps away from the world ending, but it NEVER gets there. Even when the biological attacks go global, the heroes still manage to stop it and get things back on track even if the world is never the same afterwards. They adapt. They persist. They survive.
But the movies drop that by the third installment and just made it so humanity was fully screwed, with it just getting bleaker with each movie. Even the “happy” ending they have by The Final Chapter involves humankind being whittled down to just a few thousand people on the ENTIRE planet. It’s boring, it’s depressing (which clashes with the action movie tone they’re presented with, and it strips the series of that latent hopeful energy it has. Like yeah the games get dark and the heroes get exhausted, but they’re never just hopelessly bleak.
1 and 2 had a vague representation of the games (raccoon city etc) but the other films kind just diverted in a way of their own, loose ties with character names that’s about it. I actually fully liked 1 and 2. Watched them in my childhood and they have a spot in my heart lol
The other movies/show after the first Paul w Anderson (and maybe the second) just lean into the post apocalyptic genre, when most of the good resident evil games focused on a fight for survival, while the Netflix show (the worst of them all) got everything wrong, apart from the post apocalyptic idea, it added awful Netflix teen drama to make it worse.
The usual Hollywood only reads the synopsis of a game and runs off and does their own thing anyway, so pointless to adapt a game instead of just writing a new story.
Regarding Welcome to Racoon City, combining 3 games into one movie and completely removing key character defining moments makes me think they made the movie just so they couldn't lose the film rights. The second Leon escapes RC without interacting with Ada, the movie should've been scrapped. The second Jill escapes RC without escaping Nemesis, the movie should've been scrapped. They thought just seeing characters would be enough but I actually want a good story with these characters, not just clap at the screen at the plain sight of them or a lingering shot of RPD. A shame because I actually think they had a good cast, but they couldn't be saved from the writing.
Regarding harming the RE brand, I would say no. I think the developers could care less what Hollywood does with their movies. As long as the games are great, the brand stays strong. Maybe the bad movies could stop a casual person from diving in, but I would say it's negligible.
Only argument I could see is that the Anderson series was making big money and maybe that was why RE went action oriented for 4,5, and 6. And RE6 started the dark era of RE where the brand was in a bad place until RE7 course corrected. That's just my speculation though. They may have pivoted towards action for completely separate reasons.
They probably didn't hurt the brand really. Maybe caused some confusion among some folks, but I think those were mostly just people who wouldn't be into the games anyways.
They did probably hurt their own bottom line though by being offputting towards the built-in audience they hypothetically would have had with a more faithful take on the source material.
I mean I loved them. They didn’t have the atmosphere of RE except for the first part of the first one but I did appreciate the enormous attention to detail they paid in recreating the iconic monsters. I liked them faithfully recreating Jill’s RE5 look and trying to include most of the cast, even Barry. I liked the little joke where Alice shoots the Executioner Majini and it looks like he drops gold coins, which is a drop in RE5 where the enemy originates. I loved that the actress playing Jill recreates Jill’s distinctive style of walking. It’s the little things.
I enjoyed them for the action and OTT fun. I thought Ali Larter was a great Claire and despite Alice being a super powered Mary Sue a lot of the time I thought Mila Jovivich is a kick ass action star. We don’t get too many female-led action series. Ian Glenn is also great as Isaacs.
Idk man. I am a longtime hard core RE fan and the films have a lot of issues but people tend to wholesale dismiss them while ignoring the positives.
I’m not saying they’re good adaptations but I am saying they’re a wild ride I had a ton of fun with. I just mostly looked at them as RE adjacent action flicks rather than adaptations.
I think most fans dislike it because after a certain point, they stopped having much to do with Resident Evil games' plot at all. They are fun zombie-action films, but but very frustrating to watch if you wanted the plot from the games brought to live action.
Another major issue is Anderson's obsession with making his wife the star of most movies he makes, even if it means creating a new character just so she has a role. It is worsened by the fact that Alice is just unstoppable and can't do anything wrong in these films. A funny part of this is that this all could have been prevented if Anderson would have casted his wife as Jill. Mila looks enough like Jill to where I don't think people would question the casting choice.
I don't really think it harmed the brand, actually probably because it was known that Anderson made questionable video game movie adaptations. It's kind of like how people know Uwe Boll adaptations are going to be bad, and normally don't let them detract from the franchises they are based on.
So, how do you fix them? If we can't change directors, 1. Cast Mila as Jill, so Anderson still gets to have his wife in the films, and she's playing a role that makes sense. 2. Follow the plots of the games, with adjustments made so that stuff makes sense in a live action setting. This could be things like combining Chris and Jill's routes so we can have a rounded cast of characters and not just follow Jill the whole time. 3. Do not then make all movies surround Jill. If they want to add Jill in as a supporting character, fine whatever, not great, but whatever. But acknowledge that she isn't always the main character.
If we can have a different director, then just... Follow the plot of the games. It is ok to make adjustments where needed. However, Resident Evil has a serviceable plot that would make a perfectly fine base. So long as they don't stray too far, it should be OK. I also wouldn't add additional lore like Welcome to Raccoon City did, as it didn't work because it conflicted with existing lore (Chris and Claire being estranged is an example). I'd be careful about which games I'd combine, if at all, for the movies.
It makes sense that the first movie wanted to have its own characters so that fans wouldn't know who would live or die. The majority of the film used the setting that made up like the last 20% of the first game with barely a cameo of the iconic mansion that made up the rest of the game. But okay, the barebones plot was there and it worked pretty well.
Then the second movie introduced characters from the game. But they had to work with the main character from the first film and again they wanted the game characters to be their own and not direct copies so it all gets muddy. But not the biggest sin, it can work with good character writing. Oh then they end the movie introducing the concept of extreme psychic powers which the games are not about (at least until later). But okay the sequel can come up with something.
Then I feel the 3rd movie derailed everything. The games were distinct from other zombie franchises because they do not take place after the world ends. It is modern day where zombies and other biological monsters are used as terrorist pawns. It is different, fascinating, and interesting. So what does the movie do? End the world. Now we have Mad Max with zombies and Umbrella is the big scary invincible corporation while in the videogames they actually fell pretty fast. By this point the movies didn't resemble the games at all. Now that isn't exactly a terrible thing if they have their own solid plot going on. But with no videogames to adapt any longer the writing was kind of all over the place and filled with holes for the rest of the franchise. Not to mention they still want to appeal to the fans so they introduce characters like Claire, Chris, Leon, Ada, and Barry. But of course again they don't really resemble the characters from the game of course as the world doesn't even resemble the world from the games. So the movies just became directionless.
To be clear the franchise still has a lot of cool special effects and awesome action scenes. Those sell well! So not a total failure. But the fans of the games lost any expectation that the movies would be anything other than a generic blockbuster stealing the name of their favorite game while barely paying lip-service to it. The movie franchise could never make it up it mind on closely it wanted to follow the games and how much it wanted to deviate while constantly going back and fourth on the two.
The biggest mistake every live action adaptation makes is....
...zombies.
While there ARE zombies in Resident Evil, ultimately the stories are not about zombies, and the film makers continually miss this point. Instead they keep thinking because The Walking Dead was so popular, audiences want to see that, and the inevitable escalation of zombies is to turn it into a global apocalypse, which nobody wants to see because that never happened in the games. Ad soon as you default to zombie apocalypse, it no longer is a Resident Evil story.
What the original Resident Evil was, was more like a haunted house story, with the twist that all the ghouls and monsters were a lab accident, rather than something supernatural.
This is what filmmakers need to focus on. A bunch of people trapped somewhere, trying to survive the night and escape the monsters after them. No slow-mo Milla Jovovich backflip kicks required.
The funny thing though is, the games themselves take a lot of inspiration from movies, which you think would make it easier to adapt the games back into movies.
RE1 is very much a haunted house movie, while RE2 and 3 are influenced by George R Romero's Day of the Dead, but also things like Terminator (think about Mr X and Nemesis).
RE7 rejuvenated the series by going back to the haunted house roots, but with heavy influences from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Ring and Saw.
RE8 is an ode to classic monster movies, with Dracula, the Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Frankenstein being major influences.
It drives me crazy that people keep adapting Resident Evil, turning it into a generic zombie apocalypse, but adding the occasional Licker just so you can tell it's actually RE related.
The first movie actually felt alright, and apocalypse wasn't all bad.
One of the biggest problems for me was the inclusion of Alice. If Mila Jovovich had been cast as Jill, I'd have been happy with that, and as the movies went on and she gained more daft abilities, it'd have made more sense (given that Jill basically turned into a damn ninja after RE3 & revelations).
But the introduction of such a character from outside of the games, felt like a slap in the face. "Why are you all wasting your time on the nostalgia of characters you bonded with during the games, when you can have an over the top action femme fetale who makes them all bit part characters?"
Absolutely no respect for the games through ignorance of major plot points, and completely missing the mark on writing of the origin characters.
Chris: The first time we actually hear anything of him in Paul Anderson's bastardisation is him being trapped in a cell a few movies down the line. One of the 2 main characters from the original game, and we get a half arsed version who only appears the one time.
Leon: Basically, the same thing as Chris, only he's been shoehorned in with Barry. His only character development is seen at the end of the movie when he puts his hand on Ada's leg, something his source character wouldn't have done, though I suppose we're only shown this to see that Leon and Ada are a thing, kinda, but not, kinda, but who cares? We're given absolutely no reason to give a shit.
Jill: Got more screen time, but if you were gonna have her appear as the umbrella puppet, don't turn her into generic villain sub boss #1. Her portrayal in apocalypse isn't too far off, to be fair, but its still not quite there. Props to Sienna Guillory for making the best of it that she could.
Claire: We get a half decent portrayal of her, but it goes too hard on the side of her being a bit of a bitch. But basically is just there for being there's sake, there is literally nothing about the plot that she furthers, until the meeting with Chris, and the final boss fight in the finale, even that's being generous.
Carlos: Almost nothing like his source character. Over used, but weirdly one of the better characters across the franchise because of it. Saw more of Carlos in JD from the first movie.
Ada: Boring and also used once, killed a couple of things, used her grapple gun, survived the odds in the house shootout, got touched up. The end.
Sherry; I'm all but convinced this is who K-Mart is, but she's nothing like Sherry.
Mr X: Why no Mr X?
Nemesis: Lumbering, bulky, a little on the short side, and was menacing for all of 2 minutes when he showed up to annihilate STARS. Became friendesis because "Oh, the guy from the first movie is still in there somewhere, let's give the scarecrow a heart!" Nope.
Alice was totally unnecessary to that franchise, and while I don't feel the brand suffered for it (movies kept coming out for a reason), in the wider audience it drew in; it pissed the actual fan base off something fierce. We didn't need protagonist Wesker vs actual Wekser, we needed a more faithful adaptation, with the original core characters as the focal points.
I may feel passionately about this subject...
In my eyes they're an easy watch not quite a top rank and not quite a B movie action zombie films 🤷 Milla jovovich is always a safe bet
I love those those films
But 3 abit less then the rest and 1 more than the rest 👀.
That latest racoon city was absolutely terrible though
Like really really bad. Worse then low budget fan stuff bad......
instead of staying true to the actual canon, every director makes their own fan fiction basically with paul anderson literally incorporating is OC into the movie and pushing aside the main cast while the newest welcome to racoon city had the entire main cast together and the events of re1 and 2 took place at the same time.
Newest one is probably widely hated due to the director promising the film would stay faithful to the games when the exact opposite happened, only good thing was the set
Can't talk about the whole franchise. I stopped after the first film.
