Looks like we have yet another video game adaptation, this time from streaming giant Netflix. And this one at least started off promising.
I'm not really a big TV person and I had already heard some pretty bad things about the new Resident Evil series. But when I saw that home screen thumbnail with the licker, I had to at least give it a shot. Even though I haven't really discussed it that much here, RE is one of my favorite gaming series of all time. I have three of them on my 10's list, tied for the most with Final Fantasy. Really, I just haven't gotten around to playing any of them yet, it totally has nothing to do with the fact that I largely play games alone, at night in the dark and I'm a huge wimp. Nothing at all. Anyway, I was excited to see what RE would bring to the streaming world and I'm glad I gave this show a shot...so I could let you all know it's probably not worth your time.
Let's start with the story. You all know the story of Resident Evil, the STARS Bravo team is dispatched to the Arklay mountains to search for their lost comrades from Alpha team. Along the way STARS members Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine find a mysterious mansion and...wait, that's not what the show is about? I got it, Resident Evil follows the story of Raccoon City survivor Leon Kennedy, now a federal agent, who is dispatched to a remote region of Spain. There, he must search for the daughter of the President, Ashley Graham, who has been abducted by a cult hell-bent on...oh? That's not it either? Ok, one more time. Resident Evil follows the story of a man named Ethan Winters, who receives a mysterious letter from his missing wife. He makes his way to the allegedly haunted Baker estate in the bayous of Louisiana to find that...wrong again? Look, I understand that you can't make the show a scene for scene remake of the games, but it would be nice to have the show have SOMETHING to do with the games. Sure, there's an Umbrella Corp. and a Raccoon City, but they could have less to do with their video game counterparts. This isn't a game that's lacking in lore. In fact, the Resident Evil series has the second longest continuous lore in all of gaming (I guarantee no one will ever guess what's first without looking it up). This isn't even an adaptation, it's a completely new story that's trying to pass itself off as Resident Evil. There's no Jill Valentine, no Redfield siblings, no Leon Kennedy, just a bunch of new characters no one asked for and a couple characters who have the same name as they do in the game.
While this is largely a bad thing, I have to say Lance Reddick's version of Wesker is probably the best part of the show. I do think this is largely because Reddick is really, really good at his job, but the character is just different enough that its its own thing while also having similar personality traits to the in-game character. Look, the video game version of Wesker is almost too much for a TV show, he's cartoonishly evil in a way that doesn't really work in film or television. Reddick manages to capture the conniving, stoically evil nature of the character while also providing him with redeeming qualities. But he's not the main character here. That would be his daughter, Jade, who is living in London after the apocalypse studying zombies for some reason. Wait, apocalypse? Yeah, there's an apocalypse now. This is one of those things that confirms to me that no one involved in this show ever actually played Resident Evil. My guess is it went down like this:
"Okay, Resident Evil, it's this video game with zombies where..."
"Right, so Zombie apocalypse, got it."
"No, you see that's one of the things that makes Resident Evil different, the outbreak doesn't lead to an apocalypse but..."
"Okay, mark it down, zombie apocalypse in London."
Anyway, regardless of her circumstances, Jade is one of the least likeable main characters I've ever encountered, she's arrogant and pompous, and her tough girl persona comes across as forced. She's even less likeable in her younger years, the show jumps back and forth between the past and present, where they tried way, way too hard to pass her off as the stereotypical moody teenager. For all her bluster, she nearly gets herself killed multiple times in the first episode and seems to constantly make stupid choices. Again, why did they even need to make a new character in the first place. Have Jill or Chris or Claire or Leon, hell, Ark Thompson would have been more interesting. They don't have to be exact duplicates of their in-game personas, but at least give us a version of them like you did with Wesker. Jill need not be the master of unlocking, Chris doesn't need to punch any boulders, but some level of recognizing the core characters from the game would have been nice.
