Transdude1996 said:
Also, wow, you guys hate this film series with a fiery passion. What did it do to deserve it?
Well, can't speak for everyone, but speaking for myself, I don't "hate" the series (there's very few things I truly hate, and few, if any of them would be pieces of fiction), but I can say it's down to the following:
-They're lacklustre adaptations. Now, let me make it clear, an adaptation doesn't need to be loyal to the source to be a good end product. But like any adaptation, those who like the original will take umbrage to see something not represented well, and at the end of the day, the RE films are poor representations of the games. They only really adapt anything from the games for the first two films, and then do their own thing, with the only shared elements being shared names. It's telling that the main character of the series (Alice) isn't even a game character, and constantly makes actual game characters redundant. It would be the equivalent of John Doe being inserted into Lord of the Rings and making the Fellowship a waste of space as he does everything for them - wiser than Gandalf, more pure-hearted than Frodo, a better swordsman than Aragorn, etc. It's what you see in the worst of fanfiction, when an OC starts taking away the spotlight from the main characters. Now apply this to a feature length movie.
-So, fine, let's forget the adaptation element, how do they stack up as films? Well, in my opinion, not very well. Even confining them to their own universe, each film, for me, has been weaker than the one before it. The story is all over the place, Alice is a 2D character, the action is over the top, even by the standards of action films, and there's the sense (to me at least) that there's no great plan for an actual storyline, just "what cool stuff can we do?" It's the same problem that many have cited with the Transformers - "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." And this is just me, but even action films need to have the basics of storytelling down - good plot, good characters, etc. For me, the Resident Evil films haven't had these elements for a long time.
So no, I don't hate them. Whatever hyperbole I use on the Internet, it's not worth truly 'hating' a piece of fiction. But I certainly have little love for them. Which is a shame, because I thought the series started off on quite a decent note. It ironically mirrors the course the RE games have taken for me, and why RE5 was the last Resident Evil game I played.