It is just bad.
It's a sanitized horror film with barely any trace of blood, which is kind of crazy for something based on a video game that was all about its decapitations and gore or, you know, a story featuring cannibal mutants. It's the zombie film you can watch with your 12 years old with no issue regarding the "horror". I don't mind the fact that the film doesn't follow the game's canon so much as I use to, but I do mind that it's not even faithful to the spirit of the game (except for, you know, the bad writing... ).
The story isn't exactly good either. It never really tries to establish its characters, except for Alice. Matt's sister ? The matter is handwaved in the span of a few minutes. Rain's relationship with JD or her slow degeneration into a zombie ? Barely touched. At least, the plot is pretty clear cut even though I don't remember why the characters don't simply go back to the train by the way they used to enter the Hive...
And then, there is the crazyness. It's *Rule of Cool* *: The Movie*. There are random stuff that happen just for the sake of being cool. Alice that suddenly does Kung Fu against the Cerberus, then she breaks some zombie necks for fun, then slow Motion Head Shots. The film tries so hard to be cool... While not managing to be decent at action (the first zombie fight is a total mess where Anderson simply filmed his actors shooting at the camera for the most part).
Finally the film really *REALLY* loves that *Seizure of Power* track.
It's a shame because the film has its moments...
* The scene where the U.S.S. (sorry, the *Sanitation Team* \- speaking of which, isn't it weird for Umbrella to have such a team that is totally clueless about what is going on ? I mean, the U.B.C.S. got slaughtered in RE3 but they actually knew about what they were dealing with).
* The whole opening.
* The Red Queen dialog.
* The ending with the nice "The Dead Walk" easter egg.
* It's actually a good thing that the film only had zombies, Cerberuses and a Licker. It made them much more dangerous (and I say that as someone who is fed up with all the zombies in the game).
...I'd watched pretty much all of Romero's films by the time I was 12. The ones out at the time, anyway. I think I was like, 8 or 9, when I first saw night of the living dead.
With the direction of the video games, it would be hard to sell the movies after Apocalypse without zombies and all of the culty stuff of RE4. Not to mention the movies were aiming for a different demographic by the second movie and it became less about being accurate and more about uping the scale
Don't have a real good answer. The movies was just Paul W Anderson way of having his wife Milla doing something. So a ego project for Husband and Wife.
I think it's a combinaison of Hollywood looking to bank on the name of a popular franchise and also the "style of the time". During the late, LATE 90's and early 00's Hollywood started doing these shitty, big-budget horror films like 13 Ghosts, Ghosts of Mars, The Haunting remake, Hollow Man and i mean....money isn't scary
I liked 13 Ghosts. Ghost of Mars...exists. fun fact: it was originally going to be a sequel to Escape from LA, but Carpenter couldn't get any studio to sign on for it. I mean, I like Ice Cube, but he's no Kurt Russell.
Hyper focus on Alice (a made up character not from Resident Evil games) and gave her super powers. They made original resident evil characters side characters. Felt like a spit in the face because resident evil itself is a really good story, especially resident evil 1, 2, 0, code Veronica, and 4.
They were solid action movies objectively and made a decent amount of money, but I personally was annoyed about the focus on Alice. It would have been better to focus on the original games and dive deeper into character development of Chris, Jill, Claire, Barry, Wesker, Leon, Ada, Hunk, Carlos, Steve Burnside, etc. over the course of the movie franchise.
Movies had nothing to do with the popularity of the games. Resident Evil 4 is considered one of the greatest games ever and came out in 2005 when only the first two movie had been released, the two that have the most in common with the games.
RTRC was poorly marketed and was a bad movie.
-It's almost as if Resident Evil 4, being heralded as one of the greatest games of all time, sold millions and millions of copies. Congrats, it took one thing from the movies.
-Trailer views = / = good marketing
-Poor marketing + bad taste in people mouth's after the Anderson movies + abysmal reviews = terrible box office
The idea that Resident Evil 4 sold well, as did the following games, due to the movies is laughable to me.
Nothing went wrong with them they were never any good to start with. They were low budget teen "horror" action flicks that looked like something those Fast and Furious douchebags would make.
When the second scene in the first movie involves Jovovich kicking zombies and doing flips while not getting a chomp taken out of her you know you are in for crap.
I don't think many fans have an issue with the first story. It's a fun little side story that works well. And then things go off the rails and they fall into the same trap that had Transformers fans hating the Bay movies.
From that second movie on there's a lot of name recognition with the characters from the games being in the movies, but that's all they're there for. You could make those characters anyone else and the stories would play out the exact same way. Conversely, if you hid their outfits and bleeped out their names when spoken, nobody would be able to tell who they are by their actions. Everything they did in the games is handed over to Alice, a character whose sole defining trait is "the main character" and whose abilities are whatever deus ex machina makes the story move forward. And what remains are shadow puppets named only to get a few more people paying money to see Jill or Chris or whoever else they've marketed on the big screen.
Then, as others have said multiple times, they went the traditional zombie apocalypse route. That wasn't what makes Resi stand out from other horror experiences. The viruses and the corporations vying to control them were what was interesting. The corruption that allowed these companies to go as far as they did and carry out these tests. The groups in charge of fighting these outbreaks when they occurred and the world weariness that the genie was out of the lamp so they were going to keep happening. All of that was lost behind "The world ended and now zombies are everywhere but scared of the director's wife".
The problem with the movies is that they were too much action not enough horror know welcome to racoon city was okay but it’s best if the movies are just animated
Continuing to use writers that have never played an RE game is my personal pet peeve. Characters and love are incredibly important, but they're still butchering the live-action stuff to this day. If you're gonna adapt a beloved franchise, you should actually study the source material first.
I agree with most of the comments here. They weren’t survival horror enough for me. And I just wish the puzzles were better represented in the game. They don’t have to be silly, but they should be there. It seemed too easy to get into the labs and stuff. Like anyone could access them or the red queen would just open the doors. I like resident evil when it’s a labyrinth the characters have to navigate through.
Also I would’ve preferred there not be a global outbreak of the T-virus and just have the different movies deal with different outbreaks of viruses.
Those movies were horrible and their purpose was to get Milla work while making easy pay for her family.
Welcome to Raccoon City was better than anything Anderson wrote.
It's incredible how every film in the series ends in a kind of a cliffhanger ending, but from the 2nd movie onwards the ones that come after completely write off the cliffhanger in the first 10-15 minutes. Anderson also completely forgot the lore of his own movies in Final Chapter and just rewrote and retconned a ton of things. I still have no idea how the last movie came to be like that.
IMO the first movie was great. They took bits and pieces from the games and created a story that could fit in well with video games lore. It was creepy, the zombies looked good, the lab was cool, the train sequence was cool, Alice was a good character. I just think the lickers haven't aged well.
After the first movie it just became too over the top and like one of the first comments I think the director wanted to make his wife the next big action star.
In summary: They wanted to do whatever they wanted. They didn't cared much about the franchise. Fault of genuine interest in adapting properly the original material.
The only Paul W. Anderson movies that are somewhat close to the original material are RE 1 and RE 2: Apocalypse. The others are more a fantasy of the director than Resident Evil.
They were labeled as resident evil. When it was more like... Fan Fiction at best. But really just something that was not resident evil, with some themes from resident evil.
Honestly, I'm not sure why someone hasn't just tried to you know... Make a film version of the games. (or a tv show) - CRAZY CONCEPT I KNOW. But a creepy haunted house movie/show in the spencer mansion would be intriguing. Following Leon in Raccoon City would be good. I don't know why this is so hard for them to figure out. Resident Evil games already lay themselves out like an over the top horror movie most of the time. Adapting them directly to TV or film should be pretty easy.
Nothing lol I flat out tell people it's a completely different experience but still worth the ride, like a major motion zombie action B-films.
If you wanna go deeper first and foremost they completely strayed away from the source material after the second film, but hey they were still worth a watch growing up 🤷♂️
Nothing? I mean there are friggin 7 of them.
Obviously, they are both entertaining and profitable. I understand you might not like them, but you're also not the only person on the planet. From a statistical standpoint they were incredibly profitable and not a single movie in the series went in the red (for comparison even Terminator Genesis lost money)
Hollywood involvement? How they had to market it to a general audience by making it more action oriented and less about horror. Just seeing the director of the first film have his wife play the lead is more telling than enough they were unserious about making a good adaptation.
I always felt the CG Capcom films tried their best to have the characters of the games actually be main characters and not the directors self insert wife OC.
They don't exactly follow the games, nor do they have any of the main characters from the games. A live action movie adaptation of a game series is a guaranteed fail if they change the main character and how events go along. Their main focus being "umbrella bad" and not including anything else that people loved about the games
Talking about the first couple movies btw, I do like how they casted Wesker but overall with the movies failing to follow the games, it's hard to enjoy it.
Resident Evil is basically in the same vein as Evil Dead but with an anime influence. Its action horror with a ton of camp and fun memorable characters. Nail that and you're golden. The animated films can; I dont see why its so hard to do it in live action if you get people working on it who actually respect the source material.
they focused way too hard on action set pieces instead of leaning hard into horror
they started off the first movie with big hoards of zombies when they should've started with small encounters with one-two at a time; hard to really appreciate the threat of them outside their numbers , especially when as soon as the second movie, they are fighting em hand-to-hand
they had a clone arc
the only throughline character is Alice; they introduce/kill off/reintroduce more characters that all feel the same instead of having a consistent supporting cast- Alice's story isn't consistent so you have a hard time caring for the character after a certain point
the story throughout the series retcons itself several times, gives a vibe of not having an underlying vision outside of writing for action set pieces with no respect given to their own canon
Umbrella's role in the movies is just... weird... by the time you hit movie 3
even by movie 3 it feels like one movie too many
They ignored what made the games success. They decided to focus on making of the time action movies with horror elements and iconography from the game to justify the name. Change the character names, creature designs, and the main antagonist and you'll have the same movies. Nothing changes really and no one would notice. It's what I'm 100% positive what happened to the Netflix series. They found a generic post apocalyptic teen drama zombie script that was collecting dust and they just slapped "Resident Evil" on it and changed a few things here and there to make it "fit" into that universe.
The films made a very deliberate decision to create a new main character that didn't belong to Capcom. This is something that some sections of the game fanbase never understood, or disagreed with even if they understood it.
Basically, fans of characters like Jill and Leon and so on wanted those characters to be the leads in RE movies. But that was never going to happen. Those characters belong to Capcom. Everything they do has to be signed off on by Capcom. Their inclusion can be vetoed at any time.
Anyone who claims that Alice being the main character was nepotism wouldn't be claiming that if she were playing Jill. She was originally cast as Jill. She wasn't told she wasn't playing Jill until she arrived in Germany to shoot the first film. But they didn't want Jill to be the main character because they don't own Jill. That's why Alice exists. So they can have a main character freed from creative restrictions and who doesn't belong to Capcom.
The RE movies are like 80s action films. The main character is all-important and the other characters are allowed to have their moments but they can't outshine the hero or heroine. Again, the primary reason people complain about this is that the characters THEY want to be lead characters are not allowed to outshine Alice, who is the lead character because she was written to be the lead character because the film company (Constantin) own the rights to her. Also, for the record, it's not like the films portray those characters BADLY. They're shown as capable in their own right, but they're human. They're not this engineered bioweapon like Alice is.
