Borderline blasphemy to the original game

Rating: 5/10 (10 April 2020)

"Resident Evil" is a 2002 horror film and video game adaptation directed by Paul W.S. Anderson starring Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez. As I previously expressed, my love for the video game franchise and all of its titles is endless. They accompanied me through high school and even as of today, I routinely play them as if it was the first time. I can never escape the packing atmosphere and the unique feeling that it never fails to create in me. While I adore the original games, I've always kept myself from watching the movies, as I heard they are nothing like the games. But now that I made my way through the "Silent Hill" adaptations, I thought it was long overdue to survive those films as well. I really wasn't expecting much, but what this movie offered was a huge disappointment even for that standard.
First of all, it's totally obvious that this film absolutely distanced itself from the source material. It's more than heavily adapted, it's something that's at last loosely connected with the iconic franchise. I knew about that. But what was this supposed to be? Neither does any of the beloved main characters appear in here, the whole premise has been extremely altered. Instead it follows a group of soldiers on the mission to contain the virus, with Milla Jovovich's character Alice (as only mentioned in the credits) as the protagonist. Many things from the game are name-dropped and only mentioned by the way and no part of the actual story. Even if this tries to be something on its own, it's still nothing but only just mediocre as a horror film. Director Anderson who's responsible for the infamously trashy gem "Mortal Kombat" tries to bring his own vision to the big screen, but fails to achieve anything I'd consider notable. After watching this film, I additionally watched a short documentary segment in which he explains his actions. In a nutshell, the man is a total hypocrite. He states that he'd absolutely love the game and always wanted to make it come to life and describes his admiration for the atmosphere, the characters and the specific kind of horror it created. Then why didn't he include any of those aspects? What did he do instead? In his own words, something that functions as some sort of prequel to the game. And I was even more confused. Funnily, he was confident enough to claim that he treated the source material with immense respect. What he just didn't. He simply did not. The plot is a total mess with less than a handful of scenes that I liked. Nothing else. Except from famously cheesy dialogue and one-liners, it didn't do anything about creating some similar sort of atmosphere. It's nonexistent. While I see some kind of silver lining in the not quite brilliant yet charismatic performance by Jovovich, how she roundhouse kicks the zombie hound and how the side characters die in the laser beam sequence, it's still nothing overall satisfying or entertaining. Don't even get me started about those horrible visual effects that are so bad my running gag of comparing it to PS2 graphics wouldn't make any sense in this case. Not even the zombie makeup looks scary in any way. I've seen countless film way older than this one which nailed to have frightening make up, so there's no excuse for it that they are so dull like this. They're worse. It's an imprudent and catastrophic mess that dares to call itself "Resident Evil". All in all, it's an absolutely terrible adaptation, but a mediocre action horror film that just didn't make anything on its own, although it's obviously intended. Despite declaring himself a huge fan of the franchise, director Anderson was without a doubt too incompetent to realize a decent life action adaptation of his allegedly favourite game. He completely misunderstood the source material and failed to capture its quintessential features. To be honest, given what he made here, it feels like he's never ever played any of the games. He wanted to make something original, but there's a difference between creating something from a fan favourite source material and insultingly using its huge success to half-heartedly produce a totally estranged flick that people hoped would be anything like their favourite horror experience. Not really surprising that he never achieved to make something outstanding. Aside from this, it would be more bearable if it wasn't named "Resident Evil". But what do I know? The outcome of PWSA's questionable experiment is nothing short of blasphemy. I expected low quality, but wow. It only gets and E for effort. If this was already the "best" I don't know what's about to come after it...