Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

The many hours I spent with the first two Resident Evil games didn’t do my college GPA any favors, but the sweet spot they found between the immersive dread of a good zombie movie and the adrenaline rush of a good action/adventure game was a revelation. Two great tastes that taste great together, and they even threw in some fun puzzles while they were at it.

The series lost me when it veered into convoluted storylines and conventional third-person-shooter gameplay, and while Paul W.S. Anderson’s loose RE film adaptations have their defenders, the first two left me cold and I didn’t bother with the rest. So by the time a new RE film trailer started making the rounds in 2026, I was more than two decades removed from any interest in the franchise. But I got curious when I saw Weapons writer/director Zach Cregger’s name on the thing, and even more curious when the early reviews were positive.

So as I prepared for reentry into RE’s undead phantasmagoria, a reasonable appetizer seemed to be 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a reboot said to be more faithful to the source material than Anderson’s films. And Raccoon City is indeed careful to highlight many of the narrative particulars of the first two games, with familiar characters green-screened into meticulous recreations of some of the games’ most memorable environments. What it unfortunately leaves out is the games’ extensive variety of horrific creatures, apparently due to drastic budget cuts, and at that point, they really should have just pulled the plug.

What makes the games successful is the escalating terror of exploring vast locations with unnerving atmosphere, holding your breath with every door opened and corner turned, wondering what new mutant horror awaits. The first game in particular has a good cinematic premise, with an elite paramilitary squad lured into a secret lab as unwitting gladiators battle-testing the efficacy of a corrupt pharmaceutical company’s biological weapons. Little of that made its way into the film’s final script, and the various easter eggs referencing other moments from the games are mostly empty gestures at best, as is the wannabe John Carpenter ambience. Incredibly, even with all the best stuff missing, the film, tasked with adapting not one but two sprawling games, is still overstuffed with scenarios and characters, almost none of whom are meaningfully developed.

Cregger has shown himself capable of much better, so I don’t expect his film to be a dud like this one. His film is also reportedly unconcerned with fan service, which is fine with me. The contours don’t matter nearly as much as the feel, and I’m looking forward to seeing if he can nail the alchemy of fun, scary, and dumb that made the original Resident Evil games rightful hits.