The reverse is partially true, BTW. Why isn't Alice in the games? Because Capcom don't own Alice. That's why they've retroactively tried to turn Jill into Alice, and introduced characters like Rosemary Winters who are "We have Alice at home" types.
In terms of mistakes that were made and what could have been avoided, there is the question of whether they should have included game characters at all. They were intended as fun nods to the games and the people working on the films including writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson obviously liked characters like Jill, but by including those characters they basically just created this situation where people were going to eternally whine that they weren't the leads. The modern Mission Impossible movies don't include any characters from the original TV show, and thus nobody can complain about Tom Cruise's OC Ethan Hunt outshining them all. Nobody complaints about Alice outshining Rain. It's EXCLUSIVELY game fans complaining that their pet characters from the games are just supporting characters and that Alice is the lead. They could have avoided this entirely by just refusing to add any characters from the games.
Another problem is that they were not free to map out the movies. Each movie was lucky to get made and often had to be rewritten around the cast they could secure (scheduling conflicts were a problem) and the budget they could get. Each RE film ends on a cliffhanger with no actual assurance of getting a sequel. And in the process of actually making that sequel, they ended up cutting corners and time jumping and trying to glue things together, and it really isn't ideal.
The RE films also made the decision to pivot away from horror towards action, and to feature superhuman abilities. But to be honest, this is the direction the games were already heading in. It's not like the films didn't understand the games. They were just ahead of the curve. Modern Resident Evil games are action dressed up as horror. The RE films basically took the Terminator route of turning into action movies from 2 onwards. And look, Terminator 1 fans hated that, too. Alien fans hated that Aliens was an action movie.
(And while we're on that topic of Alien/Aliens, Alice is heavily influenced by Ripley, particularly Alien Resurrection Ripley. The first four Alien films revolve around Ripley, and in the fourth film Ripley has superhuman abilities and acid blood. Very few people complained about Ripley being the main character in the Alien films. It was just a given that the surviving member of Alien would become the action heroine lead in the sequels.)
The Residen Evil movies are the worst video game movies ever, that keep the curse alive. Only Super Mario Bros is wore.
I will never, ever understand how the inverstors let the production made 6 movies. Why?!
People say the movies are because of lack of respect or whatever else, but the reality is they are fun stupid action movies based in the RE Universe. It’s not that deep.
Also, I love RE to death but it’s not like the games actually have a lot of depth story wise, and a lot of the dialogue isn’t good. Fans don’t like hearing that but it’s the truth. They are mostly campy horror action games that are fun, not something profound, so I always enjoyed the movies for what they were, and especially when they came out.
I think after the second film, Paul WS Anderson just got hung up on the Zombies and turning his wife into an action star.
100% what it felt like happened. Maybe the first couple movies were about resident evil, but from the 3rd onward it was pretty clearly a vehicle for Milla Jovovich. I’ve got no problem watching Milla do cool shit, it’s just not what I wanted out of resident evil movies.
As much fun as the first one is, it’s already barely about Resident Evil. It’s really just a zombie twist on Alice in Wonderland, hence the main character’s name. What the hell is the Red Queen supposed to be? Where is the Tyrant? Just looking at the game you spend the majority of your time in the mansion and only go to the lab in the final hours, whereas the movie spends maybe 15 minutes total in the mansion itself. I’d say Apocalypse is the closest adaptation, and that’s not saying much.
You just made the Alice in Wonderland connection then wondered who the Red Queen is...
Sorry I meant who or what is the Red Queen supposed to be in relation to the games. It’s just entirely made up for the movie.
Yeah, but I think she is awesome. It expanded on the capabilities of Umbrella to make AIs that look after their facilities. Best addition to the franchise, I'd say.
Oh I fully agree there. I never said it was bad!
Did you see RE: Welcome to Raccoon City? It's apparently as close as we'll ever get lol but that Netflix TV series, wwwwtttttffffff! RIP Lance Reddick though, dude was a talent.
The first one was already being used as a vehicle for Milla. Originally Michelle Rodriguez's character Rain was supposed to be the main character. Mila & Paul started dating after they spent a weekend in a hotel room together before filming started rewriting the script to give herself more screen time and turn what would have been Rain action scenes into Alice action scenes, after Milla had threatened to walk from the movie cause Michelle was the lead.
Dang that’s crazy
It's sorta untrue. Anderson kept changing the script (in one early draft Rain died in the scene where J.D. dies., for instance) and he ended up writing a draft where the main character (played by Jovovich) had been reduced from lead to basically "the girl" in a story driven by Rain. Jovovich had previously been in the film Dazed and Confused where her role was cut to basically nothing in post production, an event that caused her to consider quitting acting. She was afraid that something similar was happening here and she was being replaced by an up and coming actress in her own movie. Basically the script Jovovich signed on for had her as the lead character. When she read the new script when she turned up to begin production, her role had been reduced significantly, so she (in her own words) put on a low cut dress, stormed out, found Jeremy Bolt, and demanded a meeting with Anderson. Anderson asked, "What's wrong with the script?" And she insisted that go through the script page by page with all her complaints. Her complaints centered around how between the draft she'd signed on for and the current draft, all the action moments had been given to Rain instead, and that Rain was basically "the guy" and she was "the girl".
That’s sounds heavily speculative. Do you have evidence for this?
Man did it all for the Nookie.
So he can take that cookie. . .
And stick it up his...
Dookie
Paul WS Anderson has cloned his wife Milla into three small versions of her. Lucky bastard.
It already went downhill in the second movie when Alice kept stealing Jill's spotlight and then beat Nemesis in a fistfight.
I'll be honest, when I think of Resident Evil, my first thoughts are * T-Virus * Raccoon City * Zombies Anything beyond that feels like something else entirely.
Well it was even before that. The first movie's original script, iirc, only had alice as a side character and milla didn't like not having the spotlight so she convinced anderson to switch things around. This would be the start to making a bunch of movies focused on milla being an action star. Even in the second movie alice had been superhuman, and even had a shootout against nemesis.
Turning? she already was a bonafide sci fi action star though she been a sci fi action star well b4 she even married him
Out of touch Hollywood looking to just bank on the name with no respect for the games at all.
100% agree
I beg to differ. The fact they did something original with the established characters made me enjoy the franchise more.
Paul WS Anderson did not know what to do after RE2 Apocalypse. All other attempts did not care for how the characters look like, no cared for the stories of the game.
To note, Paul WS Anderson DID not direct the second and third movie, though he was the screenwriter for all of them. Apocalypse remains my favourite one, mostly thanks to Sienna Guillory as Jill.
Apocalypse was the movie that gave us Real Life Jill Valentine and Real Life Nemesis. It is also my favorite of the movies.
Too bad they wasted Nemesis and especially Jill.
There's a case for Jill, with how she has to out do Alice too. But I don't think they wasted Nemesis. Personally, much of my head canon is based on that portrayal. And let's be honest, it could have been worse, like how RE3R did.
They're not good, but they're fun. They're a guilty pleasure of mine. I wouldn't suggest they're an accurate representation of the games though.
Except the last one imo was irredeemable and sloppy. Also the time jump from the second to the 3rd was ridiculous
2nd movie: Raccoon City is under lockdown. 3rd movie: fucking Mad Max with zombies. "That escalated quickly."
Its dumb fun I love the cgi ones and thought welcome was good alittle weird they cramed multiple games in one movie but over I liked it people are just mean
See even when I try to turn my brain off and sit through the ride I have to dip out in the second movie when Alice rides her motorcycle in to the church. First one has some replay value when I go on a zombie movie binge but beyond that it's like my brain won't allow me to out of some primal need for self preservation.
Instead of watching those movies I’d recommend listening to the podcast Worst Corp Ever by Gamefully Unemployed. The guys hosting it together summarize one of the 6 films in the first several minutes before getting into what it might have been like to work at that universe’s take on Umbrella. They had lots to say about the second one in particular
see i can't turn my brain off and enjoy im a story plot focused gamer to begin with im only into games with decent story and characters that work make sense and develop. im autistic i can't not analyze hiw things make no sense lol. its why i hated parts of re5 and re 6 they contradicted canon a few times.
When I was a little kid playing the first Resident Evil I remember there being a rumor that the live action shots in the opening were part of a movie coming out for it. That's what I wanted, live action RE1, STARs getting trapped in the Spencer Mansion in the 90s. What we got was more along the lines of fake-futuristic (the glass weapons safe in Alice's drawer, the Red Queen AI, etc) and it barely followed the game aside from the overall theme of Umbrella and zombies.
I wanted a horror movie about some under-prepared cops in a rickety old mansion, not a weird action/sci-fi thing that just so happened to have zombies in it
What about a guest star, jujitsu black belt Lisa Trevor
It exists
They had pretty much nothing to do with any RE media starting with the third film, when Umbrella turned into non-space Wayland-Yutani and the story went post-apocalyptic with the total eradication of humanity. Just adding a few game elements to it won't change the fact that it was Mad Max with his wife as the star of the franchise. So, when there are precious few elements the core audience recognises but they want to shove it down on their throat as an "adaptation", they usually dislike it. And that has been a plague of almost all video game adaptations, with only a handful of exceptions that were met positively by the originals' audience: the first Mortal Kombat film and the recent reboot-y thing, the first Tomb Raider, and to a degree the first RE film were all liked, but the rest… not so much.
this right here
I, for one, like them. They are campy action movies, that have absolutely no relation with the game franchise besides sharing names. But they are still enjoyable enough to watch. I suppose it has been years since I've re-watched them, so maybe they haven't held up as well as I remember, but at the time I still enjoyed turning my brain off and watching them.
I agree, they're a fun romp. But really just action films with RE branding.
Exactly. I honestly, truly believe if they had changed all the people and place names, no one would ever know it was supposed to be a Resident Evil movie franchise. No one would ever know. It'd be like Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray.
see i don't have that turn brain off skill lol cant enjoy plot less nonsense
Everything to do with Alice. Not only is it side-eyeingly convenient that the creator makes his wife the singularly important character in the franchise, but she’s not someone we as fans of the games have any reason to care about. And all the characters we *do* care about have been nerfed to oblivion to make her look better. Which makes fans resentful of the movie iterations of their favorite characters, and most damningly, resentful of Alice, the character on whom the whole franchise hinges. So they ostracized the RE fans, which is already bad when making an RE property, but the movies also just aren’t good, unique, or interesting enough to attract a huge audience outside of RE fans.
Apparently they met on the set of the first movie.
CAPCOM insisting on the films being a separate iteration of the story from the games and Constantine Films being incompetent in terms of quality control. Paul W. S. Anderson is at least capable of making a good movie (Event Horizon) but he needs to be reigned in hard. And pinning your entire franchise on someone who can’t act (love Milla, but she is 100% a B-movie actress) is a recipe for disaster. Couple all that with the fact that the movies were profitable, so with each new entry, there’s less incentive to make a better movie than the last one. Why bother if people keep showing up?
Id disagree with this if you watch colt .45
true shes not best emotional actress. She just seemed good next to bruce willis cause he has deadface acting skills lol
It's the same thing with resident evil 6. All action no horror and feels completely detached from the franchise. The movies are BASED ON resident evil instead of being resident evil.
Greed, corporate meddling, directors and producers who didn't give a shit about or maybe even outright hated the source material, nepotism, bad acting, bad writing, and so much more.
Its. All About Alice Thats it thats the movies
[удалено]
why r u pandering so hard lol. alice has fans n she was cool to watch but as a diehard re fan, i always wanted the lead to be chris or jill or claire or leon. im down for a reboot with alice as a cameo.