The other place I will say the show succeeds is in replicating the various monsters. A lot of these do look like they come straight from the game, from the worm to the dogs to the lickers. There were some really impressive graphical effects here, but my issue is they messed one monster up bad...the zombies. These guys look like rejected extras from the set of Army of Darkness, it almost looks like they didn't even bother to put makeup on some of them. Also, why are the zombies fast? T-Virus zombies are supposed to be slow and plodding. Again, it doesn't have to be identical but that would have been an easy way to have the show sync up with the game. If you really wanted fast zombies, you could have introduced crimson heads later in the show, I can see the scene now where all the characters are like "yup, we're safe" before a fallen zombie gets back up and runs after them. It was also at this point that I realized one of the biggest things about the show that bothered me. Post apocalypse? London? Edgy female main? Survivor encampment that looks friendly but isn't? Super fast zombies? That doesn't sound like RE at all. But it sounds a ton like 28 Days Later. Did they watch that and think it was part of the RE cannon? Look, 28 Days Later is an awesome movie, one of the few I can watch over and over, but this wasn't a side story or sequel of adaptation or remake of 28 Days Later. It's supposed to be an adaptation of Resident Evil.
I really don't understand why they can never seem to get these video game adaptations right. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they are looked at as easy cash grabs that gamers will watch no matter what. Sometimes, the source material is given the respect it deserves, the new Mortal Kombat movie is great and while I haven't seen the Witcher series, I've heard it does the game justice. But there was just no respect paid to RE here, I have my thoughts as to why, but I won't go into too much detail. At the end of the day, it boils down to the fact that video games are still looked down upon by those who work in the other media formats. Who cares if the show follows the stupid game I've never heard of, its fans should be watching my pretentious arthouse cinema project anyway. Could you imagine if the opposite happened? Sure, a lot of movie or TV licensed games aren't great, but they at least stay faithful to their stories. What if we just went full on rogue and created a video game called "The Godfather," but it was a hentai dating simulator? That's not that far off of what happened with RE.
I've read a lot of comments as to some potential reasons why the show was changed so much from the games, and I want to address two of the biggest ones I've seen. The first is that the writing in the games isn't good enough to hold up as a TV show. While that line of thinking smacks of elitism, I do understand it to a point. Looking at the first game is almost comical with its atrocious voice acting and horrible dialogue. Later entries in the series improved quite a bit, but to me it wasn't really until RE 5 that they got this down pat. But the issue here isn't the writing and it never has been. The problems come largely from the voice acting, but also from translation and localization. All of the corny line from RE 1 weren't written that way on purpose, the game was poorly localized for the Western markets. As someone who deals with localization as part of my job, it takes a lot more work than most people think it does. Even without translating everything needs to be localized, even content written in the UK or Canada needs to be localized from the Queen's English to American English (or vice versa). Language is complicated and translating between two languages that use very different alphabets is doubly so. And that's just translation, then you have to localize. That's where the RE games really fell on their faces. The direct translation may be technically correct, but there wasn't any effort put into making any of it read or sound like actual English. That's how you get lines like "master of unlocking" or "Jill Sandwich," it's not really bad writing so much as bad localization. Again, I totally recognize that a shot for shot, line for line remake of the games would not work as a television show. I just wanted to make the point that the source material isn't as bad as it's made out to be.
The second was that the structure of the games wouldn't work as a television show, and it would be impossible to make individual seasons out of each individual game. This was something I initially agreed with, but now I'm not so sure. I don't necessarily think it would be the right way to do it, but it could absolutely be done. I think it would look something like this:
Season 1 - Resident Evil: Mansion (the events of RE)
Season 2 - Resident Evil: Escape from Raccoon City (RE2 and 3 together)
Season 3 - Resident Evil: Code:Veronica (CV was a pretty long game so it gets its own season)
Season 4 - Resident Evil: Cult (RE 4, with some more focus on the events before and after the game)
Season 5 - Resident Evil: Ouroburos (RE 5)
And you could go on and on like that, continuing with RE 6 and its multiple storylines, RE 7 and 8 with their shift to the Ethan Winters storylines, hell, even the revelations games. Each could be its own standalone season, obviously they would reference each other to a point but they would largely be their own thing. This structure absolutely could work. In fact, I know it would work. Because it has worked. Ever hear of American Horror Story? Because that's how that's structured. Obviously, you would have to pad out some thin portions of the games with extra stuff, but again no one is asking for a shot for shot remake. We just want something that makes some consideration for the source material.
Comments
Post a Comment