Compared to the game, it falls way short.

Rating: 4/10 (16 March 2002)

Okay, I am going to warn you that the following comments may contain spoilers, because I'm not sure if comparing scenes from the film and the game could be seen as such.
Anyway, Resident Evil is less like the video game and more like Event Horizon (by the same director, Paul Anderson) meets Dawn of the Dead (by the man who basically invented zombies, George Romero). Here's the bad first, as it is a lot easier to recall the bad than the good.

Screw Up #1: Changing the script! Our Event Horizon director must have really liked his old film, because he decided to rewrite the RE script and make the Umbrella lab a slave of some AI computer, just like the "living spaceship" in EH. It felt more like the team was in battle with the lab instead of the zombies. And to think they initially had George Romero on the staff and let him get away!
Screw Up #2: The zombies (what's left?)! There were no zombies in the mansion like in the game, it was basically "zip right to the lab to make the movie easier to shoot i.e. more contained." The zombies that were in the film were not scary or gory (except for a couple) and unlike older (Romero) zombie films, there was little violence in their destruction. No humor, no creativity, terribly crowded camera work on many of the "zombie" sequences, etc.
Screw Up #3: The plot (now what's left?). The plot was a total rip off of Dawn of the Dead, yet Dawn was a much more entertaining, well-rounded movie. One major difference is that Anderson didn't take any time to develop ANY of the characters, so we really could care less who gets killed. When the good guys do die, most viewers won't even remember their names at that very moment.
Screw Up #4: Translation (yep, that's right). They did not use ONE character from ANY of the games! Anderson claimed that using characters from the game would make the film too predictable. I (and I hope you agree) think that was a BAD move. I think his reason was that he didn't know JACK about the characters, so instead of doing some hard-nosed research on the games to "get it right" he decided to do it "his" way. Ouch!
Screw Up #5: The ending. I won't give that away though...
The Good: If you saw the commercial or trailer you saw most of the good stuff i.e. the dog getting kicked in the head, the lab sets were great, Milla is so beautiful I think she was the only reason most guys watch the film to the end, and there are a FEW other parts of the movie relative to the game which aren't worth mentioning. I had mixed feelings about Tomb Raider when I saw it, I thought it was good, but not very deep. But compared to this, Tomb Raider looks like gold. Anderson did much better with Mortal Kombat, I'm not sure what happened here.
Overall score: 1.5 out of 4 stars