Why so much hate?

[Teen Tyrant]

This thread is sort of continuing a conversation started in the So Bad It's Good thread, because I didn't want it to get too off-topic and focus on these movies, so I'm going to drop it off here and continue.

To be clear from the get-go, I get why people hate the moves. I just have never been able to see why they are hated so much. I really feel like the RE movies are disliked more than they deserve, or at the very least, that the reason why most people give for disliking them is not entirely accurate. I will post a quote I was going to respond to in the other thread here, to continue the discussion:

I see them as the opposite. They’re entertaining in the way of popcorn flicks but, as Resident Evil adaptations, they are horrible.

That's what I'm always hearing, that they're bad as adaptations. And really, that's only true to a certain extent. The first movie was not a movie version of the first game, and did not star the characters from that game. Ok, fine, I get it. That's super disappointing and there was no reason to do that, and it just kept on from there, focusing on a character made up for the movie and bringing in characters from the actual games as side characters who supported the made up one. Completely agree and totally respect the anger at that viewpoint. I also understand why people dislike the full-fledged zombie apocalypse that was introduced in the third movie for the same reasons. Completely on board with that.

The rest of it, however, doesn't seem to level with the reason most people state is their reason for hating the movies; they are too different from the games. Excusing the fact that this is true of every video game adaptation movie, with the possible exceptions of Assassin's Creed and Detective Pikachu, I find the logic in this argument to be lacking. Yeah, they are different for the reasons listed above, but beyond that? An evil corporation named Umbrella, secretly working on a virus that turns people into zombies, usually, but also can be used to mutate them into other monsters, with a group of paramilitary soldiers fighting against them with limited support, and the whole thing is being manipulated by a White Supremacist poster child in sunglasses. There's a city blown up with a nuke, an unstoppable monster named Nemesis, parasites, Executioners, Tyrants, guys named Chris and Carlos and Leon and Barry, women named Jill and Claire and Ada, all of whom resemble in looks and personality their game counterparts. It's got lots of bullets, lots of explosions, people doing things that are at best implausible based on our understanding of physics...

It's Resident Evil, folks. Yeah, it focuses on Alice and not the people we play as; yeah the whole world ended, but it's not like the fact that it hasn't in the games is really relevant to the game series when you get right down to it. The games might be brownies while the movies are flan, but at the end of the day, it's still just cake.

 

[ToCool74]

Pretty straightforward answer to this really and not somethting I wish to debate for tthe 100th time in the span of the 18 years this topic has been rehashed, the reason is the films have a complete lack of respect for the source material and the characters, ,Alice is the end all be all and that would not have been as much of a issue if other popular mainstays like Claire, Jill, Chris, and Leon at least had a major part in the narrative (which they did not). Hell the respect was so low for the characters that the like of Leon, Jill, and Ada where all killed off offscreen in the Final Chapter which many fans took as a confirmation for what they had already found out anyway which is that the source material and its characters means nothing to these guys and they simply wanted to make this as mainstream as possible why using the Resident Evil lore but not respecting it and its characters. Business wise I get what they where doing but as a fan who loves the lore and its characters I never liked these movies for what they did which IMO was to butcher the source material to their liking and make it as mainstream as possible while centering on the wife of the guy (Anderson) who is in charge of the whole thing.

 

[bSTAR_182]

This thread is sort of continuing a conversation started in the So Bad It's Good thread, because I didn't want it to get too off-topic and focus on these movies, so I'm going to drop it off here and continue.

To be clear from the get-go, I get why people hate the moves. I just have never been able to see why they are hated so much. I really feel like the RE movies are disliked more than they deserve, or at the very least, that the reason why most people give for disliking them is not entirely accurate. I will post a quote I was going to respond to in the other thread here, to continue the discussion:



That's what I'm always hearing, that they're bad as adaptations. And really, that's only true to a certain extent. The first movie was not a movie version of the first game, and did not star the characters from that game. Ok, fine, I get it. That's super disappointing and there was no reason to do that, and it just kept on from there, focusing on a character made up for the movie and bringing in characters from the actual games as side characters who supported the made up one. Completely agree and totally respect the anger at that viewpoint. I also understand why people dislike the full-fledged zombie apocalypse that was introduced in the third movie for the same reasons. Completely on board with that.

