Well slap my tits and call me surprised!
It didn’t actually completely suck. The brand new reboot of the RE video game/movie franchise actually made some strides in telling a grounded origin story to the sprawling horror epic. Generic millennial actors dropped into a late 90’s setting, ham-fisted exposition, and ropey PS3-level CGI all notwithstanding, Welcome To Racoon City manages to scrape by as an unironically enjoyable horror movie, despite having the entire deck stacked against it since day one.
What I Liked
This movie goes right back to basics and shows how Racoon City got to be the way it is. Taken over by corporate interests and drained of its resources, Racoon City is now a rain-soaked liability for the Umbrella Corporation. The movie starts with them already making their exit from the area, leaving the few remaining residents up shit creek. This really hearkened back to the premise of the early games in a great way and is probably one of the strongest elements in the movies arsenal.
The practical zombie and creature effects are also solid, albeit a little dated. There’s no subtlety or nuance when it comes to bloodshot eyes or skin deformities, but at least the effort was made to go practical for the majority of the movie. I have to respect that much at the very least.
The movie takes place over one night, whereby at 6am Racoon City will be destroyed so as to prevent an outbreak of infection. While this premise is by no means original in the slightest, the whole movie works as a giant ticking clock, constantly pushing the plot forward. I love ticking clocks in movies; they help to cut out unnecessary schlock and action shots which the Paul WS Anderson movies embellished in to the point of farce.
What I Didn’t Like
This movie is clearly aimed at fans of the RE games and yet hammers audiences unnecessarily over the head with dialogue and exposition that didn’t need to be there. This movie could have had a much smarter message behind it, signalling shitty corporate tactics in low-income / disadvantaged communities. That would have been clever. And relevant. But the movie was too busy being generic, whilst dropping perfunctory references and throw-backs.
The CGI sucked balls, even for a movie dropped one year into a pandemic. I completely understand and respect the logistics and budget of such a movie in these times, but I’ve seen Corridor Crew clean up cruddy VFX within 48 hours and make vast improvements. Resident Evil: Welcome To Racoon City needs an edit to remove over-handed plot-points and a VFX crew to do a few deeper renders. Do this and the movie will improve by about 15%.
Albert Wesker has no fucking place in a modern Resident Evil game or movie. He is a cringey, over-the-top villain, conjured up by virgins who just couldn’t get enough of The Matrix back in the early 2000’s. The Wesker in this movie is fine, up until the point he becomes a dated eye-sore, done so to keep fans happy. What rocked on a console game 30 years ago does not necessarily work on the big screen work today and Albert Wesker is definitely going to be a stone in RE’s shoe if they even manage to get a sequel (which is doubtful at best).
So, in conclusion, it was fine. They got plenty of things right, and only a handful of things wrong. I’ll take this movie over any of the Jovovich turds (although I have a guilty pleasure for the first movie). I suppose it’s a step in the right direction, at least tonally. Let’s see if this fuck-tree bears any fruit…
