Its 2002. The latest mainline Resident Evil games are RE Zero and Code Veronica (plus Gun Survivor 2 released the previous year), and the remake of the first RE game was coming a week later, but something else related debuts, and it’s the first feature lenght, live action film adaptation of the franchise, produced by Constantin Films via Sony’s Screen Gems label, with direction and script by Paul W.S. Anderson, previously known for the 1995 live action Mortal Kombat movie, and cult sci fi horror film Event Horizon.
So he already dabbled in the early wave of videogames films for the big screen, and fittingly enough the Resident Evil live action film would be his legacy, for the most part anyway, enough that eventually Capcom would collaborate with him again to make another film based on one of their IP, in this case one that started as a niche title but launched the popularity of “hunting games” and eventually became one of their biggest franchises, Monster Hunter.
But back to the zombies with what is now the first of the Resident Evil live action film series, and not even the only RE film series, as we looked upon the CG animated one some years ago.
In terms of what “Resident Evil 2002” it plucks from the games…. let’s consider the first one for reference, and it clearly a case where people from Capcom had a list of things that had to be in the movie to make it Resident Evil”, but never specified how and why these things should exist in this new continuity, because Paul W.S. Anderson clearly had little interest in making faithful adaptations of the games’ plot, and did its own thing, playing fairly loose with the videogame canon, which was reviled as it’s often now but was less lamented upon, at least compared to modern standards of backlash, “outrage” and rampant reactions from the internets.
For example, while it begins in a mansion and there are people storming in for a mission… the context is completely different, and doesn’t matter much anyway as we quickly move into the laboratories under the mansion, which is where most of the movie takes place, and we also have new character like Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her fake husband that are amnesiacs for plot convenience.
Her husband called “Spence” (yeah, without the “R”), because again, the director decided to randomly shuffle around references from the videogames, but mostly as key jingling to the fans more than anything else, or reshuffled iconic moments in different context, like the zombie dogs introduction via them breaking a windom now happens in the underground labs instead of the corridors of Spencer’s (or “Spence’s”, according to this movie’s logic) Mansion.
One thing is the aforementione reshuffling of setpieces from the first RE game, or having stand-in substitute characters, heck, even throwing references to Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 movie Cube, with the reference scene in question that would eventually become part of the mainline RE videogame series, being featured as a QTE sequence in the original Resident Evil 4.
Anothet is the Red Queen, a sinister IA that controls the Umbrella’s Hive lab and projects itself as a little girl, this being the biggest invention/addition of the movie and was never a thing in any RE game, either up or after this movie released in theathers.
There are zombies, yes, but also the emphasis is already more on action than survival, again, kinda accidentally predicting the direction the series would take later and keep for years, before Capcom came back to their senses.
Given the expectations, the director and everything, this first entry is relatively more tame on the action than one would expect, mostly because it has to introduce things than a precise directorial restraint and kinda has to have the zombies as a treath they are better off escaping from, even if there’s plenty more action than “survival horror”.
And it’s definitely not the work of a skilled artisan, i mean, this is the kind of movie that can even make you second guess if we’re seeing a flashback or not, as 99 % of the times it would clearly indicate it one way, and then one single scene does it differently, all to make the conventiently amnesiac character (and hence the audience) known that there is an antidote, in a clumsy way too.
In terms of monsters, we get human zombies done in practical effects, zombie dogs and Lickers, the latter done in CG as expected. And let’s be frank, the CG wasn’t amazing at the time, i remember it being criticized for that, but given the budget and the standard of the era… it’s ok, it’s decent enough. Not the biggest of budgets, nor the most extreme in terms of graphic content, be it nudity or explicit gore, so you might be let down if you were expecting much gruesome gore from it.
Even so, it’s not a bad horror action film, in itself, and while it ignores completely the established storylines and lore of the videogames it’s based on, it managed to capture the tone of the series fairly well, channelling the same energy the games did from horror b-movies, so yeah, it’s fitting the first film adaptation of Resident Evil being a horror B-movie itself.
Overall, Resident Evil (2002) it’s very entertaining, there’s some nice effects even if the gore is oddly restrained (we never get to see a head being cut off or something else crude, the movie cuts away just before showing shit like that, most likely to avoid age restrictions), the action it’s shlocky but fun, Milla Jovovich kicks ass, etc.
And honestly in hindsight i’m not angry that they didn’t follow the plots of the games, i mean, we already had those cheesy narratives, there was no harm in forcing Paul W.S. Anderson to come up with some “original material” for these.
The film has an open ending, too, with Milla Jovovich’s character being captured, brought to an Umbrella facility inside the Raccoon City Hospital, where she leaves to find the city outrun by the same undeads found in the Hive, and gets ready to fight for her life and answers…
For better or worse, the movie was a fairly big box office hit, so we got a direct sequel two years later, with Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
“Oddly” we didn’t get the “Resident Evil The Movie The Videogame” videogame adaptation, maybe Capcom still remembered that chapter in their history with shame and figured it wasn’t worth it. We can only wonder what that could have been, if you have the time and desire.
I mean, an official, released to retail Dragon Ball Evolution videogame exists, so this isn’t really that much of a stretch….
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