Man, where to start with this.
I guess I'll start with the good.
The set designs for this were on point. The police headquarters and the mansion were very well done and very faithful to the games. However the train set up looked horribly underdone.
The makeup effects for the infected was actually pretty creepy. It felt like a fairly realistic version of what people who are sick and slowly getting sicker would look like. Their bones starting to protrude more, hair loss, saggy skin, and just overall sickly. I really wish we would have gotten more of this and less of the CGI. The few practical effects we got, I actually enjoyed.
Speaking of CGI, it was absolutely horrendous in this movie. It felt like they were trying to invoke the same exact CGI used in the original games but it just didn't work here. The birkin monster, the dog, the licker and the truck crash just looked horrible. Even crappy CGI nowadays is pretty good and this looks like something an amateur did 15 years ago in their basement.
I really feel only Claire had any really character development. All the other characters barely had any time to flesh out and felt like hollow imitations of their game counterparts. Especially Leon. That's twice now that a resident evil movie has been attempted with probably the most well-known character from the games and somehow managed to completely screw him up. That's not on the actor, he did about as well as he could with just a really bad interpretation of Leon Kennedy.
Unfortunately it seems like they tried to fit multiple storylines into one movie. They really should have broken this up into multiple movies, or honestly, a TV series. We barely spent any time with the infected or the mutations. Nothing in this movie felt like a real threat because each thing was dead soon after it was introduced. Rarely does a movie feel like it has too much and too little at the same time. This accomplice that feat well.
Now the suspenseful parts it did, IE the girl running off into the woods, the girl in the orphanage, the infected at the gate, and the zombie's swarming and attacking at the mansion was actually very well done. I absolutely loved those parts and wish we would have gotten so much more of that.
I appreciate that this movie tried to keep it somewhat faithful to the original material, however, the other resident evil movie spent way more time with the zombies and with the mutations and made each feel like a legitimate threat. None of the creatures in this one felt scary or threatening because they didn't have time to.
I liked parts of it well enough to hope that they actually go through with a sequel and hopefully in the sequel, they spend more time fleshing out characters, spend more on their CGI, and make the creatures involved feel like legitimate threats.
CGI: 3 out of 10
Acting: 5 out of 10
Set Design: 8 out of 10
Practical Effects: 8 out of 10
Rewatch: 4 out of 10
