How do you evaluate the movie "Esident Crisis"?

As a player of all Resident Evil series games, what can I say about this movie? First of all, it is closer to the plot of the original game than Milla Jovovich’s Resident Evil series of movies. But because the game Resident Evil is actually difficult to adapt into a movie, because the main line of the game is that the player controls the protagonist to act alone, thereby triggering the plot. It is impossible for a movie to film the protagonist from beginning to end and completely follow the plot of the game, so reasonable adaptations can only be made. But for this movie, he didn't adapt it well. He combined the plots of the first, second and second parts of the game together, although from the game timeline, the first, second and third parts of the timeline all took place in the Raccoon City Crisis. That night, only the characters controlled by the players were different. This leads to plot conflicts and role conflicts between various characters. For example, brother and sister Claire, Jill, and Leon are all protagonists, and each had a different experience that night. The movie mixed them together, resulting in a nondescript plot, and each character's role was limited, resulting in no clear explanation of whose role it was. Second, there are many hidden lines in the movie, such as Wesker in the last Easter egg and Evelyn in the orphanage. However, these hidden lines are also laid regardless of the type, which is very different from the game plot. Even if we follow the hidden structure laid out in this movie, the final result will take at least three or four films to explain clearly. If the step is too big, it will easily be messed up.

When it comes to zombie movies, the "Resident Evil" series is a name that cannot be ignored.

In 2003, when the first "Resident Evil" movie starring Milla Jovovich was released, it not only received a great reputation, but also made a lot of money at the global box office.

Subsequently, the producer Constantine Pictures released 5 sequels in 15 years. Although the style later changed from horror zombie movies to assembly line action movies, and the reputation also declined, the box office continued to rise.

The global box office of "The Finale" released in 2017 reached US$312 million, of which US$160 million came from mainland China.

Although 312 million is not very high compared to other blockbusters that easily earn over 1 billion US dollars at the box office, it is still cost-effective.

With a global sales of US$1.2 billion for the entire series, the producer will naturally not let this cash cow go.

Three months after the finale was released, Constantine Films announced that it would restart the "Resident Evil" series.

Recently, the latest reboot of this series, the first film "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City", was released abroad.

The reviews of this movie on major rating websites can be described as appalling. IMDb scored 5.6, and Rotten Tomatoes’ professional freshness rating was only 29%.

Although this series failed Rotten Tomatoes, as the most important audience, it bought it.

However, this movie is an exception. The global box office in its first week of release was only 13.9 million US dollars. Generally speaking, the first week box office performance of most movies is the key to the success or failure of the entire movie. The box office performance in subsequent weeks will be Continued lower.

As a reboot with a production cost of US$25 million, it is expected that it will be difficult for this movie to make back the money.

Unless it is released in mainland China, it may have a chance of survival, but at the moment, it seems that there is little chance of being released in mainland China.

Again, let’s first briefly talk about the plot of this movie, and then talk about its advantages and disadvantages.

Although the previous game was claimed to be adapted from the game "Resident Evil", it was criticized by game fans.

The producer seems to have noticed the dissatisfaction of fans, so the plot of the reboot is mainly based on the first and second generations of the game. Even the focus of the announcement is to restore the original flavor to the game itself.

Therefore, there are a lot of wonderful restorations of the game in the movie. The truck driver who appears at the beginning is a restoration of the first scene of the second-generation game, and even the scene of eating a hamburger is almost exactly the same.

There are also the designs of various buildings in Raccoon City, including police stations, underground parking lots, orphanages, etc., as well as some forms of big bosses.

The plot is the same as the game, with the protagonist and a group of people escaping from Raccoon City as the main line. In fact, this plot is a bit conflicting with Mira's version of "Resident Evil 2".

What is more attractive to fans is that these characters are all from games, and can also better distance themselves from game fans.

Except for the heroine Claire, all the other characters in the film are basically NPCs who come to complete tasks. Perhaps for game fans, these are acceptable because they all know the endings of these characters in the game. .

But for me, who is a bit face-blind, I didn’t understand the positioning of each character until I watched almost half of the movie.

If a movie makes the audience feel this way, there is no doubt that the movie's characterization is substandard.

Zombie movies in recent years all like to use explosive actions such as gunshots to attack zombies.

This is true even for the later Mira versions.

But this film is very different, and this is the only thing I want to praise about this film. The tone of the whole film is more like a thriller. Perhaps because I thought James Wan was the producer in the early stages of development, the horror atmosphere created by the entire film even made me feel like I was watching "Insidious" for a while.

The entire first half of the film is paving the way for such an atmosphere, starting with the weird scene of a truck driver hitting someone on a rainy night, the castle-like house, and the foggy mansion outside.

The appearance of this movie seems to remind the protagonist at all times that some catastrophic terrorist events have occurred in this city, and they are preparing to annex the city.

The fear and unknown that the protagonists feel before the zombies attack is an effect that cannot be replaced by any big scene, and the same is true for the fear of ghost movies.

Jump scare, another classic element of thrillers, is not inconsistent here. The zombies lurking around suddenly appear in front of the audience in an extremely terrifying form.

In the opening scene, when little Claire meets the strange-looking mysterious figure for the first time, there is only the sound of rain outside and the protagonist’s own breathing, plus the lighting of the mysterious figure’s face and the sudden voice. The sound effects can indeed scare the audience. Although this method is old-fashioned, it still works.

Starting from the second half, the film abandons this atmosphere creation and focuses on various monsters.

After the audience knows the appearance of the monster and lacks imagination space for the monster, the scary atmosphere they feel will be much weaker.

What makes people even more helpless to complain is the way the big boss dies at the end. Instead of the protagonists working together to defeat the monster, they are killed directly in a super fast, simple and crude way.

This level of speechlessness is like Batman defeating the Joker not with wisdom, but with a machine gun fired at the mortal Joker dozens of times, killing the Joker directly.

After watching the whole movie, the first half felt like I was watching a thriller, but the second half felt like I was watching an action movie.

There is no doubt that the fusion of these two styles fails in this film.