The Resident Evil franchise is, for better or worse, one of the most storied video game film adaptations, lasting for six films across fourteen years. The series varies wildly in quality, some entries unrecognizable from others, and each film is a totally different experience.

Paul W.S. Anderson directed each of the six Resident Evil films, which starred Anderson's wife Milla Jovovich. The series took inspiration, elements, and occasionally fully recreated scenes, from its source materials, but crafted an entirely separate storyline and new characters. This led to a very divisive fan response to the series, with some writing it off entirely while others embraced the differences.

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Best: Resident Evil (2002)

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The first cinematic take on Capcom's classic horror franchise is undoubtedly the best. Released in 2002, Resident Evil was an early entry into the video game movie craze, before fans were made cynical by years of failure. Paul W.S. Anderson was chosen to direct the film after the modest success of his 1995 Mortal Kombat film marked what was then the height of expectations for the genre. Anderson decided to avoid too much connection to the games because video game movies tended to underperform. Anderson was reportedly such a big fan of the franchise that he had written a script for a film that he himself dubbed a ripoff of Capcom's opus. Routinely in the modern era, R-rated films are edited down to appeal to younger audiences, but Anderson knew Resident Evil needed to be faithful to its source. Reportedly, the film needed edits to drop from an NC-17 to an R.

Resident Evil is the story of Alice, a mysterious amnesiac who awakens alongside a pair of men in an otherwise deserted mansion. The trio discovers a sprawling laboratory system hidden beneath the landscape, which they then discover they've been tasked with guarding. Joined by a team of heavily armed commandos, Alice and company delve into the secretive Umbrella Corporation's research facility. While there, they encounter high-tech traps, CGI recreations of in-game monsters, and tons of gruesome fast-paced violence.

The film is far from perfect, but it's the most cohesive entry in the series. It's a story that feels totally reasonable within the world of the games, without simply retelling any game's story. It gradually escalates from a claustrophobic horror film to an absurd action film in a way that feels well-earned. Its visual style is striking, with red lighting and visceral gore set against the stark and clinical white laboratory surroundings. Most of the action is fun, though a fair amount of it is very dated, some of it still looks good. Overall, Resident Evil is a solid film set in the beloved universe.

Worst: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

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The second film established the series as an action franchise, the third increased the scale, the fourth is too hilarious to hate, but Retribution, the fifth film, is an embarrassing disaster. Each film in the franchise made their references to the games, becoming more intrusive over the years as original ideas seemed to run out. Retribution is the point of critical mass, not just abandoning all pretext for its appropriation, not just shoving in random references, but breaking beloved characters into unrecognizable forms as if they were trying to gain fans' ire. The previous entry, Afterlife, features a frame-by-frame recreation of a cutscene from Resident Evil 5, and yet, Retribution still manages to feel shameless by the series' standards. But ruining parts of the source material is not the only thing that the franchise overdoes by this fifth entry, it goes too far in almost every direction.

By this point in the franchise, Alice has been clearly established as the only character who matters. Most other original characters are dead or turned evil and all of the characters from the game are there to be recognizable, like cosplayers in a photoshoot. The film sees Alice, now so powerful that nothing seems like a credible threat to her, enter a VR simulation and battle through a frozen lab station. All the unique visual style of the early franchise is replaced with generic wreckage and largely CGI suburbs. All the action boils down to characters firing guns at floods of zombies or engaging in endless samey hand-to-hand brawls.

Any attempt at horror fled the franchise by the third entry, there is absolutely nothing scary about this film, though not for lack of trying. The film retreads aspects of earlier entries with even less context, resorting to stealing moments from its own franchise that often weren't perfect the first time. And perhaps worst of all, the film ends on a deeply unsatisfying cliffhanger that is never paid off. The film is a complete narrative dead end, so meaningless and dumb that it manages to be the bottom of the barrel, in a franchise that seemed to delve deeper every time.

Resident Evil is a very enjoyable film, and there's a ton of fun buried within its sequels, even the bad parts are often fun to watch. With Welcome to Raccoon City now in theaters, fans can only hope that it'll be a shining diamond in this lovably chaotic franchise.

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