The Resident Evil films (that huge franchise that followed Milla Jovovich re-killing things and looking awesome all the time and where lots of things blew up and nothing really made sense) were hardly failures – yes they were as ropey as a Go Ape Vacation and had as much oscar-creed as a pile of bananas but did anyone care? Well, sure, unfortunately, it being based on a massively popular video game series with enough geeky fans to populate a moon, it meant a similarly massive proportion of its fan size are going to be pissed off that its a) not canon / not canon enough and b) was taking liberties with a perfectly good video game series story.
I agree, of course. I may not be the biggest fan of the Resident Evil games, but i’ve played a ton of them… and i sort of understand the basic plots because one of my pals has explained it to me once. Heck, i even think i owned a few of them. The remake of the original, the umbrella chronicles on rails-first-person-er, the one with the dude with his head in a bag with a chainsaw… oh, and i watched a grown man lose his shit during a VR session with one of the newer ones…but was i a fan? Hmmm i wouldn’t go that far.
But i understand why some peeps get pissed when films change things from the source material. I’ve ranted about this very thing elsewhere.
So when Paul WS Anderson’s string of rubbish masterpieces came to an end with “The Final Chapter” it seemed inevitable that somewhere down the line a reboot would occur.
But this was not what they wanted. They, being the fans.
This was a ham fisted attempt to tell the already established story of Resident Evil using enough tiny references to keep the fans happy and still tell a cohesive horror story… except somewhere down the line it went from 70% film to 30% Resi love letter to 30% film, 70% obscure reference to something else. Pretty much all the main characters appear, in much more PC skins, and we get to see shot-for-shot recreations of famous scenes (the first zombie turning his head towards the camera from way back when, remember the shot??), writing on the wall, a video of characters unnecessary to the immediate plot… meh. I got lost.
Maybe it is good. Maybe to truly enjoy this you have to be knee deep in the franchise, but if you’re that deep you’re not going to appreciate the unnecessaries – its not as if the characters needed actors anyway – they all look real enough.
And then in that case… why make this in the first place? Why not make another entry into the franchise altogether? A new chapter / spin off set in the franchise’s beloved and expansive world, with a standalone ploy AND some cheeky nods at the series.
Instead, a boring, flat mess, wasting the talents of Firestorm and Damian Dahrk, and the gorilla man from the (laugh laugh) Umbrella Academy. Poor.
the FANGG of HORROR ROCK 