Why They Keep Making Resident Evil Movies
Look online for any information about the Resident Evil movies and you’ll find a thousand nerds bitching about how bad they are and why do they keep making them. Or they bitch that the director/producer is just making them to give a starring role to Milla Jovolich. Listen, I’ll admit straight up that I have always been a huge fan of Milla Jovolich, so that is probably part of the reason I like the Resident Evil Movies. But even so, the fact that they keep making tons of money on a relatively (last one was made for 60 million, most of the rest were 40M or under) small budget is the reason why they keep getting made.
Quite simply, people are going to see them. Most of the people who are complaining don’t seem to realize why the movie has so little to do with the games. At the time Resident Evil Movies started most of the Video Game movies had been busts. Since for the most part at the time you were talking about 8 bit and 16 bit games, it was rather tough to transfer some of these games stories to the big screen you ended up with stuff like the Super Mario Bros. Movie and the Street Fighter Movie. A lot of the characters, but a modified plot. Of course it’s been almost 10 years since the first movie and things have changed a bit.
Here’s the other part of that. The stories to Resident Evil are AWFUL. Run around, find keys, solve stupid puzzles and OCCASIONALLY find a few zombies to fight. I tried the original Resident Evil a bunch of times and never had any fun. I found it even dumber that you needed keys, considering you had a gun on you and the keys were FOR WOODEN DOORS! All the Resident Evil plots suck. No one in their right mind is going to make a direct conversion of the Resident Evil games to movies. If your a fan of Resident Evil you should know how much the plots suck.
In the end though, the Resident Evil movies aren’t even for the nerds bitching about them on the internet. We’ve already seen how weak the internet is when it comes to movies. Remember how the Internet was going to make “Snakes on a Plane” a huge movie? Yea, that didn’t really work out. Why? Cause the internet doesn’t watch movies. Just look at the box office totals for Scott Pilgrim.
So it’s time to stop bitching, and just enjoy the Resident Evil movies for what they are. Popcorn action flicks with no real point or ending. A flimsy plot and somewhere along the line an excuse for Milla Jovolich to be half naked. That’s plenty to make me happy with the Resident Evil series. Hell, I hated the 2nd movie in the series but I keep watching them. So if your a fan of Resident Evil and pissed that they keep making movies, just keep going on youtube and putting up annoying rants. People will take you seriously and stop watching the movie, it will stop making money and no more Resident Evil movies. Problem Solved!
So to sum up this terrible post “I didn’t like or understand the games so I prefer watching an anorexic pull off stupid stunts in a terribly scripted, acted and produced movie.” Fact is people loved the game and it isn’t that difficult to translate to a good movie if they put a bit of thought into it. They didn’t have to recreate puzzles or anything. The first one could have easily been a special ops team (STARS) in the mansion. It was very easy to do. Instead we have the invincible Alice kicking panes of glass and essentially being a demi god. Yes it makes money so I understand why they make the money. This doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with it and I’m certainly going to give out especially since a lot of the movies they could have made would have easily been done for a similar budget (in fact Resi 2 had the entire city and antagonist from Resident Evil Nemesis) but since they had created Alice they had to incorporate her into them, budget would have been easily very similar and I’d say profit would have been higher as a lot of people would be more willing to watch it a few times.
So please don’t make a blog post about something you have 0 knowledge of.
The games did have an overall plot, when a writer can produce 7 books that transfer the games story to a strong plot completely shows how the games stories could be produced into another medium(search out S.D. Perry for any of the seven). They were good and could have easily been transferred to a visual medium, with far better results than the one we have.
Naming two films from over a decade ago doesn’t give an accurate portrayal of how badly these movies were done, while Street Fighter and Mario Bros were collosal failures, they at least tried to stick to the general plot of the game: Mario-sake a princess. Street Fighter-Fighting(well, less so on that one I guess) but dammit the Resident Evil game story involved Mad Scientists building super weapons, the movies have been Look at the cute woman doing ever increasingly impossible stunts that make no sense in a realistic way.
There have never been good game-to-film conversions because people have to put ‘their take’ on the plotline. You say that they’re popcorn movies, well when popcorn movies are general things to sit down and watch aimlessly, the majority of the first movie’s fanbase would have been game fans and second zombie fans, when we get a convoluted plot made up of elements from several different types of movie to cope with the tiny amount of actual plot in the movie so it was a ‘genre specific’ movie, like the new Trek Movie wouldn’t have romcom fans going to it, it’s a scifi thing.
But the worst thing really is your attitude to seeing a movie, you said you liked #1 but hated #2, well…why oh why would you continue to watch the movies just to see Mila Jovavich half naked, there’s other movies with her in that show some skin. The only answer I can get is you really just don’t give a shit anymore, you’ll watch a dogcrap on a stick for two hours if it’ll break up the monotiny of your life.
In essence S said it right before me, the REASON why they keep making them is that while the fanbase of the Resident Evil Games have said completely to F*ck *ff, it’s the other audience, those like you who don’t give a shit about actual story and plot and will watch anything so long as it distracts them from their crappy life.
They should have Chris Nolan save this franchise too, what a waste of a perfectly good storyline and game.