Resident Evil Franchise (Anderson/Witt/Mulcahy, 2002-2017)

[davoarid]

How was there no mention of the cinematic event of the decade: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter ?

Cool story: It's Monday now, and it's not getting released until Thursday. And both the 7:00 and 10:00 showings at my local theater have already sold out.

[colinr0380]

I think many people who might be interested in that are currently distracted by the imminent arrival of Resident Evil VII.

[chiendent]

Is there much overlap between fans of the games and the movies? A lot of the praise I've read for the movies seems more focused on Paul WS Anderson's over-the-top direction rather than the mythos. I've only seen the first movie and played bits of the games so I'm not too qualified to compare them.

Also, how did I not know ::kogonada's directorial debut is in Sundance this year? Is someone out there actively trying to make my worst nightmares into reality?

[colinr0380]

A little, but the games and movies are separate things. Though the films feature significant locations, monsters and characters (Chris and Claire Redfield, Jil Valentine, Ada Wong and Albert Wesker) Milla Jovovich's character was always newly created for the films from the very beginning. Which makes sense to let the films build their own convoluted mythology separate from the games.

(By the way the two animated films: Resident Evil: Damnation and Resident Evil: Degeneration are more spin offs from the game series than the live action film one)

The main reason Resident Evil VII is causing a lot of excitement is for its very P.T. influenced playable demo that has been building anticipation (though I'm worried that people's expectations for the 'P.T. game that never was' might raise expectations too far!). Plus its first person perspective is the next change in mechanical style for the series after Resident Evil 4 basically defined a First Person Shooter control scheme for games for a decade. So its captured a lot of people's attention the way the previous Resident Evil games did not.

[davoarid]

How was there no mention of the cinematic event of the decade: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter ?

Cool story: It's Monday now, and it's not getting released until Thursday. And both the 7:00 and 10:00 showings at my local theater have already sold out.

Well, they had a special screening yesterday, and I was one of 6 people who got the news. Yay me!

At one point in the film Milla Jovovich says to the vain and narcissistic con man who's occupying the White House:

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"You're fired."

I knew PWSA would reward my faith in him over all these years.

[solaris72]

I like the eccentricity of this series- like the Planet of the Apes movies in the 70s,

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the world ended in the second movie and then they kept on making more movies.

Also they remind me qualitatively of 30s serials moreso than the pastiches of Lang or Lucas or Spielberg- a flimsy story that is always impatient for the next action sequence, featuring tissue thin characters, relying on cliffhanger endings that are usually ignored or retconned into irrelevancy in the next movie.

[colinr0380]

Its also an interesting series for the way that its as much about the pleasures of absurd imagery and impossible spaces as plot in some ways. Though the same could be said about the 30s serials too! The films are always foregrounding a deceptively normal surface and revealing it to be hiding a hidden base, or a horrible mutation just underneath. And its interesting the way that the films have used Jovovich's Alice character (as in Lewis Carroll) as the centre of all of that, almost as a muse figure constantly changing and shifting roles and allegiances (and even getting cloned and multiplied!), compared to all the characters from the videogame world who pop up as fan service and get more rigidly defined in their roles.