Does Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, Emulate the Game?
Apocalyptic and survival games and movies have, for the most part, been enjoyed and continue to be enjoyed the world over. In recent years, the genre has taken quite a knock, but it has since received a fresh new take with the latest horror Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Now, we can argue that games have prepared us for so-called zombies and scary creatures, but there are other survival guides you need, like watching a survival movie or reading a survival horror comic book.
A brief history
In 1996, video game developer Capcom (behind some famous games such as Street Fighter, Devil May Cry, and Mega Man) released Resident Evil. The premise was simple, outlive and fight your way through a mansion filled with zombies and other monsters. The game was released on PlayStation One. Players could choose between Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, two special forces members racing to escape their hell on Earth.
Now for the movie
The story follows Claire and Chris Redfield (Kaya Scodelario and Robbie Amell) who live in an orphanage in Raccoon City. Claire befriends a disfigured girl who she later finds out has been experimented on by Dr. William Birkin (Neal McDonough). He is an employee of the Umbrella Corporation and oversees the orphanage where he takes children to experiment on them. Once Claire is selected to be experimented on, she escapes leaving Birkin to think his problems are over, but it’s only just begun.
When Claire returns years later, she hitchhikes back into Raccoon City and is picked up by a truck driver who is accompanied by a Doberman. While distracted, the truck driver hits a woman walking in the road. The two then investigate and stumble upon a pool of blood which the Doberman starts to lick, and later proves fatal as the Doberman starts foaming at the mouth and becomes a full-on zombie dog, scary!
Meanwhile, rookie police officer Leon S. Kennedy, played by Avan Jogia, is sitting in a diner when he notices blood coming from the owner’s eyes. In the meantime, Claire heads over to her brother Chris to warn him about Umbrella Corp’s experiments. And during this time things become clearer to Claire that Umbrella Corp unleashed pure evil on Raccoon City. Chris, who is a member of a special task force called the STARS Alpha team, meets up with his team members consisting of Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), Richard Aiken (Chad Rook), Brad Vickers (Nathan Dales) Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper), and the police chief at the police station, to discuss the recent events. The team is then dispatched to Spencer Mansion to investigate a missing police crew. What follows is a pure survival horror with zombies, unbelievable creatures, and a mole that’s ready to sabotage the team at any given moment.
What we thought
As, with any franchise, die-hard fans lose their minds when the characters are not depicted exactly as they are in the game or book, and that’s exactly what happened when Avan Jogia was cast as Leon S. Kennedy. You will remember Jogia from the series Twisted and The Stranger and a range of other movies as well.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City truly pays homage to the video game. Firstly, the dark setting of the film (the lighting in particular) keeps you on the edge of your seat with loads of jump scares that eerily remind you of the video game. In the original video game, you can play with Chris or Jill, but the film’s main protagonist Claire is all you will want in a savior who is willing to unravel and reveal to the world a corrupt corporation. Claire’s character was spared the experiments, yet she’s willing to risk her life to save the people and the place she once called home, a true hero in anyone’s book.
And while the original Resident Evil movies from the early 2000s did not quite live up to the hype, except for the first installment in the franchise, Welcome to Raccoon City will have fans of the video game in awe. Many have questioned if the film is another diluted version of this horror survival game but it comes packed with so much horror and it’s scary too. The movie was pretty much marketed for fans so that it would stick to the video game throughout, and did it? Yes, Welcome to Raccoon City delivers in this aspect 100 percent. Welcome to Raccoon City deserves a score of 8 out of 10.
