Resident Evil - Welcome To Racoon City

Valentine’s Knight

Resident Evil
Welcome To Racoon City
Germany/Canada 2021
Directed by Johannes Roberts
Sony Pictures

I’ve got quite a lot of time for the previous live action franchise based on the Resident Evil computer games, I have to say. However, they’re not sacred to me, perhaps primarily because they let me down somewhat. The second of the six was quite disappointing but the third, fourth and fifth ones were all, like the original movie, way better than that. Alas, the sixth and final one was a real franchise killer in that the plot twist, which would have been obvious in any film to spot, completely betrayed the continuity of the preceding five films and basically contradicted the motivation behind the events of the second movie. Thereby rendering both it and the whole franchise suddenly useless and nonsensical. Yeah, I think there are a lot of fans of the franchise that went completely nuts at how bizarrely, badly written the storyline of the sixth part was. You can read my reviews of those original six films here, here, here and here.

So, it’s time for a reboot with Resident Evil - Welcome To Racooon City. A reboot that was announced, I should probably add, while the sixth film was still playing in cinemas. So, yeah... I guess they knew it was a franchise killer even then.  

With this one, director Johannes Roberts takes it back to the roots of the game. As in, it’s a return to the horror elements that the early games in the series on which this was based are best known for. The original film series had taken a few key elements from the original stories in the games, kept the zombie body count element and then pushed it to its logical point... or rather, one of a couple of logical points. That is, it turned it into very much an action franchise with big guns and explosions and a few added horror elements. And I was fine with that and I guess a lot of other people must have been also... considering it ran for six movies.

With Welcome To Racoon City though, while there are certainly some big explosions and scenes of rat-a-tat-tat gunplay, for sure, it’s mainly not an action picture. Instead, the director slows things down and moves the camera around in a more exploratory manner, allowing the creepy atmosphere of a mostly deserted city (more like a small town, actually, I would say) to come forth. This one is obviously based on the first two games and, as such (and almost coincidentally, it seems to me), it also takes elements from the first two movies. So, the mansion house which leads into the underground Umbrella Corp complex is included, mostly in the final third of the picture and there’s a lot of just trying to survive the decaying town of Racoon City, as the population slowly ‘go zombie’ with the T-virus they’ve been infected with.

The cast of characters including many favourites from the various games such as Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell), Claire Redfield (played by one of my favourite up and coming genre actresses Kaya Scodelario), Wesker (Tom Hopper) and Leon Kenedy (Avan Jogia) are all cool and have good chemistry together, I think. Also, the creature effects in this one are handled a lot better than in, say, the second Resident Evil movie, where one of the big ‘man in suit’ creations was a huge let down.

And there’s some nice cinematography with some much brighter colours which really work in the darkness (the film is pretty much all set over one night) with occasional more subtle palettes sneaking in if a scene calls for it. This is coupled with some slower paced, leisurely camera movement and a director and DP who know how to calm things down to not break the atmosphere. For instance, sometimes they will wait for a character who is out of focus to wander into the focus of a shot rather than bring the camera in straight away to sharp focus on them, which is nice. Also, the use of verticals to separate screen elements is something this director uses from time to time with a nice bold choice of leaving two thirds of the frame in darkness around a doorway, for example, to focus the collective eye of the audience where he wants it, by deliberately withholding the detail of the periphery. Nice.

Another thing he does... and I personally first became conscious of this technique when I first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho... is to give time checks to the audience with some very specific times as the movie progresses. There are a few reasons for this kind of tactic but the documentary feel that Hitchcock was going for is definitely one of them. By that I mean that telling us the time is 11.17pm subconsciously fixes the time frame in your head as being something real and therefore more believable, because, otherwise, you’d round it up every time, right? The other thing this does in this specific film is ratchet up the tension because it’s established fairly early on in the picture that the Umbrella Corporation are going to destroy both their old labs and the entire town at 6am the next day. So, yeah, we keep getting time checks until, the last one of 5.59am suddenly ticks over on screen to the 6am deadline.

And, yeah, it all works. It’s not exactly a scary film but it is genuinely much more atmospheric than the previous films in the first series and it also brings in little elements from the early games like the zombie crows, which is nice. It’s also nice that it’s set on the 30th of September 1998, which is the same year I think the original game was first launched (I had a Playstation version of... I think it was Resident Evil 2 but, I wasn’t much good at solving the puzzles and got frustrated at the limited ammunition they gave you to get past zombies with). So there’s some nice moments of ‘old school’ technology such as Claire Redfield using a VHS machine or nice touches of humour when her brother asks her, “What the fuck’s a chat room?”.

And I have to say, although I don’t think it did very well at cinemas (well, gee, I guess you shouldn’t have released it during a pandemic guys... maybe just stop releasing films for five years until we’re out of this, the audience will still be there, if they didn’t die from the real life C Virus), I'd have to conclude that I really had a good time with Resident Evil - Welcome To Racoon City and I would certainly be up for a couple of sequels if somebody would green light those please. My only two complaints are that, a couple of the screen transitions seemed a little sloppy on their timing and, well, good lord people, how long does it take for a crack police team to realise you have to shoot a zombie in the head to kill it. Apparently forever, if you go by most of the characters here. But, yeah, those minor grumbles aside, I thought this slow burn of a movie was pretty great and a refreshing spin on the Resident Evil live action franchise. Fingers crossed for a sequel.