My experience with Resident Evil is similar to my experience with Souls games. I started with the first (or a PS4 port of the Gamecube remake of the first RE), which I struggled with initially and came back to years later. Sooner or later I beat it once with each character, and then moved onto my second game: RE 0.
RE 0 was a prequel to the first game that uses the same engine and general gameplay style of the remake, but with an added co-op element. It also notably has the series' post-Code Veronica level of cheese, which led me to the moment I fell in love with the series - the cutscene right before the final boss.
Basically, you find out the guy who released zombies all over the Arklay mountains, kicking off the events of the first game and also the rest of the franchise, is none other than one of Umbrella’s founding members, Dr. James Marcus, who was assassinated by Umbrella top boys Albert Wesker and William Birkin in an effort to usurp the company, but he was resurrected by a leech parasite he was experimenting on. The scene where this is revealed is one of the funniest moments in the franchise.
The shapeshifting Christlike opera-singing guy made of leeches turns into his old man form from before he died, and his villainous monologues instantly turn into a shaky senior citizen’s rattle. Then there’s the tonal whiplash of Wesker & Birkins’ epic Reservoir Dogs walk from his dying POV, Billy & Rebecca’s equally poor performances and that fucked up leech monster transformation. What a ride!
If you asked a hundred fanboys what they thought Resident Evil was about, you’d get a hundred different responses. Some would say zombies, some would say horror, some would say the adventures of Chris, Jill, Leon & Claire etc. If you asked me, I’d say Resident Evil was about awful dialogue and eccentric villains juxtaposed against moments of survival horror. To that extent, I actually liked the Netflix series. Not so much that I'm sad about it being canceled, but I defo don't hate it as much as some of the fanboys do.
To many, Netflix’s Resident Evil simply wasn’t Resident Evil. Family drama was an element of the games, but school drama wasn’t. The parallel timeline aspect really didn’t pay off by the end as I was expecting, and the cliffhanger it ended on was really dissatisfying. In went in with an open-mind and I genuinely liked parts (that shootour with Baxter was a reference to Mercenaries mode - prove me wrong) but overall that ending makes me glad they canceled it.
The zombie genre has changed a lot since RE started. Back then and in the Romero era, zombie movies and games were generally about survivors, well, fighting to survive in the face of a zombie outbreak. These days, things like The Walking Dead and Army of the Dead show humans adapting to a zombie apocalypse and trying to retain as much of society as they can after it's fallen. That's another thing that the series focuses on that wasn't in the games. What I was surprised to see, though, was an episode where the main characters solve bullshit puzzles to find exposition dump documents that culminates in a lab self-destructing. If that's not Resident Evil then I don't know what is, but the fact of the matter is most people aren't into RE for the cheese factor or tonal whiplash. Most people want to see the adventures of Chris, Jill, Leon & Claire etc, and they weren't in the series at all. Ada was teased in the final episode, but with how hard they fumbled the ending I'm not sure it'd be worth watching anyway.
Did you see the series while it lasted? Is the cancelation justified, or did it have its moments? Let us know below!