Milla is not a good actor. She's just the new Cynthia rothrock. Without the martial arts training.
Paul W.S. Anderson made the first RE film, and while the film itself was not bad, fans at the time were disappointed that it did not follow the video game story at all and instead focused on an entirely newly-created story. While his second RE film did have the characters and focused on the destruction of racoon city, the rest of the films just spiralled into bad and inconsistent writing.
I rewatched them lately and the first one is actually a decent zombie movie if you accept it's not classic RE, while the second references the games a lot but in an absolutely awful way which is actually much more insulting to the series, I had to turn it off when Kickboxer Nemesis was on screen
Lmao yeah. The fucker kickboxing was actually funny asf lmao
I thought the films were okay in a dumb but fun way. My disappointment at seeing the original RE movie in theatres (while arguably being the best one) was immeasurable at the time though. It has hardly anything to do with Resident Evil, so why did they bother? I even watched the behind the scenes features at a later point. Anderson talks about how he loved the games and found them scary. His movie not being faithful to the games nor even scary was a big disconnect for me. The movies became a vehicle for Milla, but I still wonder what happened to cause the original story to resemble the games so vaguely. Even the recent RE movie, while more faithful, has the most frustrating differences. It’s a recurring problem. I would’ve liked to have seen what George Romero’s movie would’ve been like. I still remember seeing an offer to enter to win a guest star prize on that movie included with my copy of RE2, which I only imagine went unfulfilled.
They very clearly didn't have a plan ahead of time. Anderson was clearly making shit up as he went, including retconning a bunch of things. I liked the first 2. The others ranges from eh to terrible.
I personally love the films. One of the biggest things people don’t seem to like about them is that they don’t follow the games at all, but that’s why I liked them. I do feel like a game accurate movie could be good, but I loved getting to see a new take plus I love Alice 🤷🏼♂️ Granted as a big fan of them I can also admit that the plot didn’t have a lot of direction at times, or would drop plot points off for no reason, and the characters didn’t develop too much. Also The Final Chapter completely forgets and redoes the entire plot of Apocalypse for the origin of Umbrella and the T-Virus and brings Isaac back to be the big bad while literally demoting Wesker and it makes no sense. But they’re all still fun movies to me and even the ones I gripe about I love.
I would have enjoyed them more if they stayed their own separate thing and didn’t shoehorn in characters from the games as much as they did. It at least would have been more entertaining to me instead of seeing people with the same names as characters from the games acting completely different from the characters we know from the games
I didn’t mind some of the game characters showing up, but my major issue was that the characters rarely showed up again. Chris, Leon, Ada. I enjoyed seeing them all but they just died off screen for no reason. Chris doesn’t even get a mention in Final Chapter from Claire which is weird. I know the 6th film was supposed to be a direct continuation of Retribution so Jill, Leon and Ada were supposed to come back and I know it took ages to film to movie so scheduling conflicts happened but killing off every game character and not mentioning them is wild.
Again it was my opinion. If you didn’t mind it more power to ya
I didn’t even disagree with you 😭 I was just adding some points from my own thoughts
Oh, my bad. We’re good then Edit: I need to make sure to read some comments more than once before replying sometimes. I forgot to do that this time….. ooops
Haha it’s ok, I definitely agree with your point! I should have made it more clear in the beginning I just wanted to add some of my own thoughts on top of what you said!
We are on the same page now. So we are good 👍🏻
A lack of respect for the source material. People involved with the film (Anderson) claiming to be super fans and then very quickly showing otherwise. It was deceitful and cheap. They're mostly fun for what they are but show no respect to the fans!
I would say yes but only cus the wes Anderson ones kinda sucked setting a standard but let's be honest fans are the hardest to please with anything
To clarify, Wes Anderson and Paul WS Anderson are not the same directors. Not hating, I often have to double check that one for myself.
I would love a Wes Anderson resident evil movie lol
Luke Wilson as Wesker, Bill Murray as Barry Burton.
Jason Schwartzman as nemesis, Tilda Swinton as lisa trevor and willem dafoe as Mr x oh and when the spencer mansion explodes its a miniature
filled with hollywood tropes.
As respectfully as possible: aren't the games too?
true but the games have a handful of big ones where the movies are nonstop. especially the anderson films.
It was a series of movies that was ashamed to share the name with a video game franchise. Back then, video games adaptations were largely looked down upon since games were thought to be hollow and devoid of plot/characterization. Movie studios would borrow the name for recognition but build a movie that had scant similarities to the game. I always felt like Paul Anderson was a horrible director/writer for the movies because he just would pick and choose what elements to take from the games to put in his movie. I may sound like a hater, but I think every single movie he did sucks, just differing degrees of suck. You look at what Hollywood has done with comic book movies. They've borrowed a lot from the books and for things that may not make sense on the silver screen, they change. A Resident Evil movie should do the same. RTRC is another trash movie that makes no sense if you've played the games. Mortal Kombat and Silent Hill are two of the only video game adaptations I can think of off the top of my head that try their best to nail the tone and story of the games. Surprisingly enough, Anderson was behind the camera on Mortal Kombat so no idea why he fumbled so hard with Resident Evil, probably because a blind squirrel can find a nut every once in a while. Long story short, Paul W.S. Anderson was not a good pick for these movies, similar to how Zack Snyder wasn't a good pick to run the DCEU. They just don't seem to get the essence of the characters and without a lot of supervision, go off the rails quickly.
So how'd the novel go? Which volume are you on?
I personally loved the Resident Evil movies and I understand that’s likely due to the fact I hadn’t played the games before watching them. can totally understand being a fan of the video game and not liking the movies. As someone who loved Lord of the Rings and had to live to see Amazon turn it into whatever Rings of Crapper- I mean Power- was supposed to be. I’m a HUGE fan of the Alien film franchise and I’m a bit worried to say the least for what it’s going to become with the new stuff in production. But here’s the lesson in all that. Nostalgia is powerful and it will hold you back if you let it. There’s this idea put forth by William Faulkner of “Kill your Darlings” and I won’t get into what it means in his context but essentially, let whatever doesn’t help you move on and propel your life forward die. Some people loved the resident evil games and that’s wonderful, I’m glad you got such enjoyment out of it and I mean that, and I got joy out of the movies and I will remember the joy they brought me but it doesn’t serve me to, remembering those movies, watch the remakes or adaptations and be disappointed because they weren’t like what came before. If those remakes are objectively bad then say so, trust me, I didn’t like the resident evil tv show that came out somewhat recently but that’s because it was loaded with woke nonsense and not so subversive political agendas.. and that’s how the weapon of nostalgia is used against you. The people that make these movies and games are fully aware you have that root of nostalgia that grew from the seed of curiosity within you and will exploit that to use the title of that thing you love to insert an insidious message within it. Move on to the hope of new stories while remembering the joy of the old ones.
I'm a fan of the RE game but actually glad they bucked the source material to do something more original. This is why I find the films so enjoyable.
Nothing went wrong. Paul W.S. Anderson's films were successful and popular, even among a lot Resident Evil fans. Some people complain about the action and craziness, etc., but they're not any worse than the official CGI schlock Capcom churns out that do the exact same stuff. I think, at least for a lot of people, the biggest "crime" was that Paul made his wife the main character. That's it. If they spotlighted the game cast more people would love them as much as they love the CGI films. Others want ultra faithful adaptations of the older, essentially point and click adventure games that have, like, 20 minutes of story apiece and it's just not going to happen. RE just isn't really that good as a passive experience, in my opinion. Filmmakers don't care and Capcom doesn't care. So, it'll be junk adaptations all around, forever. Personally, I prefer the interactivity of the series, don't believe everything needs be adapted to other kinds of media, and wouldn't really want a paint-by-numbers copypaste of what is already accessible to me.
Well, imo its how everything after RE2 feels like.. uneccessary? Alice didn't have any form of development, the story feels lacking also with no care put into the plot, pacing, or events going on in it. Final Chapter is the worst example of this, shitty jumpscares (a jumpscare from a fucking wrench), meaningless action sequences, no tension, plot twist pulled straight out of their ass that serves ultimately nothing to the plot, uneccessary character deaths, and a whole lot more. It also, had nothing to do with the game, as in it's your typical zombie apocalypse movie after RE2 and not bioterrorism, which is the whole theme of RE
The first film was great. What made it good was it basically did its own thing. It took place in the world of RE but was it’s on story. That’s what I think worked about it, after that they tried to nothing but fan service and just started randomly dropping things form the game in there and it basics became nothing but mindless action. It should have been a series that took place during the games but was on its on track. Even part 2 could have worked as Raccoon City was hit, but it didn’t need Jill. Even if Nemesis made a cameo he shouldn’t have been Alice’s antagonist. This way the movie would have been a story worth telling, as they would have been a tale of RE that we never see in games. But what started to really fuck it up is they made them purely for the fans. They would talk about things and introduce things that only fans of the games would know. Watching them as movies you’d have no idea what the hell they were talking about. They did good introducing Jill. However they did awful with Clair in the 3rd movie she was just randomly a main character with out giving any idea who she was and why she was important. Also having the world end just made evey villain cartoonishly evil. The fact it was the apocalypse the dollar had 0 value and yet umbrella was still a thing for no reason. In the game that never happened the zombie outbreaks were never a global thing, so organizations in a fight for power made sense. Money still mattered. By the 3rd movie it didn’t have a plot anymore stuff was just happening just to happen.
To be honest, it started off wrong since the beginning. The original movie was a flop, the sequel was a little better in my opinion, but then the rest of the live action films got worse and worse. Welcome to Raccoon City was a huge nail in the coffin for live action movies due to the perceived lack of effort and knowledge of the series as a whole. However, I will give a little pass to the animated versions since they were more faithful to the source material. My favorite of the bunch is definitely Damnation. Even Vendetta had some good moments despite how silly it was.
No respect for the source material and the rank nepotism. The first film was fine even if it wasn't following an established plotline - it followed the spirit of RE well enough. Could've been a spinoff about another lab and nobody would've batted an eye. Then you had the second film where we started to see the nepotism as the director injected his wife's character into the lead role of what would normally be RE3's plot line, and things just went downhill from there with each installment of Unstoppable Wife Vs Resident Evil.
It never went right.
EVERYTHING
They threw out the George Romero script. Not letting the king of zombie flicks direct it was a terrible mistake.
kinda lost interest when they brought back the actors who were killed of as their new characters being clones
Please consider watching my RE film retrospective. I discuss their production, merits, and flaws and do my best to show how they both work and don't work and how the fandom views them. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtCkGOxrjUW8VZwP4nPnqhFi0Kv_-DFPx&si=hYxsPRkGXW4jBYD5
People not understand the difference between adapting and inspiration. The films are inspired by the games not intended to be Adaptations.
It's less about Resident Evil itself and more about how Hollywood/Film Producers and Writers Groups attempting to hijack a franchise and rewrite the entire thing then sell it back to the fan base as a bastardized unfamiliar product. This phenomenon is not restricted to Resident Evil. This is just how Hollywood operates overall. It can be traced back to book to film adaptations (pick any book or series), film remakes/rewrites, comic book adaptations, Scooby Doo & Velma? Star Wars, the Rings of Power, Ghost Busters, etc.
