Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

**The director’s love for the games is apparent, but too many poor decisions ruined what could have been the best and most faithful Resident Evil yet.** Welcome to Raccoon City marks the first live-action Resident Evil adaptation to stick close to the original games in story and feel. Character costumes looked like they were plucked right from the games. Sets and locations were identical to levels I spent hours playing. Easter eggs and nods throughout the film celebrated hardcore fans. Unfortunately, its flaws overshadow its victories. An overcrowded story with too many characters prevented developing the characters or making the story have any real impact. Forcing two full game stories into an hour and 47-minute run time had consequences. I enjoyed the movie’s attention to the slow descent from human to zombie, which showed the dread and hopelessness as the victims felt their humanity drain away. There is also a fantastic action scene in complete darkness where the muzzle flash provides the only light for the survivors to see. There were some wonderful moments that Resident Evil fans will enjoy, but nostalgia is really the only thing Welcome to Raccoon City has going for it.

Not bad, first one without Alice though. Racoon city now has since been destroyed now. They start to find out what's underneath the city.

A great improvement over the previous movies, but it still misses the mark. Discussing what "is" Resident Evil will never be easy, both the games and the movies reached quite a wide audience, and the two cannons have widely different themes, lovers of the games will want more gore, darkness, horror and a bit of cheesiness, and lovers of the movies will be looking forward to big set pieces, pumped action scenes, and a wide cast of characters. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccon City is clearly trying to bridge the gap by offering an experience closer to that of the games, but in movie form, and it gets close, the themes are there, the cheesy, but undeniably cool scenes are present, and the overall plot follows that of the games much more closely. Having said that, the movie lacked the courage to fully abandon the core formula of the previous movies completely, creating a weird clashing mishmash of ideas. Welcome to Raccoon city wanted to have a wide cast of important characters, and to do so it decided to borrow from 3 games at once, and in its attempt to convert 3 isolated storylines into one a lot was left on the cutting room floor, characters were poorly developed, many events were barely explained, and overall the movie lacked cohesion. It's painful to see how many good ideas were there that lacked the time to be properly executed, one glaring example is the character of Leon, one can see that the movie tried to give him a zero to hero arc, with him going from a clumsy cop to a strong-headed, laid back hero, but the audience doesn't have enough time with the character to fully grasp that growth, and it just ends up giving the feeling that his character just changes drastically from scene to scene. A really good effort, but still a clumsy movie by the end, on par with the rest of the series.