The rest of it, however, doesn't seem to level with the reason most people state is their reason for hating the movies; they are too different from the games. Excusing the fact that this is true of every video game adaptation movie, with the possible exceptions of Assassin's Creed and Detective Pikachu, I find the logic in this argument to be lacking. Yeah, they are different for the reasons listed above, but beyond that? An evil corporation named Umbrella, secretly working on a virus that turns people into zombies, usually, but also can be used to mutate them into other monsters, with a group of paramilitary soldiers fighting against them with limited support, and the whole thing is being manipulated by a White Supremacist poster child in sunglasses. There's a city blown up with a nuke, an unstoppable monster named Nemesis, parasites, Executioners, Tyrants, guys named Chris and Carlos and Leon and Barry, women named Jill and Claire and Ada, all of whom resemble in looks and personality their game counterparts. It's got lots of bullets, lots of explosions, people doing things that are at best implausible based on our understanding of physics...

It's Resident Evil, folks. Yeah, it focuses on Alice and not the people we play as; yeah the whole world ended, but it's not like the fact that it hasn't in the games is really relevant to the game series when you get right down to it. The games might be brownies while the movies are flan, but at the end of the day, it's still just cake.

I'm not really sure where we are going with this, seeing as you have already acknowledged the fact that they are not good adaptations "to an extent". You also glazed over the part where I mentioned that the film series really goes downhill after the third movie.

While the first movie has nothing to do with the avatars of the games, it is appealing in that it is an interesting take on the events that caused the mansion leak and the 'woman in red' looking to expose Umbrella. The second movie finally introduces some of the actual game characters and story concepts from the games while giving it its own spin in film format. That is all well and good, despite there still being flaws. The third film is also entertaining; it has a cool desert setting and a really awesome boss fight at the end. Extinction actually left me interested in seeing what a sequel film would follow up with (granted it still would have been better if they nixed the whole extinction of life, and just made it a bunch of characters heading into the desert to destroy an Umbrella lab).

However, the films completely go off rails, for me, once they started to revolve around the 3D gimmick and take full focus on Alice as she outshines all of the game characters at every chance possible. They do all this while ripping scenes and lines from the games in the worst way, making it feel more like a parody to the actual games themselves, which ends up feeling like a slap to the face for many fans.

Unlike other video game adaptations, RE was rather successful as they went on to create 6 movies. That's obviously more than any other video game adaptation, which, in turn, also gives more material for fans to hate. The films were only successful because of the RE title being slapped onto each “adaptation” and the fun concept of bioweapons that could be molded into whatever story they wanted to tell about Alice.

I can’t argue for adaptations like Assassin’s Creed (as I’ve never played the games or seen the movie), but I’d say that the very first Silent Hill movie was a respectable adaptation to the game series it was based on. Even the 2018 Tomb Raider was an adaptation of decent quality. The RE movies simply get the hate they deserve as they continuously undermine the source material and focus more on gimmicks.

 

[Springhosen]

The films literally have nothing to do with the source material and blatantly disrespect the characters that actually make up this franchise.

Alice being the main character and her having superpowers negates the whole "survival horror" aspect where regular people are thrown into an extreme situation. She's not a regular person and has a distinct advantage in this situation which is not what Resident Evil is about.

There's also the fact that they straight up jacked a scene from Resident Evil 5 move for move and stuck it in the movie.

If the director wanted to make a movie about his wife he should've hired someone to write a movie about his wife, not force her into an existing video game franchise's lore and try to profit off its name.

 

[Mr.R]

A lot of what I think has been said here but...to be honest, they're not only bad adaptations. They're bad movies. Especially 5th and 6th.

5th movies feels like a videogame in the worst way possible. A mumbo jumbo of scenes that lacks cohesion, with a plot that derails more and more with a "clone farm" and a company that keeps making test scenarios of virus for a "market" that doesn't exist anymore. It's stupid.

6th is, without a doubt, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Camera work in this movie is awful and in action scenes the cuts doesn't last 3 seconds each, jumping and cutting all around to give you a headache. The plot? Well...which plot? Because the movie doesn't acknowledge the ending of the previous one, makes Wesker a bad guy again because "yes" (after making him a good guy because "yes") and then retcons not only the T-virus's origin but also everything that revolves the plot and Umbrella to old Alice, because there has to be an Alice in every.single.plot.point of this damn series. Oh yes, and Game of Thrones was a thing, so they brought back Iain Glen with a very bad excuse.

And there's Alice...

Well, I'm not a fan of Monster Hunter, but I'm sorry for those who are...I mean, Paul & Mila will be leading it on...

 

[Rain611]

See I have different reasons for not liking most of the movies I think, which is sad because when it was still early in the franchise I actually defended them... But the further you go into the sequels the more obvious it becomes that Paul WS Anderson doesn't give a **** about the art of story telling, and the later you get into the series, the more he seems to conveniently forget what he wrote in the previous film/s and just writes whatever could make the next one parallel whatever game was fresh at the time.