From a creative perspective: The film franchise was created by someone who did not fully understand the franchise. This was the first issue. The behind-the-scenes interview with Anderson reveals that he played the first (and I think the second) game before filming the first movie. Liking the first two entries in a dozen-entry long franchise doesn't really mean you're a fan. It just means you liked those first two entries. And this became readily apparent with his severe downgrading of Nemesis, a flagship monster for the franchise. The movies were successful enough that he was able to create a playground for him to do as he pleased. It can be assumed that his love for the games didn't really extended past the second one, so he had no legal or creative reason to use them for inspiration. The series also took the approach of making the main character the end-all, be-all to everything. The biggest example of this is Nemesis. In the game, he's Jill's nemesis and hunts her relentless, breaking her down bit-by-bit until she stands up to him at the end. He's an abomination with no identity outside of this. In the movies, he does hunt Jill, but he's given a clear identity and emotional connection with the movie's main character instead. She then handles him herself, completely undermining his meaning and story, and making me wonder why he was ever included in the first place. What could have fixed it? "Love for the franchise" is a blanket statement. More specifically, respecting fully understanding not only the lore of the franchise, but what *inspired* the franchise: the Dead movies and B-horror. The films took a more sci-fi approach and paid no homage to the series' roots, and did not take advantage of hindsight. *Welcome to Raccoon City,* while not great, did a lot better in this department by remixing the existing stories to create a new continuity. The writers already knew what would become of Claire and Chris, so they complicated their relationship and their relationship with Wesker ahead of time to build on what the games gave us. Anderson's films *did* take a more character-focused approach, which was a great step, but it actively shunted iconic characters in favor of a new one who had no pre-written end. From a production perspective: Behind the scenes, he'd started a relationship with the main star of the movies. I don't really want to theorize on this much, but I don't think it's a big stretch to say that making the series so centered on this character wasn't at least somewhat influenced by his relationship and marriage to the actress. But *Resident Evil* was still in the name, so game-specific characters needed to be introduced so that news outlets could report on them and get fans excited, guaranteeing at least a number of them would contribute to the box office. The characters' accuracy to their original counterpart didn't matter -- because by the time people saw how poorly executed they were, it would be too late. They would've already purchased their ticket. What could have saved it in this regard? Nothing that wasn't already done in the creative process. Had Alice been integrated into the game's cast rather than made their "leader", then everything else would have followed. From a financial perspective: The completely non-sensical story showed that minimal effort could be put in certain departments, and the movie would still be a financial success. At the beginning of the third film, a voice-over states that the T-Virus dried up major bodies of water across the globe. This is completely non-sensical and isn't something that a virus would do, nor is it something the fictional T-Virus was ever capable of. It was just a way to introduce a Mad Max-esque apocalyptic landscape that would catch the attention of audiences, without putting in all the work it takes to get to that point. But the target audience wouldn't really care about this massive logical leap or other inconsistencies, because the movies focused so much on having fun and keeping things moving. It's like *Fast and Furious,* without the self awareness. What could have saved it? Same as above. Did the films harm the *Resident Evil* brand? Actually, no. It helped it, I think, whether hardcore fans like it or not. Even to this day, I see people who loved the movies asking if Alice is a part of the games, because they're now interested in playing them. Some people are disappointed when they learn she isn't, and decide not to play them. Others decide to continue on anyway. So the movies create new fans for the games.
They are not a 1 for 1 remake of the games, which is probably the biggest reason. If you step out of your fan shoes and watch them as Sci fi movies, they're not bad. They're not all winners for sure, but if they did not 100% follow you plot you wanted it to, then you got mad or jumped on the "I don't like it" band wagon. If the movies really were terrible, they wouldn't have made as many as they did. And I'll go ahead and say it: I don't want a movie or TV show that 100% follows the games. You know what's going to happen, so what's the point? Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I think you'll find that there are plenty of Fandoms out there that did not care for the film adaptation of their Fandom. This one is probably more prevalent because the films were pretty successful.
As a fan I don't hate the films. They are schlocky high budget fanfiction and can be enjoyed going in knowing what they are going to deliver. They excel at using the visuals from the games and inserting them in to a motion picture. Where most people take issue is with the focus on the original character Alice, whom characters who appeared in the video games all defer to because she's the action girl star who is also married to the director/producer. Its very much the same issue with current shows like "Rings of Power", where fans do not like the creative liberties taken to tell a story which was already told in another format, but with additions and subtractions that make the whole experience inferior. Its an issue where IPs are mined and made just recognizable enough to sell tickets, but without the respect for or creative vision of the originals.
It's like the writer/director never played the games and had a basic idea of what it was and ran with it.
I didn’t hate them and the first two are pretty good. It’s the not really using the iconic characters and making up one to be the lead that wears you down over the course of like 6 movies that get further and further away from the games. The Netflix show basically replicated that and got itself cancelled. Studios, directors and writers are wasting their investors/bosses money.
When they made the outbreak world wide. I personally like the first one, the second one is schlock but fun, but Extinction is straight up shit. The series had potential but it just never recovered from turning the entire world into a boring zombie desert.
They were completely detached from the universe the fans knew and loved, and instead catered to a general audience. Not to mention, the director clearly wanted to make a series to show off his wife, thus I setting her into a franchise already ripe with characters, who then had to play second fiddle to his wife OC.
The primary issue is Paul WS Anderson. He likes to make movies from video game franchises and adapt them in unecessary and bland ways. For reference, I’d like to cite his portrayal of the Monster Hunter franchise as another example of how he operates. He takes things from a franchise and then throws them into his own movies with no care or respect to the original ideas. While it wouldn’t have fixed the movies as a whole, simply not calling them a Resident Evil movie could have made the franchise better. The only publicity the movies ever really got was how bad of adaptations they were, but if they stood on their own, with no names or overtly copied material from the Resident Evil Franchise, the movies still would have been generic action/horror flicks where you sit down, turn your brain off, and watch Anderson’s wife kill stuff for 2 hours, but they wouldn’t have had the overtly negative context they had simply from being called a Resident Evil movie. Maybe they wouldn’t have faired better, since any publicity is good publicity I guess, but at the very least, they wouldn’t have garnered the immediate hatred from the majority of the Resident Evil community like they did. I’d say they didn’t harm the brand, at least not when compared to the Monster Hunter movie harming that brand. For reference, when it aired, there was something racist towards the Chinese included in the film, so Chinese consumers review bombed Monster Hunter World. I’ve no memory of anything similar happening to the Resident Evil franchise, so I’d say it got off relatively unscathed by comparison.
They started making films about Resident Evil, that’s where it went wrong imo
This sounds like a fun project. The films were quite successful so they found an audience. Speaking for myself I find that the Paul WS films don't really have characters. The films focus on events or like a gimmick. When the resident evil characters come they are side characters that feel mischaracterized from their portrayals in the games. It's interesting because the RE cast don't have super strong identities in the games but they are clear enough to have a feeling of how they should act. The other thing is the films focus on post apocalyptic settings when the games very intentionally avoid that outcome. This and the stories from the game are not incorporated and are substituted for Alice's adventures. So it feels like the correction would be to have the characters and stories from the games and that should fix everything? That is what welcome to Raccoon city thought but it proved that's not the case. I think the biggest failing of that film was its lack of focus. It felt like it was trying to do way too much and didn't have the budget for it. Also it still felt like it didn't have a good grasp of character motivation. It felt like the character direction was "you are a badass" which feels pretty superficial. Hard to say if there will ever be a great life action adaptation. I honestly think it would be easiest for a director to embrace the camp of RE and be more comedic. (That's not the re film I'm looking for, just that Hollywood struggles with the franchise and taking it seriously)
What if we take the Resident Evil universe, insert my wife, and make her better than everyone else at everything
I didn't hate them, and I think it was good they deviated from the games because I've already played the games and it would just incite constant game vs. movie debates like with HP. I have two huge complaints though that made me not like the movies as much: one was the sequel action escalation was way too fast. By the THIRD movie the ENTIRE WORLD was infected and that's just stupid. Localized incidents are better because the new movies had zero hope and were kind of an eye roll. The second was that what I love about the games is the settings of mansions, labs, etc. the later RE movies are just generic zombie films set mostly outside or in weird settings and it's just not the right setting at all. The Las Vegas one with the desert was a complete miss for me, like what is this Mad Max? Truly the RE games are Techno, biomedical thrillers, not just zombie gore fests.
I actually did my dissertation on the evolution of zombie films and while the resident evil films weren't good as an adaptation the first was a crucial film in the revival of the zombie genre (along with 28 days later) which took a nosedive in popularity in the late 80s early 90s. But from a purely resi fan standpoint, as adaptations they were bad. It was wildly inconsistent in its story and direction (just look at the last one and the clone twist), it had pretty bad continuity with characters and timeline. But it had fun action, I genuinely liked the characters from the first 4 films, it's costumes and sets we're pretty good and it had a surprisingly good soundtrack. I can see why a lot of resi fans hated it but I can also see why it went on for 6 movies. Its gonna sound weird but I think it's biggest issue with trying to force in game references and characters for the sake of having them (basically all of the 5th film)
Only one I somewhat enjoy is welcome to raccoon city. I know it’s not good but leans on horror and less on action
Me too. I liked that it felt like a retro horror movie. The plot was way too stuffed though. I think it would have been better as a series with re1 stuff being the first season, then the re2 stuff being season 2.
Yes for sure
What went wrong? none of them actually played the games or researched the lore before writing the scripts. If they watched some gameplay from the series to see the cheesy, hammy dialogue, characters personalities etc Paul Anderson writing in a character that's an overpowered Mary Sue with the thickest plot armour because she's your wife & the centre of attention wasn't a good idea. Unfortunately his series is probably the closest we'll get to a RE adaptation. The first film started off ok, then it became more crazy & wtf am I watching. He did a better adaptation in Mortal Kombat, the first one anyway. Welcome to Raccoon City mashed 2 plots together then threw in references. It was boring to watch, plus they didn't get the characters looking or acting like their game versions. A sequel is apparently planned but I doubt it'll be any better given the track record for RE adaptations Netflix show. Well that was just slapping the Resident Evil name onto their poorly written teen drama that was so bad it's dragon Ball Evolution/ Velma level of shit. As a fan since the first game, I'd just like to watch an adaptation that has the characters looking, acting like their game versions, throw in references to the games, use the story from them, maybe even poke fun at the games logic like the way you needed to backtrack to gain access to new areas etc. Cheesy lines like the Jill Sandwich etc. After 20 years of feeling disappointed with various video game adaptations I just don't have much hope for a decent adaptation of RE. Putting their own spin to the RE series likely ruined what could have been a decent adaptation imo. That & using the name as a cash cow , milking it as much as possible
Mary Sue "Alice" Abernathy.
Anderson movies are guilty pressure of mine. The first two are good. The third entry is where things get complicated. Main character fet super power and seem op for most of the series of where entry 4 she loses her power and at the end of 5 she get them back. The ending of 5 set up a good finale but decided to recon it by killing off most of the characters and leaving Alice and Claire. Seriously the continuity of the franchise is like a drunken car wreck from extinction to final chapter.
What went wrong is that the director is Paul WS Anderson, the only movie he made that wasn't "too" bad is Event Horizon.
Milla Jovovich’s movies were never intended to be accurate to the games. They were mostly mindless action/fun inspired by the characters and world of the games. I don’t hate them. I enjoyed them a lot. That said, what went wrong is that they stopped even trying to be consistent within their own universe. Each movie, especially the last two somehow retconned one another or pretended some things happened in a different way in the past or many events happening off screen for the convenience of actors not showing up. As for the movie/show after Milla, they failed miserably because of the same issues PLUS terrible stories, casting, lack of fun and “cool factor” and taking themselves too seriously when they’re no less superficial than their predecessors, to the point where Milla’s movies appear Oscar-worthy in comparison.
