Turn on the game system. Resident Evil jumps out across the screen and a booming growl emits “Resident Evil”. Suddenly here you are amidst a creepy battle between living and walking dead. Now it’s time to kick some serious zombie tail.
You choose a character and get ready to fight whatever jumps around the corner. The uniquely placed camera angles leaves suspense wherever you point that shotgun. Open a door into a gloomy room with eerie music consisting of mysterious diaries and documents. Maybe even find some puzzles to open the door in a strange mansion that’s more than what meets the eye.
Turn on the DVD. There’s a plot, a viral outbreak has occurred in an underground facility named “The Hive” and the workers and inhabitants are all turning into zombies. Now we have a set of characters we become familiar with. Here we have a George A. Romero-esque live action zombie plague.
Coming from an avid fan of the Resident Evil series, I noticed the differences quite quickly between the movies and the games, leaving me scratching my head.
For starters I noticed this woman Alice, played by Milla Jokovich was this security guard for The Umbrella Corporation, who secretly develops viruses for bio-weapons. She later becomes infected and teams with STARS specialist in the fight for humanity. The Umbrella part I understood, but who was this woman becoming a central character to the plot, yet I had never encountered her in any single game prior to the movie?
I know in films, character development is important and they can’t just be robots, (in which they tend to act in videogames) but what bothers me is the main game characters such as STARS’ Jill Valentine interacting with other characters I feel as though I should know from playing the games. Never has there ever been a character who worked among Umbrella yet, then revolted against the system.
One main direction the films went was in which they fully disregarded the Resident Evil zero game which was released a year before the movie. Where was the acknowledgment of the enigmatic James Marcus and his giant leech creatures? The films wanted to base the macabre and wrongdoings in large part to Albert Wesker but from playing the series; this was simply not the case.
Might I also add that Resident Evil 2 is largely disregarded as well. As viewers experience the monstrous frog-like beasts considered the Lickers, the game misses most of the various different creatures introduced in the second game, such as the mutating creatures exposed to perhaps the more powerful G-virus.
But it isn’t just the story and character development that has been skewed but also the rough idea of certain translated creatures. Just take the nemesis featured in Resident Evil 3 and Apocalypse. In the film, while the intention of Nemesis remains to destroy STARS members and whatever stands in its way, it doesn’t show how the virus causes it to evolve through time as it does in the game, and also gives the Nemesis an emotional light, in which it breaks down at the end of Apocalypse. While this is done for the sake of Hollywood, this is not The Nemesis I know.
Among the differences however lie similarities and reasons within the film in which a gamer fan can appreciate. The strong acknowledgment of the mansion remains strong as a tie-in between the movies and games. The basic story of the T-Virus is essentially the same. And while the outcomes are certainly different for characters in the game, the film characters have the same names and occupations.
What I am mostly driving toward, is the fact that a movie can ruin a gamer’s film derived experience, as this film series has officially done for me. The Resident Evil movies were a huge success and brought a somewhat different story attributed to a zombie outbreak. Sure, Action and horror was a premium in both games, but as someone who has played and beaten many of the games through and through, sometimes I am left shaking my head and I wonder if these writers and directors base their knowledge off of basic summaries rather than becoming deeply immersed in the games. They strive to appeal to common game fans with the mere title and decide to create their own diverse Resident Evil world. The world–wide famous game from the nineties should be the main focus for a film from the millennium based from the series, fair and square, the games have the upper-hand.
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