I don't care that the movies weren't closer to the games, ie dealing with new characters or not using storylines more similar to the game. I do care that the moment when Paul brought in a bunch of game characters as fan service he swiftly killed them all because reasons. I care that Alice was WAY too overpowered and this tends to make stories incredibly boring and predictible to watch, while Wesker, who was supposed to have those powers, was trapped under a door for an entire film. But most importantly, I care about the validity and importance of Story, and how haphazardly he would just ditch events from past movies because they didn't fit the narrative of the next one that he wanted to write.

As an aside, I think it's lame that he rewrote the first one so that Milla got all of Michelle's cool bits because she's jealous and married to the writer/director but I didn't want to include that because I guess it's more personal bias. But yea, I won't ever watch another Paul/Milla colab.

 

[Angel]

I actually like the films because they're nothing like the games. They're not something I would take a night out to go to the cinema to see but as an evening in with junk food and not much else to do, I'm happy to watch them.

But then to give that a bit more context, I'm not a fan of the games. I did enjoy RE 5 aside from some annoying mechanics that should have been sorted out and the terrible dialogue in places, but overall I am not someone who would ever choose to play a Resident Evil title. I tried 6 but got so fed up with the whole "kill him then watch him reform as something else and kill him again. Then again" thing that it lost all interest for me.

I never saw the films as anything other than entertaining fluff with some pretty bad acting in places and a few well-known monsters. But if I was a fan of the games then I could totally appreciate how irate it can make someone when something billed as being part of the franchise is nothing like it. It's a huge risk to take on a project, knowing it has a passionate fanbase, and then screwing it up not once, not twice but 6 times.

They did keep screwing up the casting for Wesker though. I don't even know what they were thinking there...

 

[La Femme Fatale]

^ Right? If I was a grandma, I could just pinch the heck out of those cute chubby little cheeks all day long.

Anyway, I echo Rain in that I didn't really care that they weren't faithful adaptations of the games, or that they didn't feature the game characters in more effective storylines. I didn't enjoy the franchise because they just weren't good movies - or perhaps, I wasn't their target audience. I actually thought the first one was great, the second one was fine and if I recall correctly, the third one wasn't too bad as well, but everything past three was just bad fanfic. Alice is sort of the quintessential Mary Sue - far more powerful than the other heroes, and then you go and shove a million of her clones at me? I'll pass.

Also, the films suffer from a lack of general cohesiveness. It always seemed as though the plot was never as important as the action scenes. At times, it felt like Anderson just strung together all the action sequences he liked best from the games, and then wrote whatever thinly-veiled plots he had in mind around them. And don't get me wrong, when I write, I have a habit of writing a scene and figuring out later how to get my characters to exactly that place. But those scenes are important plot points, not 'AND NOW HERE'S ALICE, JUMPING OFF A BUILDING... BACKWARDS!!... WHILE SHOOTING HER UZIS AT THE ZOMBIES BELOWWWW'.

 

[Awebb]

I kind of enjoyed the movie series with the exception of The Final Chapter. The first two movies were actually quite good RE movies that ticked a lot of boxes. It was clear from the start, that this adaption wouldn't be part of the main lore, so I just enjoyed the ride. The third movie removed the series too far from the original by introducing a walking dead style world and concentrated too much on a small cast of survivors. Afterlife and Retribution were also very enjoyable to watch.

The Final Chapter, however, betrayed the viewer. Retribution ended in a very specific way with very specific expectations for at least the beginning scene of the final movie, but that was swept away in a "it was a lie" "tell not show" kind of scene. The overall movie was too dark, too full of flicker light scenes, the action wasn't interesting and the overall conclusion sucked. They also completely ruined their relatively interesting Wesker interpretation.

 

[UniqTeas]

I feel like the first film is the only film with any sort of film credit to it. Sure, it diverts a lot from the games to create a unique story, but that is okay. It could have been handled better. I think the biggest issue with the first film is that there is too much attention on The Red Queen rather than actual characters from the story. The booby trap segments are cool, but didn't belong in a RE movie in that form. It was like the writers had a vague idea of what to put in to an RE movie and gave us the glamorized version of it.

The first film also only have zombies and a single licker as enemies. A big part of the life of the RE franchise is drawn from the unique enemies which there were none in this film. They could've done so much more!

Additionally, the second film is a complete action film without any horror in it at all. The finale of that movie is Alice in a FIST fight with NEMESIS. Why? It was bad then and bad when Jake fist fought the Ustanak. It is just not welcome in this UNiverse.

The movies have had okay moments and characters, but they could never recover from the shady start.

