Overall it was better than I expected. Just a few random points from me
- Loved the look of the Mansion and the R.P.D
- Not sure why they had to make Leon such a fucking moron. For Hollywood I guess?
- I liked the fact that overall they kept close to the source material which for me automatically makes this movie better than Paul Anderson movies...
See, that's what I thought was good about the P.Anderson movies, that they were original material in the world of Resident Evil (albeit kind of a bastdardized cinematic universe rather than canon stories that fit perfectly with the games,) rather than adapting individual stories faithfully.
I've played those games; I don't need to watch them again. I have Youtube for that, or a savegame on my PlayStation to just play the story again. The story of the early games was just sort of atmosphere as it was, kind of junky-but-fun material that didn't really hold up in the telling well (especially before the director's cut of 1, and at least now with REmake it feels like it's a story written by all the same alien creatures but still not the Great Amer'Japanese Novel.) Seeing the RE1 or even 2/3 story play out on screen, just with differently-bad actors, I don't know why I'd want that.
Also, the REverse has always been an expanding saga. Especially when the P.Anderson movies started, they usually had a recognizable character but then also a completely unknown character as the playable pair. New landscape, new characters, returning characters have often gone through some massive change since the last time we saw them... the Resident Evil games weren't this static or narrow thing, they always went unseen places and often with unknown characters. So it made sense for the cinema world to be a unique character in their own pocket of the RE saga, and their story would weave into the games here and there, and add addition contents to what you know about the grander Umbrella conspiracy, (which didn't really happen, but so be it,) but largely to expand the canvas of RE. A game-to-movie like Tomb Raider or Uncharted, that approach doesn't make much sense because those games are about Lara Croft or Nathan Drake, not about the tombs or the adventure, but RE was already going off into several directions, so why not one more direction with the movie timeline?
Show me something I don't already know.
The fact that the P.Anderson movies were schlocky didn't sell them as the better way to go, but to me, it made sense to start with a new character, because of my reasons above and also some of your reasons listed. Making a faithful set, that's easy; finding a good actor who can pull off a faithful portrayal of a game character, that's much harder. Paul Anderson certainly wasn't up to the task of finding those actors. What was good about the P.Anderson movies was that they were about somebody named Alice, and if you were interested in Alice, you got a shitload of it, and if you didn't, you never needed to watch any of those movies since they had no importance to the RE timeline.
(I guess you can also skip this shitty Welcome to Raccoon movie too, since it's just a haphazard rehash and I'm sure no changes matter to the games, but I just never want to have one of those nerd conversations of, "Oh, you must not know about blahblahblah that happened in the movie...")
Like, should I spare one single brain cell the energy of paying attention to the story of the Monster Hunter movie? No, because it's obviously bullshit with no connection to the games. But would my eyeballs enjoy seeing a Diablos churning through the sand of a desert or a Rathalos ripping apart everything it comes in contact with? I don't known, don't ask my brain, just make it look cool and put it streaming somewhere and who knows what'll happen when I'm drunk...
