![]() ![]() It even has a high-profile fan in one James Cameron. But as its own thing, Anderson’s first Resident Evil is efficient and enjoyable enough. The soundtrack is an industrial score by Marilyn Manson and Marco Beltrami and a jukebox of early-2000s metal including Slipknot and Rammstein. Where the game was slow, quiet and eerie, the film is fast, loud and action-packed. The film ends with Matt being taken away by Umbrella scientists for Nemesis experimentation, and Alice waking up (again) in hospital, and walking outside into a deserted and derelict Raccoon City. Alice remembers that she was an Umbrella employee who'd gone rogue and started working to expose the company's weird science. Cue battles through zombie hordes and "lickers" (monsters also brought in from the game) to find the anti-virus. Alice and her newfound allies Rain ( Michelle Rodriguez) and Matt ( Eric Mabius) and some Umbrella commandos override the Red Queen and accidentally let the zombies out. The Red Queen to seal it off to avert a pandemic. There’s been an accidental T-Virus outbreak in the laboratory complex – The Hive – causing A.I. But it’s all spun around a new story and an original character: the mystery of Milla Jovovich’s Alice, who wakes up in the mansion with amnesia and has to piece together who she is and what’s going on. There are also some mashed-in elements and easter eggs from other games, including the wider setting of Raccoon City, and mention of the Nemesis Project, which is about creating a sort of undead mutant Terminator. The story principally lifts the Spencer Mansion setting from the first game, along with the idea that there’s a secret lab underneath it, from which the nefarious Umbrella Corporation have been experimenting with "The T-Virus" and accidentally created zombies (okay, "infected", but allow us the shorthand). This was essentially a European film based on a Japanese video game. Zombies were such an unsafe bet that Resident Evil didn’t even have any American financing. Romero’s return with Land of the Dead, was a couple of years away. The First Resident Evil arrived a few months before 28 Days Later, and the triple-whammy of Shaun of the Dead, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake and George A. It’s hard to remember now, but in 2002, zombies were nowhere near the mainstream. (Note: Names that appear in the games are highlighted in bold.) Resident Evil (2002) With movie reboot Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City on the way, Empire presents the ultimate start-to-finish guide to the live-action Resident Evil films – following the whole barking mad plot, exploring how they all tie in together, and explaining how they relate to the games. Sometimes the fans hated it, but I felt like the end result was a good one." You risk alienating the fans if you deviate too far, but if you don’t deviate at all you kind of don’t appeal to a movie audience. While you have to appeal to the core fanbase who love the game, you also have to make a film. What makes a successful video game doesn’t necessarily make a successful movie. "Adapting games into movies is not easy," Anderson told Empire. Somehow, the director turned a claustrophobic zombie survival horror property into an action sci-fi spectacle, with a very loose grasp on continuity and a protagonist – occasionally super-powered and much cloned – who isn’t in the games at all. It’s all the more impressive given the consistent critical kicking the films received, and the poor word-of-mouth from the game-faithful who were unhappy with the liberties Anderson took with the material. It still holds the record for the most successful film series based on a video game. For a while it was officially the most successful horror film franchise of all time, until James Wan’s Conjuring universe stripped it of its title. The six films so far have taken more than a billion dollars at the international box office. That film arrived in 2002 and has spawned, to date, five increasingly bonkers sequels and a reboot that’s due in December. "Eventually he returned my calls and I asked him what he’d been doing and he said, ‘I’ve been playing Resident Evil! We have to make the movie!’ He’d literally been up all night for weeks playing this game." "I couldn’t get hold of Paul for weeks," Bolt told Empire in 2016. A notorious flop, it gave Anderson some downtime to consider his next move. Anderson and producer Jeremy Bolt made the infamous sci-fi action movie Soldier, starring Kurt Russell.
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