Man, where to start with this.

I guess I'll start with the good.

The set designs for this were on point. The police headquarters and the mansion were very well done and very faithful to the games. However the train set up looked horribly underdone.

The makeup effects for the infected was actually pretty creepy. It felt like a fairly realistic version of what people who are sick and slowly getting sicker would look like. Their bones starting to protrude more, hair loss, saggy skin, and just overall sickly. I really wish we would have gotten more of this and less of the CGI. The few practical effects we got, I actually enjoyed.

Speaking of CGI, it was absolutely horrendous in this movie. It felt like they were trying to invoke the same exact CGI used in the original games but it just didn't work here. The birkin monster, the dog, the licker and the truck crash just looked horrible. Even crappy CGI nowadays is pretty good and this looks like something an amateur did 15 years ago in their basement.

I really feel only Claire had any really character development. All the other characters barely had any time to flesh out and felt like hollow imitations of their game counterparts. Especially Leon. That's twice now that a resident evil movie has been attempted with probably the most well-known character from the games and somehow managed to completely screw him up. That's not on the actor, he did about as well as he could with just a really bad interpretation of Leon Kennedy.

Unfortunately it seems like they tried to fit multiple storylines into one movie. They really should have broken this up into multiple movies, or honestly, a TV series. We barely spent any time with the infected or the mutations. Nothing in this movie felt like a real threat because each thing was dead soon after it was introduced. Rarely does a movie feel like it has too much and too little at the same time. This accomplice that feat well.

Now the suspenseful parts it did, IE the girl running off into the woods, the girl in the orphanage, the infected at the gate, and the zombie's swarming and attacking at the mansion was actually very well done. I absolutely loved those parts and wish we would have gotten so much more of that.

I appreciate that this movie tried to keep it somewhat faithful to the original material, however, the other resident evil movie spent way more time with the zombies and with the mutations and made each feel like a legitimate threat. None of the creatures in this one felt scary or threatening because they didn't have time to.

I liked parts of it well enough to hope that they actually go through with a sequel and hopefully in the sequel, they spend more time fleshing out characters, spend more on their CGI, and make the creatures involved feel like legitimate threats.

CGI: 3 out of 10
Acting: 5 out of 10
Set Design: 8 out of 10
Practical Effects: 8 out of 10
Rewatch: 4 out of 10

Sorry, but really hated this one. I was hoping that as a horror movie fan and avid fan of the games, I would get something out of this film. Sadly, there were three points that really bothered me:

1). I'm a fan of the game and finished RE 1-5. Sure, there were some references to the game in the movie. However, the movie didn't follow the story of the game at all. I felt that lots of things were left out and it seemed they were in a rush to properly tell the story.

2). As a horror movie fan, I liked the style of the movie and in the first act I thought this movie might be good. Turns out that the dialogue is really bad and the characters weren't really making sense. Around the middle point of the movie, I really had to force myself to finish this one.

3). The pacing of the first act was proper, after that it feels like you get an hour to climb the mount everest. Because it felt so rushed, there's no tension building in this movie. The whole point of making a horror/action movie is that there needs to be tension and suspense and the audience needs to feel it.

**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.

Well I cannot say that I I had high hopes for this movie but I have watched the other movies in the franchise and I am a bit of a sucker for horror/fantasy/science fiction movies. Especially if one can expect a decent amount of special effects and gore so…

It is not a great movie. Not even a good movie really but it is a half decent B-movie horror flick. It sure as hell is better than that woke piece of trash that Netflix has produced with their TV-show adaptation of the franchise but then that does not really say very much.

The story is rather non-existent and things just happen for no good reason. It is like the writer just took a bunch of zombie and monster encounters and threw them in a mixer to see what came out. Sure there is a resemblance of a background story there but it is not much.

We never get to know why the zombies escaped into Raccoon City, why the experiments where abandoned or anything else that might enlighten us as to why zombies pop up here and there all the time (apart from the fact that it is a Resident Evil movie and it is Raccoon City of course). There also seems to be a number of characters in the movie that knows a lot about what is actually going on but again, we never really get much of an explanation. I have understood that the movie is based on the story in the first three of the games so I guess those that have played them might understand the why’s better.

The main reason to watch this movie is the special effects, the gore and the action and this is best done with your brain in the off position. There are indeed some decent gory special effects and I have to say that the monsters in the later half of the movie was pretty okay.

I do miss Milla Jovovich though. There is not really any good kick-ass replacement for her although some of the characters tried. Also, for f… sake, will the dumbass Hollywood script writers ever going to stop putting stupid shit in the movies, like firing off bazookas and rocket launcher in confined spaces, say a train car. It doesn’t work unless the goal is to also kill the person firing it you morons!

One thing that annoyed me throughout the entire movie though is the fact that it is really dark. Sure it is a horror movie so some dark scenes is to be expected but the entire movie is really really dark. To the extent that it really is difficult to see what is going on for a lot of the movie. It might have worked in a cinema but on a TV-screen, even with the pretty good OLED that I have, it is really too dark.

So it was pretty much what I expected, a basic B-movie of the gore feast variety. Didn’t feel like I wasted my time but that is a positive as it gets.

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.