 

[bSTAR_182]

A lot of what I think has been said here but...to be honest, they're not only bad adaptations. They're bad movies. Especially 5th and 6th.

5th movies feels like a videogame in the worst way possible. A mumbo jumbo of scenes that lacks cohesion, with a plot that derails more and more with a "clone farm" and a company that keeps making test scenarios of virus for a "market" that doesn't exist anymore. It's stupid.

6th is, without a doubt, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Camera work in this movie is awful and in action scenes the cuts doesn't last 3 seconds each, jumping and cutting all around to give you a headache. The plot? Well...which plot? Because the movie doesn't acknowledge the ending of the previous one, makes Wesker a bad guy again because "yes" (after making him a good guy because "yes") and then retcons not only the T-virus's origin but also everything that revolves the plot and Umbrella to old Alice, because there has to be an Alice in every.single.plot.point of this damn series. Oh yes, and Game of Thrones was a thing, so they brought back Iain Glen with a very bad excuse.

And there's Alice...

Well, I'm not a fan of Monster Hunter, but I'm sorry for those who are...I mean, Paul & Mila will be leading it on...

Agreed, the last two were definitely the lower points of the series. Even if you were interested in any storyline they were somewhat developing, the next film would revolve around Alice with an entirely different group of underdeveloped characters.

It wasn’t that Alice was the main character, it was the fact that she was the only character they attempted to develop at all throughout the 6 movies. This became even more prominent by the 4th movie.

 

[PinkHerb]

Well, I don't hate the films, just disappointed on how it turned out. It started out with such promise, but after the second movie,it went down the crapper. I like the first film, and even though the second one was more flawed than the first, i have eased up on it. The third movie and beyond were such a disappointment to me, because they are just throwing in random crap that doesn't make any sense. Even if you judge the movies on their own merits, it is still bad because Anderson apparently either doesn't give a flying frick what he is directing, or is that disorganized and forgetful on a major scale. I think he even said that the entire franchise was carefully planned from the first movie to the Final Chapter, which I do not believe inthe slightest. Correct me if i am wrong.

 

[Mr.R]

Agreed, the last two were definitely the lower points of the series. Even if you were interested in any storyline they were somewhat developing, the next film would revolve around Alice with an entirely different group of underdeveloped characters.

It wasn’t that Alice was the main character, it was the fact that she was the only character they attempted to develop at all throughout the 6 movies. This became even more prominent by the 4th movie.

I do agree with you, although I don't know if they managed that, because Alice stays more or less the same thing in all movies. Also, another thing that bothers me, is that Alice does everything. There are other characters in the movie, they fight, sometimes they even do badass things, but Alice is the one to get the final blow in everyone. I always remember a moment in the 4th movie where Claire fights an Executioner in the prison's showers or some place like that. She runs, shoots, backflips, dodges and do all the cool stuff..........and in the end Alice gets to do the final shot. The "guest" (the game) characters barely have space to do anything, because Alice was the only one allowed to have good scenes. We got Chris and Leon doing barely anything in the only movie they're in. Same with Claire. The only time a character does something badass is on a sacrifice, like Carlos or Barry, or when they're not themselves (like controlled Jill kicking Alice's ass in the 5th one). It still breaks my heart when in the 2nd movie Jill looks at Alice and says something like "I'm good, but I'm not that good."...that was the writing on the wall, back there in the 2nd movie.

 

[bSTAR_182]

I do agree with you, although I don't know if they managed that, because Alice stays more or less the same thing in all movies. Also, another thing that bothers me, is that Alice does everything. There are other characters in the movie, they fight, sometimes they even do badass things, but Alice is the one to get the final blow in everyone. I always remember a moment in the 4th movie where Claire fights an Executioner in the prison's showers or some place like that. She runs, shoots, backflips, dodges and do all the cool stuff..........and in the end Alice gets to do the final shot. The "guest" (the game) characters barely have space to do anything, because Alice was the only one allowed to have good scenes. We got Chris and Leon doing barely anything in the only movie they're in. Same with Claire. The only time a character does something badass is on a sacrifice, like Carlos or Barry, or when they're not themselves (like controlled Jill kicking Alice's ass in the 5th one). It still breaks my heart when in the 2nd movie Jill looks at Alice and says something like "I'm good, but I'm not that good."...that was the writing on the wall, back there in the 2nd movie.

Well compared to other characters in the move she is the most developed but that’s not saying much seeing as there is practically no effort in developing any other character. :lol:

It’s all very wash, rinse, and repeat.

I find it amusing how she always seems to be someone’s love interest in each movie.