By Aria Nopunte
It’s been about a month since the movie adaptation of Resident Evil was released, and it mainly received positive reviews. It received 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, 7.6/10 on IMDb, and 90% on Fandango. However, directors Christopher Nolan and Zach Creggar said that we unfortunately won’t get another comedy horror movie mix like this again. Even though the reviews were positive, Zach’s reason was that he felt like he was on a perpetual “apology tour” to players of the game, and refused to spend the rest of his career “tagging different data points to satisfy fans” instead of writing what he actually wanted.
Personally, I think that expecting in-game characters like Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong, or Chris Redfield to be represented at all is unrealistic. None of the past movies have had these characters, and the two that do, (Resident Evil:Welcome to Raccoon City and Resident Evil:Retribution), angered fans by not physically accurately resembling any of the in-game characters. Fans were always incredibly angry at the lack of accurate representation, then angry again at no representation. I think this is overdramatic because the new movie has so many other good attributes, which is why it’s rated so highly.
The movie does a good job at showing monsters like lickers, zombie dogs, and viruses from different games like Las Plagas and the G virus. Zach Creggar even states in an interview that he “was more focused on the action” rather than the looks of Austin Abram’s character, which I think is good for an action-horror based movie. The only way to form a solid opinion about it for yourself is to go see the movie, so go to your nearest theater and watch Resident Evil while you can.