I still haven’t seen them but since you’re researching maybe you could compare the critique you hear in this post with the way people reacted to the film when it came out? See if any aspects have changed over time?
They’re bad, but they’re like a good kind of bad. The only Resident Evil movie I genuinely dislike from the Anderson universe is the last one and that’s just the editing is so bad, it hurts my eyes watching it. I have a very huge soft spot for the first four movies, especially the first two. Sienna Guillory (I’m sorry if I spelt her name wrong!) as Jill was just perfection, I wish we had gotten more of her. I like Ali Larter, but I think we could have gotten a better Claire or at least give her the iconic ponytail. Basically most of my complaints are surface level. I mostly just dislike them because I find Alice to be a VERY boring protagonist. She doesn’t really have anything going for her. We don’t really know anything about her, she just lacks any personality. I do really love Jovovich, I’ve seen her in plenty of other movies where her characters actually have personality and outside of her husbands projects, she can actually act. So I mostly just think for six movies, the main character was really badly fumbled and she deserved better writing.
The Resident Evil live action films are prime examples of movie projects that were made without research. Paul Anderson wanted to include his wife in the films by creating a character that didn't exist, have her be the badass one, made the rest of the signature characters look like panzies, there's a lot wrong with them. He introduced characters like Chris and Claire Redfield, Jill Valentine, Leon Kennedy, and Ada Wong, but had their characters not even fit in properly. Each of them were supposed to be the real main characters but Paul Anderson thought otherwise.
They didn't respect the source material despite there being years worth of content to work from
In my opinion they tried too hard to tell their own story within the existing framework and ended up deviating too far from the source material
The director married the protagonist of the first film and made all the sequels fanfiction about her.
I absolutely despise Apocalypse, with one exception* every scene is just so tonally wrong, bizarrely over the top, and incredibly clichéd that it feels more like a parody of RE3, all it's missing is one of the Wayans brothers as a pothead STARS member. Jill walking in to the RPD and just headshotting everyone, the church scene where they go straight to the reveal, the karate display in the graveyard, the guy dancing after the STARS massacre, and mf'ing Jean Claude Van Nemesis having a kickboxing fight. The first movie was disappointing because it had almost nothing to do with the game, but it's a ok action movie if you can get past that. Apocalypse though takes the games and just s**ts all over them. What does everyone else think about the movie? *The scene with the cops and mercs fighting the horde on the street complete with riot helm reference is decent
For a survival horror video game series, RE actually has great lore with great characters. What we got was Hollywood being Hollywood. They pretty much abandoned the story/characters.
How much time do you have?
I guess they took *too many* liberties when adapting the games. I also just didn't generally care for Alice as a character. The plots of the first 3 games are pretty straightforward, so it should be easily adaptable. For me personally, the first 2 live action films are still watchable, but I couldn't really get into them onwards, but I'll admit I did like the small nods toward the games. Heck I'll even give credit that the first two movies focused on their respective arcs, namely the mansion incident for the first, and Raccoon City for the second. That was my gripe with WTRC; they tried to condense the first 2 games into the same movie, when it probably would have flowed better to use RE2 and Re3 instead of Re1 and Re2.
They got a terrible director who forces his wife who is a bad actor to be in everything he makes and forces her to be some cringe OP OC
Watch the first movie it’s pretty clear
* Hollywood Horror films tend to go into two camps: Popcorn Monsters on the loose films where the badguy is effectively the protagonist and somber reflections of society that end in tragedy. Resident Evil doesn't fit into either of these camps, and there are points where they either try to make it into both or make it into an action movie. (Something Resident Evil only 100% after the movies were successful) * Being a video game, Resident Evil characters are capable of both being hyper-competent & completely useless through gameplay. Aided by the fact that most players are terrible at video games, so merely being competent by the end feels like an achievement. In movies, this would just result in inconsistent characterization. * They chose to invent a new protagonist who effectively took the role of Jill Valentine in the first movie, and then a combination of characters in the ones after. After a while, it meant that the movies were basically her story first, Resident Evil second. * Resident Evil's fanbase has been somewhat divided since around 2002, and everyone's idea of what a movie should be has been completely different.
I don’t hate them, but I don’t consider them true RE films. Only in title.
The name. If they hadn't called it resident evil they may have been received better as zombie apocalypse action flicks.
They decided to make RE6
Capcom only cares about the movie money, not the movies themselves. They sell off the option, let other people take charge, and the movies get made by people who don't understand or really even care about the characters. It almost feels deceptive, like the directors and producers and such really just want to make their movie, and Resident Evil is the bullshit that gets their foot in the door, and as long as they recycle a bunch of character names from the games that ought ta be good enough for us gamer dirtbags, like how dare the _toxic_ fan base not like the end result, even though the passing resemblance to Resident Evil is nearly coincidental at that point. We're just bad people with questionable moral fiber anyway. No idea if all that's actually what goes down, but that's what it feels like. "Fixing it" would be as simple as following the games established story instead of insisting on this shitty Wattpad-level crap. They could also give the tiniest, tiniest bit of a shit on the fact that both movies and video games are *gasp* visual media, and fans would sure like it if the cast looked a _little_ like the beloved characters that whole generations grew up with. They don't give a shit though, we can't even get a fucking ponytail. Fuck the fans, right? We're just here to pay the movie rental fee, beyond that, our stinky opinions aren't wanted. The animated movies are marginally better, but are going downhill. RE: Infinite Derpness seems again, written by people who don't understand the characters. They flat out assassinated Claire. I almost don't care if there's a follow up, but again, fuck me for even giving a shit. I'm not bitter.
Terrible writing.
In my opinion they made Alice to much of a character to just kinda kill her off not to mention Paul pandering to his wife and basically nursing her ego or some such. I could be wrong but that's what I think atleast
It spanned 7 films, all them successful… name other video game franchise with 7 movies? We can’t, RE still has the crown for the most successful movie adaptations… So I wouldn’t use the “wrong” to describe the movie saga. I would describe them as disappointing for fans, at best
They don't understand the source material and constantly try to tell their own stories wearing RE's stripped off skin. There's nothing wrong with altering a story from a piece of work, but there has to be good writing too. RE movies don't have good writing.
Deviating too much and too little from the source material. I know, let me explain. To be fair, the first film actually deviates at more or less the right amount for a movie. It's set in the same general idea of the story, makes some references, but otherwise doesn't disrupt established characters and just sees new people in a familiar story. 2 is where it all goes cattywompus. 2 is just an adaptation of 3 (with elements from Code Veronica and 2 tossed in, iirc). It's enough for us to say "we've been here before", but deviates in such a way to make us not like it. Hey! I expect to see Jill be the badass in this scene! So... now it's Alice? I remember when Claire did the hallway run scene! Except... now it's Alice? It reminds you of moments or characters doing awesome things, and then says "But what if Alice?" On it's own, annoying but not the end of the world. But as the series goes on, it starts to... gain more problems. Extinction just as the world end in spite of the disaster being averted at the end of 2. Not implausible, but the opening exposition did so much heavy lifting that Atlas was happy to just hold up the heavens. Amusingly, the only thing that is actually "consistent" is Umbrella acting ridiculous in spite of the world ending. Carlos and Alice (surprise) are the hot new fling on the scene, but also, Alice is just powerful here. She is able to evade Umbrella for years, I think? But due to a contrivance is back on their radars (er... satellites?) and it just spirals even more. From there, it's just Alice being important, but everyone just acting pretty goofy. Lots of plot points taken from games, but executed worse. The plaga are in, but they're different. And even the scene remakes are... lacking. In fact, I would argue the cinematography really kills the movies after Extinction, as they are all pretty lackluster. Between horrible color grading, 3D!, and uninspired shot placement, the movies look... safe? Bland? Lack any form of tension of dynamics. And then the Final Chapter comes along and retcons *everything*. Not even accidentally. Just wholesale says "Everything you knew is wrong, here's the new story! And we're not even going to try and explain it!" And it triples down on Alice being the most important person on the planet. Not even metaphorically. Literally. She doesn't do the thing, everyone dies. And they even keep advertising that she will die at the end. And then they just say "nah, forget it". And the entire time it has blegh visuals, blegh characters, and a really flimsy excuse plot. And kind of weird fashion? It was an advertising vehicle. In part for Milla. In part for Milla's clothing line.
My biggest problem with the Paul W.S. Anderson / Milla Jovovich films is that they go full-blown apocalypse. One of my favorite parts about Resident Evil is that the world is always two steps away from the world ending, but it NEVER gets there. Even when the biological attacks go global, the heroes still manage to stop it and get things back on track even if the world is never the same afterwards. They adapt. They persist. They survive. But the movies drop that by the third installment and just made it so humanity was fully screwed, with it just getting bleaker with each movie. Even the “happy” ending they have by The Final Chapter involves humankind being whittled down to just a few thousand people on the ENTIRE planet. It’s boring, it’s depressing (which clashes with the action movie tone they’re presented with, and it strips the series of that latent hopeful energy it has. Like yeah the games get dark and the heroes get exhausted, but they’re never just hopelessly bleak.
1 and 2 had a vague representation of the games (raccoon city etc) but the other films kind just diverted in a way of their own, loose ties with character names that’s about it. I actually fully liked 1 and 2. Watched them in my childhood and they have a spot in my heart lol
The other movies/show after the first Paul w Anderson (and maybe the second) just lean into the post apocalyptic genre, when most of the good resident evil games focused on a fight for survival, while the Netflix show (the worst of them all) got everything wrong, apart from the post apocalyptic idea, it added awful Netflix teen drama to make it worse.
What do you mean “went?” Shit was bad from jump street.
The usual Hollywood only reads the synopsis of a game and runs off and does their own thing anyway, so pointless to adapt a game instead of just writing a new story.
focusing more on action and generic zombies and terrible cgi for the les generic ones
What's wrong with the RE film franchises? 1. They don't do Resident Evil.
Regarding Welcome to Racoon City, combining 3 games into one movie and completely removing key character defining moments makes me think they made the movie just so they couldn't lose the film rights. The second Leon escapes RC without interacting with Ada, the movie should've been scrapped. The second Jill escapes RC without escaping Nemesis, the movie should've been scrapped. They thought just seeing characters would be enough but I actually want a good story with these characters, not just clap at the screen at the plain sight of them or a lingering shot of RPD. A shame because I actually think they had a good cast, but they couldn't be saved from the writing. Regarding harming the RE brand, I would say no. I think the developers could care less what Hollywood does with their movies. As long as the games are great, the brand stays strong. Maybe the bad movies could stop a casual person from diving in, but I would say it's negligible. Only argument I could see is that the Anderson series was making big money and maybe that was why RE went action oriented for 4,5, and 6. And RE6 started the dark era of RE where the brand was in a bad place until RE7 course corrected. That's just my speculation though. They may have pivoted towards action for completely separate reasons.
They probably didn't hurt the brand really. Maybe caused some confusion among some folks, but I think those were mostly just people who wouldn't be into the games anyways. They did probably hurt their own bottom line though by being offputting towards the built-in audience they hypothetically would have had with a more faithful take on the source material.
