Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)
Witness the Beginning of Evil
There’s a long line of movies and shows attached to tonight’s entry. It’s not a specific situation of this one directly - but rather as a franchise it’s forked off to so many different things that if any franchise were to have massive in-fighting, I would expect this one would be the easiest. The funniest part of the entire situation is that more so than a lot of others, I’m familiar with this franchise and the attempts frequently pain me with how little they seem to care about it past the name drawing folks in - so how will tonight fare? Well, sit down and you are totally Welcome to Raccoon City.
Yes, the full name of it is technically Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, but the flow gets killed with a title that long so I opted to use the post-text instead of the whole text. One of a pair of kids growing up in an orphanage keeps seeing a spooky being in the night. Fast forward to the story proper years later, when the sister of that pair is returning to see her brother after having been away for some time. Something a bit weird happens when the trucker she’s hitching a ride from hits a woman going full bore and the woman just ups and vanishes from the scene. Meanwhile, a rookie cop is getting playfully picked on by the towns special tactics and rescue squad until his local peers show up to bully him around in a less playful way. Everyone heads in to work, leaving the rookie to notice some odd occurences with a bird and the hostess bleeding from the eye. A conspiracy is at foot in the City of Raccoon - and things are about to escalate very quickly into a bio-hazard that will have everyone fighting for their lives.
The actors do an alright job here. Having said that, mileage might vary a little bit here - it’s fine for me but some of the interactions can be a bit less than fluid feeling, but I don’t necessarily feel it’s the actors to blame in all the situations, sometimes it’s just how the character is supposed to be in the movie. Individual jobs aren’t bad though for the most part, a little hamming it up here or there but largely they do a good enough job of being entertaining even if the classic “dumb decisions” pop up plenty of times.
The characters are okay. Nothing really to write home about here - one side effect of trying to slap a whole lot of folks together in a single movie, you don’t really get to spend a ton of time with them. The only real backstory we get is the orphanage bit about Claire and Chris, and some unconfirmed bantering about the rookie. The rookie, Leon, gets to fumble his way through most of the movie, almost everyone in here never figures out it might be most helpful to shoot something in the head where it’s more effective when they do it on accident, Chris gets to have a neat action scene that’s mostly too dark to really tell whats going on - albeit in a rather artistic/cool kind of way - and the rest of special forces either gets dead or has one through line to their actions that’s easily dropped in a single sentence of dialogue. I’m not saying that the character’s don’t work - just don’t really go in here looking for massive depths and developments.
Special diner forces.
Effects are a mixed bag. Some of the stuff looks great, some of it looks good enough for the average movie goer, and some of it looks not great for even a passing attention. I’d argue most of it weights in the center - not really good nor bad - with really only perhaps two moments where it just doesn’t look great at all. One of which is an unfortunate CG creature with an interaction with a very not CG character that ends up calling out the fake-ness of the creature in comparison. On the other hand, things like the Costumes and most of the settings, and also the zombies - which I’m not entirely sure if they strictly fall into either category in so much as both - look really well done. Maybe not super duper high budget, but it has this charm about it that makes me think of a more budget affair, almost like a grind-house sort of cheesy feel. I think the helicopter flying in the S.T.A.R.S. team most emphasizes this feeling, and if people enjoy it like me they won’t find that many complaints while watching it. On the other hand, if your the type of person that has a very high bar for effects in movies, you might be complaining about a lot more than two little drops in the bucket.
Audio is fun, mixed, but also somewhat weird choices. As much as I love some of the songs they picked, and sometimes it’s a bit of a easter egg reference kind of situation, the more fun songs don’t always fit the mood. Along with that, however, is the music that I always forget by the end of the movie - the stuff that helps add to the tension and spooks, or in general just helps charge whatever emotion they want you to feel. Balancing is done well too, so you won’t be struggling to hear things said. In fairness, I did have subtitles on here, and you do get the classic close-captioned style noise captions as well, which might prove to a bit of an anti-fright measure for some. As far as the scares go, it’s mostly the classic jump-scares and virus/body horror elements, but folks prone to being upset by zombies won’t have a fun time, even though there is actually quite a tame number in the overall spread of things - largely just plopping out in bulk for a few scenes.
Now for the real fun part that I know people love that rarely comes up - the part where I talk about how as a stand alone movie, it’s an enjoyable time with a few problem, but more importantly how does it fair as an adaptation? It combines elements of both RE1 and RE2 - although it’s very much more the later remakes of them. The most prominent example of this is the main character I don’t recognize in the slightest bit - the spooky woman terrorizing a young Clair at the start of the movie, who (after doing a little searching) apparently didn’t appear until the remaster/remake of RE1 they did in the 2000s. Elements such as the orphanage I recognize more from the remake of RE2 than I do from the original - but in fairness there the original was a very long time ago for me compare to the REmake. Character costumes are great, with really the only one that looks remarkably different from their game counterparts being Jill (not that I blame them for ditching the big old shoulder pads). When it comes to the actors looking the parts on the other hand, they got some odd calls in there. Most still look close enough when viewed against their sources, again with Jill being a bit of a stand out. I remember both of the ladies having lighter hair tones than straight black, but that also could just be lighting messing with my eyes and/or memory. The largest amount of difference is going to be the story beats and locations available - there’s a lot more to explore in the mansion, police station, basements, labs, massive underground facilities, and all of that in the games where you aren’t constrained by the runtime of the movie. Probably the thing that feels the most missed b this is the actual lab side of things - we get one normal size lab room that doesn’t even really have a tone of equipment in it, leading it to feel slightly less massive than it actually is. Given the changes to the plot elements to make people meet up that wouldn’t have before and the likes, I would say that both the starts of the games are more accurately presented before mashing together and rewriting everything past that to work into the new desired format. This could bother some people - I’m fine with it, as it provides me a little something new to keep me on my toes, but people who desire more super-accurate representations are most likely going to get upset of a bunch of the changes.
He wanted to be a star, so he picked the sun.
I found it a fun movie. It didn’t blow me out of the water, but it did provide me with some good laughs and a bunch of adaptation related moments and items that I can appreciate while it did something different. It’s by far probably the least offensive adaptation of Resident Evil to a movie so far, not that that says a whole lot, and although a lot of it could have gone differently or more “accurately” I’m fine with what we got anyways. Yes, someday I would love some super-jacked boulder-punching Chris to go back-to-back gun-fu with Leon ala the animated Evil movies, but for now this one take the top level in adaptation quality and easy-going enjoyment, while the Jovavich set obviously steals the cake for wall-to-wall nonsensical action and budgets, and the Netflix series exists as an interesting case of “what the heck” and arguably some of the better actors in the live action endeavors.