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.

Monster Hunter

 

Gates Of Meow

Monster Hunter
2020 Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
Germany/China/Canada/Japan/South Africa/USA
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some spoilerage but, it’s not really that kind of movie.

So, once again, director Paul W. S. Anderson teams up with his wife, Milla Jovovich to make another movie adapted from a video game series. Now, I have slight issues with their Resident Evil series of films because... well, they were nearly all absolutely brilliant with the exception of two of them. The second one was kinda let down by some of the prosthetic ‘man in suit’ effects but the real disappointment was the sixth film in the series, Resident Evil - The Final Chapter... which totally failed to make any kind of sense and contradicted the running story of the films up until that point with absolutely no attempt to explain the complete lack of continuity, effectively negating everything we’d learned in the second movie.

So, yeah, I was always going to go see Monster Hunter, although, I hereby make the usual caveat that I haven’t played the game so really don’t know if it’s any good as an adaptation or not. Although the film has been freely available for a while in HD from ‘the usual web sites’ (and I believe that’s where at least one of my friends saw it), I decided to wait for half a year and see if it got any kind of cinema release in the UK. Since I’d seen the Resident Evil films at the cinema, I wanted to do it right with this one because, whether you like them or not, Anderson always tends to make huge spectacles of his movies and so I booked a local screening, even paying a little extra on top of my Cineworld card to see the film on a big IMAX screen.

The film itself... well, I firmly believe that with a few tweaks this could have been a really great movie but, I did have an issue with it and I think, all in all, it’s an okay and relatively entertaining movie and, at the very least, has the potential to be a long running franchise, if it gets the box office take to make that happen.

Okay, so the film is almost but not quite plotless. There are two worlds, one of fantasy style sand ships and big monsters and... also our world. After a brief prologue on the other world where the leader of a band of ‘yo hos’, played by Ron Perlman, gets in a skuffle with a big monster on his sand galleon and has to leave behind one of the monster hunters of the title to fend for himself, played by the ‘legend in his own lifetime’ Tony Jaa (who I though t had retired to become a buddhist monk or some such but, apparently not)... we join the main US protagonist of the movie, a ranger played by Milla Jovovich. She and her band of hard core military types are taking their heavily armoured transport to look for a scout team that have gone missing (in our world). Then, some archaic markers in the sand they pass by suddenly go all pyrotechnic and they are transported into the world of the prologue... and come face to face with various giant beasties.

It would be true to say there’s not much plot development after that. The film becomes one big action set piece after another and, within half an hour, Jovovich is the only one of both her team and the original team she was looking for, left alive... and only because Tony Jaa has tried to help out on occasion. When the two leads finally meet, after she manages to escape from a load of quite vicious giant spiders, everything gets a bit Hell In The Pacific meets Shelob for a while as the two, who don’t speak each other’s language, work through their issues with the tried and true movie clichés of violence and mistrust followed by, eventual, mutual respect.

And there’s also a double climax to the movie... one set in the other world and then one set in ours... both of which involve some large, ‘almost but not quite unkillable’ giant dragons and Ron Perlman, whose character can speak English due to a twist in what little of the plot there is, as he brings his team in to help out in our world after another dragon crosses over.

Okay...so the film is nice to look at, has some great actors, some not bad special effects and is quite pacey but, alas, that last thing is also the big problem with the film, for me at least. There’s no let up. The first half an hour is quite relentless, driven and harrowing, as Jovovich’s team all die big, monstery deaths but, it just carries on and on. There’s no real calm before the next storm... even the scenes where Jaa and Jovovich meet up for the first time are full of sequences where they are continuously brawling for way too long. This film, in my opinion, makes the one big mistake that a lot of modern action picture directors tend to make and that is... falling into the trap of giving the characters no real downtime before they face the next peril... thus giving no contrast within the tone of the scenes and, by the end of the film, it all seems just a little bit dull. Indeed, even the double climax seems like something of a let down because there’s no real build up to it... just conflict after conflict with the only really nice moments involving a cat... which I won’t spoil for you here but, make sure you stick around for an extra scene mid way through the end credits. I actually think that, in the case of this movie, it might have been more effective if the director had made it a little longer and put more pauses in the film to help liven up the action scenes. As it is... yeah, it feels like a ‘pretty good’ kind of movie rather than a truly great one, to be honest.

Even so, I think people who are into big monster movies will still find a lot to like in Monster Hunter and, like I said... the cat, man. We need to see more of the cat! I’d be quite happy if some more of these were made because, like I said, the director is a bit hit and miss and I’m sure he could make some decent follow ups which surpassed the original, if given half the chance. I might grab this one on blu ray once it goes into the sales and, I guess I’m still relatively happy that I waited to see it on the big screen. Hopefully there will be more to follow.