Episode 202: Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

Welcome to RACCOON CITY

It is reboot time

Johannes Roberts of 47 metres down and The Strangers: prey at night wrote and directed this 2021 reboot  set in 1998.

We have a new cast and a lot of familiar characters, with most of them coming from the games including Clare, Chris, Wesker, Jill, Dr Birkin and his family, Richard, Leon, Vickers, Irons, Ben Bertolucci and Lisa. 

However, they are NOT the characters from the computer games, they are just using the names.

The movie is dark, certainly darker than the Paul WS Anderson efforts. Set at night, raining, locals with their hair falling out bleeding out of their eyes, game locations such as the mansion and police station, a lot of death. And yet, Clare is too headstrong for me to care about her, Chris is also, Leon is too useless for me to care about him, Jill is too rough, Birkin too creepy. TBH out of all the characters in the movie, the poor experimented on Lisa and the one on the slab in the lab are the only characters I felt sorry for.

A bigger nod to the games, rather than a constant spotlight on his wife at the time (Milla Jovovic) as per the Anderson efforts, this was a decent enough escape from a city movie, not too dissimilar to the second Anderson movie, Apocalypse, however rather than having OTT comic strip computer games characters like the Anderson series, these are all quite weak and forgettable.

I gave it 6/10 because it was so much better than the others. It is watchable for sure, with some decent elements, but it isn't resident evil really, despite using all of the names.