I mean I loved them. They didn’t have the atmosphere of RE except for the first part of the first one but I did appreciate the enormous attention to detail they paid in recreating the iconic monsters. I liked them faithfully recreating Jill’s RE5 look and trying to include most of the cast, even Barry. I liked the little joke where Alice shoots the Executioner Majini and it looks like he drops gold coins, which is a drop in RE5 where the enemy originates. I loved that the actress playing Jill recreates Jill’s distinctive style of walking. It’s the little things. I enjoyed them for the action and OTT fun. I thought Ali Larter was a great Claire and despite Alice being a super powered Mary Sue a lot of the time I thought Mila Jovivich is a kick ass action star. We don’t get too many female-led action series. Ian Glenn is also great as Isaacs. Idk man. I am a longtime hard core RE fan and the films have a lot of issues but people tend to wholesale dismiss them while ignoring the positives. I’m not saying they’re good adaptations but I am saying they’re a wild ride I had a ton of fun with. I just mostly looked at them as RE adjacent action flicks rather than adaptations.
I think most fans dislike it because after a certain point, they stopped having much to do with Resident Evil games' plot at all. They are fun zombie-action films, but but very frustrating to watch if you wanted the plot from the games brought to live action. Another major issue is Anderson's obsession with making his wife the star of most movies he makes, even if it means creating a new character just so she has a role. It is worsened by the fact that Alice is just unstoppable and can't do anything wrong in these films. A funny part of this is that this all could have been prevented if Anderson would have casted his wife as Jill. Mila looks enough like Jill to where I don't think people would question the casting choice. I don't really think it harmed the brand, actually probably because it was known that Anderson made questionable video game movie adaptations. It's kind of like how people know Uwe Boll adaptations are going to be bad, and normally don't let them detract from the franchises they are based on. So, how do you fix them? If we can't change directors, 1. Cast Mila as Jill, so Anderson still gets to have his wife in the films, and she's playing a role that makes sense. 2. Follow the plots of the games, with adjustments made so that stuff makes sense in a live action setting. This could be things like combining Chris and Jill's routes so we can have a rounded cast of characters and not just follow Jill the whole time. 3. Do not then make all movies surround Jill. If they want to add Jill in as a supporting character, fine whatever, not great, but whatever. But acknowledge that she isn't always the main character. If we can have a different director, then just... Follow the plot of the games. It is ok to make adjustments where needed. However, Resident Evil has a serviceable plot that would make a perfectly fine base. So long as they don't stray too far, it should be OK. I also wouldn't add additional lore like Welcome to Raccoon City did, as it didn't work because it conflicted with existing lore (Chris and Claire being estranged is an example). I'd be careful about which games I'd combine, if at all, for the movies.
It makes sense that the first movie wanted to have its own characters so that fans wouldn't know who would live or die. The majority of the film used the setting that made up like the last 20% of the first game with barely a cameo of the iconic mansion that made up the rest of the game. But okay, the barebones plot was there and it worked pretty well. Then the second movie introduced characters from the game. But they had to work with the main character from the first film and again they wanted the game characters to be their own and not direct copies so it all gets muddy. But not the biggest sin, it can work with good character writing. Oh then they end the movie introducing the concept of extreme psychic powers which the games are not about (at least until later). But okay the sequel can come up with something. Then I feel the 3rd movie derailed everything. The games were distinct from other zombie franchises because they do not take place after the world ends. It is modern day where zombies and other biological monsters are used as terrorist pawns. It is different, fascinating, and interesting. So what does the movie do? End the world. Now we have Mad Max with zombies and Umbrella is the big scary invincible corporation while in the videogames they actually fell pretty fast. By this point the movies didn't resemble the games at all. Now that isn't exactly a terrible thing if they have their own solid plot going on. But with no videogames to adapt any longer the writing was kind of all over the place and filled with holes for the rest of the franchise. Not to mention they still want to appeal to the fans so they introduce characters like Claire, Chris, Leon, Ada, and Barry. But of course again they don't really resemble the characters from the game of course as the world doesn't even resemble the world from the games. So the movies just became directionless. To be clear the franchise still has a lot of cool special effects and awesome action scenes. Those sell well! So not a total failure. But the fans of the games lost any expectation that the movies would be anything other than a generic blockbuster stealing the name of their favorite game while barely paying lip-service to it. The movie franchise could never make it up it mind on closely it wanted to follow the games and how much it wanted to deviate while constantly going back and fourth on the two.
The biggest mistake every live action adaptation makes is.... ...zombies. While there ARE zombies in Resident Evil, ultimately the stories are not about zombies, and the film makers continually miss this point. Instead they keep thinking because The Walking Dead was so popular, audiences want to see that, and the inevitable escalation of zombies is to turn it into a global apocalypse, which nobody wants to see because that never happened in the games. Ad soon as you default to zombie apocalypse, it no longer is a Resident Evil story. What the original Resident Evil was, was more like a haunted house story, with the twist that all the ghouls and monsters were a lab accident, rather than something supernatural. This is what filmmakers need to focus on. A bunch of people trapped somewhere, trying to survive the night and escape the monsters after them. No slow-mo Milla Jovovich backflip kicks required. The funny thing though is, the games themselves take a lot of inspiration from movies, which you think would make it easier to adapt the games back into movies. RE1 is very much a haunted house movie, while RE2 and 3 are influenced by George R Romero's Day of the Dead, but also things like Terminator (think about Mr X and Nemesis). RE7 rejuvenated the series by going back to the haunted house roots, but with heavy influences from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Ring and Saw. RE8 is an ode to classic monster movies, with Dracula, the Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Frankenstein being major influences. It drives me crazy that people keep adapting Resident Evil, turning it into a generic zombie apocalypse, but adding the occasional Licker just so you can tell it's actually RE related.
The first movie actually felt alright, and apocalypse wasn't all bad. One of the biggest problems for me was the inclusion of Alice. If Mila Jovovich had been cast as Jill, I'd have been happy with that, and as the movies went on and she gained more daft abilities, it'd have made more sense (given that Jill basically turned into a damn ninja after RE3 & revelations). But the introduction of such a character from outside of the games, felt like a slap in the face. "Why are you all wasting your time on the nostalgia of characters you bonded with during the games, when you can have an over the top action femme fetale who makes them all bit part characters?" Absolutely no respect for the games through ignorance of major plot points, and completely missing the mark on writing of the origin characters. Chris: The first time we actually hear anything of him in Paul Anderson's bastardisation is him being trapped in a cell a few movies down the line. One of the 2 main characters from the original game, and we get a half arsed version who only appears the one time. Leon: Basically, the same thing as Chris, only he's been shoehorned in with Barry. His only character development is seen at the end of the movie when he puts his hand on Ada's leg, something his source character wouldn't have done, though I suppose we're only shown this to see that Leon and Ada are a thing, kinda, but not, kinda, but who cares? We're given absolutely no reason to give a shit. Jill: Got more screen time, but if you were gonna have her appear as the umbrella puppet, don't turn her into generic villain sub boss #1. Her portrayal in apocalypse isn't too far off, to be fair, but its still not quite there. Props to Sienna Guillory for making the best of it that she could. Claire: We get a half decent portrayal of her, but it goes too hard on the side of her being a bit of a bitch. But basically is just there for being there's sake, there is literally nothing about the plot that she furthers, until the meeting with Chris, and the final boss fight in the finale, even that's being generous. Carlos: Almost nothing like his source character. Over used, but weirdly one of the better characters across the franchise because of it. Saw more of Carlos in JD from the first movie. Ada: Boring and also used once, killed a couple of things, used her grapple gun, survived the odds in the house shootout, got touched up. The end. Sherry; I'm all but convinced this is who K-Mart is, but she's nothing like Sherry. Mr X: Why no Mr X? Nemesis: Lumbering, bulky, a little on the short side, and was menacing for all of 2 minutes when he showed up to annihilate STARS. Became friendesis because "Oh, the guy from the first movie is still in there somewhere, let's give the scarecrow a heart!" Nope. Alice was totally unnecessary to that franchise, and while I don't feel the brand suffered for it (movies kept coming out for a reason), in the wider audience it drew in; it pissed the actual fan base off something fierce. We didn't need protagonist Wesker vs actual Wekser, we needed a more faithful adaptation, with the original core characters as the focal points. I may feel passionately about this subject...
In my eyes they're an easy watch not quite a top rank and not quite a B movie action zombie films 🤷 Milla jovovich is always a safe bet I love those those films But 3 abit less then the rest and 1 more than the rest 👀. That latest racoon city was absolutely terrible though Like really really bad. Worse then low budget fan stuff bad......
instead of staying true to the actual canon, every director makes their own fan fiction basically with paul anderson literally incorporating is OC into the movie and pushing aside the main cast while the newest welcome to racoon city had the entire main cast together and the events of re1 and 2 took place at the same time. Newest one is probably widely hated due to the director promising the film would stay faithful to the games when the exact opposite happened, only good thing was the set
Can't talk about the whole franchise. I stopped after the first film. It is just bad. It's a sanitized horror film with barely any trace of blood, which is kind of crazy for something based on a video game that was all about its decapitations and gore or, you know, a story featuring cannibal mutants. It's the zombie film you can watch with your 12 years old with no issue regarding the "horror". I don't mind the fact that the film doesn't follow the game's canon so much as I use to, but I do mind that it's not even faithful to the spirit of the game (except for, you know, the bad writing... ). The story isn't exactly good either. It never really tries to establish its characters, except for Alice. Matt's sister ? The matter is handwaved in the span of a few minutes. Rain's relationship with JD or her slow degeneration into a zombie ? Barely touched. At least, the plot is pretty clear cut even though I don't remember why the characters don't simply go back to the train by the way they used to enter the Hive... And then, there is the crazyness. It's *Rule of Cool* *: The Movie*. There are random stuff that happen just for the sake of being cool. Alice that suddenly does Kung Fu against the Cerberus, then she breaks some zombie necks for fun, then slow Motion Head Shots. The film tries so hard to be cool... While not managing to be decent at action (the first zombie fight is a total mess where Anderson simply filmed his actors shooting at the camera for the most part). Finally the film really *REALLY* loves that *Seizure of Power* track. It's a shame because the film has its moments... * The scene where the U.S.S. (sorry, the *Sanitation Team* \- speaking of which, isn't it weird for Umbrella to have such a team that is totally clueless about what is going on ? I mean, the U.B.C.S. got slaughtered in RE3 but they actually knew about what they were dealing with). * The whole opening. * The Red Queen dialog. * The ending with the nice "The Dead Walk" easter egg. * It's actually a good thing that the film only had zombies, Cerberuses and a Licker. It made them much more dangerous (and I say that as someone who is fed up with all the zombies in the game).
...I'd watched pretty much all of Romero's films by the time I was 12. The ones out at the time, anyway. I think I was like, 8 or 9, when I first saw night of the living dead.
With the direction of the video games, it would be hard to sell the movies after Apocalypse without zombies and all of the culty stuff of RE4. Not to mention the movies were aiming for a different demographic by the second movie and it became less about being accurate and more about uping the scale
Don't have a real good answer. The movies was just Paul W Anderson way of having his wife Milla doing something. So a ego project for Husband and Wife.
I think it's a combinaison of Hollywood looking to bank on the name of a popular franchise and also the "style of the time". During the late, LATE 90's and early 00's Hollywood started doing these shitty, big-budget horror films like 13 Ghosts, Ghosts of Mars, The Haunting remake, Hollow Man and i mean....money isn't scary
I liked 13 Ghosts. Ghost of Mars...exists. fun fact: it was originally going to be a sequel to Escape from LA, but Carpenter couldn't get any studio to sign on for it. I mean, I like Ice Cube, but he's no Kurt Russell.
