Director Johannes Roberts dropped some interesting nuggets of information about Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City.
You don’t need us to tell you that video game to movie adaptations tend not to work so well, with the interactive medium often losing something vital when it gets transferred into cinema.
The original Resident Evil series of films garnered its own legion of fans however, but tellingly, strayed pretty far from the video game source material, electing instead to tell its own stories and adopt a markedly different tone.
Next month sees the release of a new Resident Evil film – Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City – marking a fresh cinematic beginning for the franchise and director Johannes Roberts has been talking lots about how this new take on the series will hew much closer to the original games. For fans of the saga, that’s both exciting and unnerving we’d imagine, with images and trailers already creating a (mostly very positive) stir regarding the closeness of the film to the Resident Evil games.
Ahead of the film’s release, Roberts continues to talk up the film, saying of the old Resident Evil films, starring Milla Jovovich “they were never really about the games. I’m a horror guy. I’m a Stephen King guy. I’m a John Carpenter guy. All those things are sort of built into the fabric of this movie. I was just like, ‘let’s make a scary movie again.”
Whilst those types of influences alone sound like tremendous fun, bringing the films away from the action style pioneered in the Jovovich flicks, Roberts is also clear that the games will be the key influence, even if the film spawns sequels.
He says that “I remember playing that second game and going, ‘this is the movie. This is it. It just blew me away completely. The aesthetics of it, the tone, the mood. I was like ‘this is the cornerstone of what we’re going to do. I think [Welcome To Raccoon City] sets everything up really well, an origin story for each of our characters, I think it would be really important to me that we don’t just use this as a springboard to then just go off into our own crazy world. I think there’s so much in the games that is so fascinating and exciting that I would really love to continue to explore that”.
Finally, Roberts clarified that the upcoming series on Netflix won’t be connected to the film, noting “the Netflix show is its own beast, from what I understand”
You can read the whole piece over at Collider, should you want to see more. Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City releases on December 3rd. More in the coming week or two…
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