Wrapping up the Resident Evil Retrospective, Ingrid and I are gonna talk about the Resident Evil movie series as a whole. Was it utter shit? Not at all. In fact, overall, there were only two installments we truly felt were awful and of those two, only one was total shit.
Overall, we felt like this movie franchise was entertaining. We can see why they did so well despite not being that faithful to the games. It was mindless popcorn fun. But, and this may surprise people, there was a decent story you can follow (The Final Chapter aside) that connects things together. When you binge watch them, you can follow along nicely. Again are they good resident evil movies? Mostly no, but in some ways yes.
The first movie is the most faithful to the games, so much so that, as I said before, on its own it could be a side story in the games universe. Not much contradicted things, the characters were handled well, no one was a Mary sue. But, looking back, compared to the later movies it’s just average.
The second movie was all over the place, but Ingrid and I both agree that more falls to the director and less to the writing. Had Paul WS Anderson, or maybe someone else had directed it, I’m sure it would have been handled a lot better. There were decent ideas (there were also some terrible ones too) and yes, this movie had Alice at her most Mary Sue-ish. But overall this was the second weakest. Which is a bit ironic cause it’s the most tied in to the games the movies will get.
Ingrid and I enjoyed the third movie very much. But we both agreed – it’s NOT a Resident Evil movie. It was well acted, well shot, and so on, but very little of this was Resident Evil! It was post apocalypse! But it was, on its own, very good! We later learned that in the planning of this film there was something that could have made it better. The original plans were to reveal that Alice killed the young girl Angie from the second movie and that’s what led Jill to leave. Stuff like that would have elevated the story and made things far more personal.
The next two movies, Afterlife and Retribution, started to give the series a more straight forward story line, playing off of the events of Extinction. They swap some characters in and out, which gets annoying, but there is still a linear narrative that’s being built up to, especially the finale of Retribution!
It’s really just too bad that the last film, Final Chapter, threw that all out the window! And this is what makes this retrospective so divisive. The Final Chapter aside, Ingrid and I would have rated this franchise highly for entertainment value alone, but instead, since it had such a face-full-of-asphalt type finale, we can only rate it 7.5-8/10. Still fairly high, but that ending is just so hard to ignore.
In our discussion video below, Ingrid and I also chat about how we would have handled The Final Chapter differently! I really think we came up with a much more fitting finale that would have pleased more people…not everyone but way more than we got. Take a listen and let us know what you think of our solution. Beyond that, this wraps up our Resident Evil Retrospective Marathon! We hope you all enjoyed it, and who knows what she and I will do next? Any suggestions?