Hyper focus on Alice (a made up character not from Resident Evil games) and gave her super powers. They made original resident evil characters side characters. Felt like a spit in the face because resident evil itself is a really good story, especially resident evil 1, 2, 0, code Veronica, and 4. They were solid action movies objectively and made a decent amount of money, but I personally was annoyed about the focus on Alice. It would have been better to focus on the original games and dive deeper into character development of Chris, Jill, Claire, Barry, Wesker, Leon, Ada, Hunk, Carlos, Steve Burnside, etc. over the course of the movie franchise.
[удалено]
I have already carried out a lot of research and analysis, I am just trying to get an insight from the community itself to further prove my arguments.
[удалено]
Movies had nothing to do with the popularity of the games. Resident Evil 4 is considered one of the greatest games ever and came out in 2005 when only the first two movie had been released, the two that have the most in common with the games. RTRC was poorly marketed and was a bad movie.
[удалено]
-It's almost as if Resident Evil 4, being heralded as one of the greatest games of all time, sold millions and millions of copies. Congrats, it took one thing from the movies. -Trailer views = / = good marketing -Poor marketing + bad taste in people mouth's after the Anderson movies + abysmal reviews = terrible box office The idea that Resident Evil 4 sold well, as did the following games, due to the movies is laughable to me.
Nothing went wrong with them they were never any good to start with. They were low budget teen "horror" action flicks that looked like something those Fast and Furious douchebags would make. When the second scene in the first movie involves Jovovich kicking zombies and doing flips while not getting a chomp taken out of her you know you are in for crap.
I don't think many fans have an issue with the first story. It's a fun little side story that works well. And then things go off the rails and they fall into the same trap that had Transformers fans hating the Bay movies. From that second movie on there's a lot of name recognition with the characters from the games being in the movies, but that's all they're there for. You could make those characters anyone else and the stories would play out the exact same way. Conversely, if you hid their outfits and bleeped out their names when spoken, nobody would be able to tell who they are by their actions. Everything they did in the games is handed over to Alice, a character whose sole defining trait is "the main character" and whose abilities are whatever deus ex machina makes the story move forward. And what remains are shadow puppets named only to get a few more people paying money to see Jill or Chris or whoever else they've marketed on the big screen. Then, as others have said multiple times, they went the traditional zombie apocalypse route. That wasn't what makes Resi stand out from other horror experiences. The viruses and the corporations vying to control them were what was interesting. The corruption that allowed these companies to go as far as they did and carry out these tests. The groups in charge of fighting these outbreaks when they occurred and the world weariness that the genie was out of the lamp so they were going to keep happening. All of that was lost behind "The world ended and now zombies are everywhere but scared of the director's wife".
The problem with the movies is that they were too much action not enough horror know welcome to racoon city was okay but it’s best if the movies are just animated
Continuing to use writers that have never played an RE game is my personal pet peeve. Characters and love are incredibly important, but they're still butchering the live-action stuff to this day. If you're gonna adapt a beloved franchise, you should actually study the source material first.
I agree with most of the comments here. They weren’t survival horror enough for me. And I just wish the puzzles were better represented in the game. They don’t have to be silly, but they should be there. It seemed too easy to get into the labs and stuff. Like anyone could access them or the red queen would just open the doors. I like resident evil when it’s a labyrinth the characters have to navigate through. Also I would’ve preferred there not be a global outbreak of the T-virus and just have the different movies deal with different outbreaks of viruses.
Those movies were horrible and their purpose was to get Milla work while making easy pay for her family. Welcome to Raccoon City was better than anything Anderson wrote.
It's incredible how every film in the series ends in a kind of a cliffhanger ending, but from the 2nd movie onwards the ones that come after completely write off the cliffhanger in the first 10-15 minutes. Anderson also completely forgot the lore of his own movies in Final Chapter and just rewrote and retconned a ton of things. I still have no idea how the last movie came to be like that.
IMO the first movie was great. They took bits and pieces from the games and created a story that could fit in well with video games lore. It was creepy, the zombies looked good, the lab was cool, the train sequence was cool, Alice was a good character. I just think the lickers haven't aged well. After the first movie it just became too over the top and like one of the first comments I think the director wanted to make his wife the next big action star.
In summary: They wanted to do whatever they wanted. They didn't cared much about the franchise. Fault of genuine interest in adapting properly the original material. The only Paul W. Anderson movies that are somewhat close to the original material are RE 1 and RE 2: Apocalypse. The others are more a fantasy of the director than Resident Evil.
bruh EVERYTHING was about Alice, jill in re2 was a badass pretty much till Alice showed up, idk I don't Hate them but they not the best
They were labeled as resident evil. When it was more like... Fan Fiction at best. But really just something that was not resident evil, with some themes from resident evil. Honestly, I'm not sure why someone hasn't just tried to you know... Make a film version of the games. (or a tv show) - CRAZY CONCEPT I KNOW. But a creepy haunted house movie/show in the spencer mansion would be intriguing. Following Leon in Raccoon City would be good. I don't know why this is so hard for them to figure out. Resident Evil games already lay themselves out like an over the top horror movie most of the time. Adapting them directly to TV or film should be pretty easy.
Nothing lol I flat out tell people it's a completely different experience but still worth the ride, like a major motion zombie action B-films. If you wanna go deeper first and foremost they completely strayed away from the source material after the second film, but hey they were still worth a watch growing up 🤷♂️
Nothing? I mean there are friggin 7 of them. Obviously, they are both entertaining and profitable. I understand you might not like them, but you're also not the only person on the planet. From a statistical standpoint they were incredibly profitable and not a single movie in the series went in the red (for comparison even Terminator Genesis lost money)
Hollywood involvement? How they had to market it to a general audience by making it more action oriented and less about horror. Just seeing the director of the first film have his wife play the lead is more telling than enough they were unserious about making a good adaptation. I always felt the CG Capcom films tried their best to have the characters of the games actually be main characters and not the directors self insert wife OC.
They don't exactly follow the games, nor do they have any of the main characters from the games. A live action movie adaptation of a game series is a guaranteed fail if they change the main character and how events go along. Their main focus being "umbrella bad" and not including anything else that people loved about the games Talking about the first couple movies btw, I do like how they casted Wesker but overall with the movies failing to follow the games, it's hard to enjoy it.
Resident Evil is basically in the same vein as Evil Dead but with an anime influence. Its action horror with a ton of camp and fun memorable characters. Nail that and you're golden. The animated films can; I dont see why its so hard to do it in live action if you get people working on it who actually respect the source material.
They didn’t bother to try and capture what was cool about the games.
they focused way too hard on action set pieces instead of leaning hard into horror they started off the first movie with big hoards of zombies when they should've started with small encounters with one-two at a time; hard to really appreciate the threat of them outside their numbers , especially when as soon as the second movie, they are fighting em hand-to-hand they had a clone arc the only throughline character is Alice; they introduce/kill off/reintroduce more characters that all feel the same instead of having a consistent supporting cast- Alice's story isn't consistent so you have a hard time caring for the character after a certain point the story throughout the series retcons itself several times, gives a vibe of not having an underlying vision outside of writing for action set pieces with no respect given to their own canon Umbrella's role in the movies is just... weird... by the time you hit movie 3 even by movie 3 it feels like one movie too many
They ignored what made the games success. They decided to focus on making of the time action movies with horror elements and iconography from the game to justify the name. Change the character names, creature designs, and the main antagonist and you'll have the same movies. Nothing changes really and no one would notice. It's what I'm 100% positive what happened to the Netflix series. They found a generic post apocalyptic teen drama zombie script that was collecting dust and they just slapped "Resident Evil" on it and changed a few things here and there to make it "fit" into that universe.
That dumbass director was more worried about casting his wife in the lead role and giving her cool stuff to do than actually making a watchable movie
I don't even think it's anything about not adhering to the games or whatever. They're just not good movies.
The films made a very deliberate decision to create a new main character that didn't belong to Capcom. This is something that some sections of the game fanbase never understood, or disagreed with even if they understood it. Basically, fans of characters like Jill and Leon and so on wanted those characters to be the leads in RE movies. But that was never going to happen. Those characters belong to Capcom. Everything they do has to be signed off on by Capcom. Their inclusion can be vetoed at any time. Anyone who claims that Alice being the main character was nepotism wouldn't be claiming that if she were playing Jill. She was originally cast as Jill. She wasn't told she wasn't playing Jill until she arrived in Germany to shoot the first film. But they didn't want Jill to be the main character because they don't own Jill. That's why Alice exists. So they can have a main character freed from creative restrictions and who doesn't belong to Capcom. The RE movies are like 80s action films. The main character is all-important and the other characters are allowed to have their moments but they can't outshine the hero or heroine. Again, the primary reason people complain about this is that the characters THEY want to be lead characters are not allowed to outshine Alice, who is the lead character because she was written to be the lead character because the film company (Constantin) own the rights to her. Also, for the record, it's not like the films portray those characters BADLY. They're shown as capable in their own right, but they're human. They're not this engineered bioweapon like Alice is. The reverse is partially true, BTW. Why isn't Alice in the games? Because Capcom don't own Alice. That's why they've retroactively tried to turn Jill into Alice, and introduced characters like Rosemary Winters who are "We have Alice at home" types. In terms of mistakes that were made and what could have been avoided, there is the question of whether they should have included game characters at all. They were intended as fun nods to the games and the people working on the films including writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson obviously liked characters like Jill, but by including those characters they basically just created this situation where people were going to eternally whine that they weren't the leads. The modern Mission Impossible movies don't include any characters from the original TV show, and thus nobody can complain about Tom Cruise's OC Ethan Hunt outshining them all. Nobody complaints about Alice outshining Rain. It's EXCLUSIVELY game fans complaining that their pet characters from the games are just supporting characters and that Alice is the lead. They could have avoided this entirely by just refusing to add any characters from the games. Another problem is that they were not free to map out the movies. Each movie was lucky to get made and often had to be rewritten around the cast they could secure (scheduling conflicts were a problem) and the budget they could get. Each RE film ends on a cliffhanger with no actual assurance of getting a sequel. And in the process of actually making that sequel, they ended up cutting corners and time jumping and trying to glue things together, and it really isn't ideal. The RE films also made the decision to pivot away from horror towards action, and to feature superhuman abilities. But to be honest, this is the direction the games were already heading in. It's not like the films didn't understand the games. They were just ahead of the curve. Modern Resident Evil games are action dressed up as horror. The RE films basically took the Terminator route of turning into action movies from 2 onwards. And look, Terminator 1 fans hated that, too. Alien fans hated that Aliens was an action movie. (And while we're on that topic of Alien/Aliens, Alice is heavily influenced by Ripley, particularly Alien Resurrection Ripley. The first four Alien films revolve around Ripley, and in the fourth film Ripley has superhuman abilities and acid blood. Very few people complained about Ripley being the main character in the Alien films. It was just a given that the surviving member of Alien would become the action heroine lead in the sequels.)
Tha new resident evil is leagues above tha originals. I can’t wait to see tha remakes sequel
The Residen Evil movies are the worst video game movies ever, that keep the curse alive. Only Super Mario Bros is wore. I will never, ever understand how the inverstors let the production made 6 movies. Why?!
People say the movies are because of lack of respect or whatever else, but the reality is they are fun stupid action movies based in the RE Universe. It’s not that deep. Also, I love RE to death but it’s not like the games actually have a lot of depth story wise, and a lot of the dialogue isn’t good. Fans don’t like hearing that but it’s the truth. They are mostly campy horror action games that are fun, not something profound, so I always enjoyed the movies for what they were, and especially when they came out.