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Resident Evil (Netflix series) teaser trailer revealed

I've decided to approach this series with an open mind knowing that it's non-canon and I'll come back to the thread after I've watched the full thing.

I've checked out the first episode as of now.

So far my positives are as follows:

+Lance Reddick is great as usual

+Them showing the pharmaceutical and business side behind this before things went bad. I liked the touch of showing the ad, showing every day life, and showing how ordinary Umbrella Co. make things appear from the surface. Normally, we only see things from a perspective of when the crisis has already happened.

+The potential of also showing the world already ravaged by the virus and simply having to live in this world. Same point as above. Resident Evil 6 tried to sort of convey this but failed. Resident Evil Revelations 2 showed a little but was mostly isolated land.

+Some really great camera work and cinematography. Some shots seriously looked gorgeous.

So far my criticisms are as follows:

-Episode length is far too long and should have been between 20-35 minutes. Lately I've been feeling like that's around the perfect length for a show because great creators have been utilizing that range of length perfectly. Not every show has the intricacies of The Wire or Game of Thrones, and having shows be 40-60 minutes each just tends to make them drag, because most writers don't have good enough talent, content, nor the budget to make those long silent moments feel any better. There's a lot you could cut here while still keeping just enough of it to convey the message that it's trying to. Because of this, my next point:

-Drawn out drama. Again, episode length factors into this. It's my same complaint with CW hero shows. When the hero stuff actually happens it can be exciting and engaging at times, but then it grinds to a complete halt after the action is over with bad dialogue, characters not simply talking to each other, and meaningless drama. It looks like they need to fill time so they use adult drama, angst, and teen relationship drama to fill that time. Drama isn't a bad thing but when it's written silly or in a CW fashion, then I'd rather prefer they start making cuts instead.

-Enemy creatures doing that thing where they stop to roar before trying to kill someone, and one even did it twice in a row before deciding to try to kill a main character. Video games need to stop this too. Creators just need to look up why animals roar and why it isn't nearly the same as when a dog barks, because a part of me feels that's what they're drawing from.

-Mixed acting performances. Some great, some serviceable, some bad. However, with Resident Evil comes a level of cheese so this isn't too much of a negative for me, as it just becomes funny at times.
 

sol_bad

Member
More boring forgettable content for this the era of streaming services. Nobody will remember this next month. Please be excited for next product. Stay subscribed!

Comments like this are a bit silly. I have no real intention to watch this show but the era of streaming services is no better than the era of cable services. I mean, you had some big hits like Breaking Bad, The Wire, Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Sons of Anarchy but there was a whoooole shit show of forgettable content that no one talked about.

Cable channels push/ed out as much content as they could to make money.
Streaming services push out as much content as they can to make money.
No different.
 

FunkMiller

Gold Member
I gave this an episode and a half.

Fuck me. Why is it so hard for these dickheads to understand why Resident Evil is popular?

This show is just another riff on the shit they did in the movies, only with a thin veneer of 2022 ‘grounded and serious’ horse crap.

Utterly zero horror, scares, or anything remotely tense, disturbing or unsettling. Just another big, stupid, shooty shooty bang bang TV show, with some teen drama thrown on top to appeal to the dead in the head Gen Zedders, and endlessly tired post apocalyptic tropes we’ve seen a million times.

Should have adapted RE 7.

But I guess that would mean actually making something horrific out of this horror game franchise, and that doesn’t appeal to enough cretins, does it?
 
Take away the name and no discussion:

6nE40CR.jpg
 

assurdum

Banned
I don't understand the hate. Seen 2 episodes and I think it's a decent series after all. I think an exact transposition of the game story wouldn't have been feasible for an american series.
 
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kunonabi

Member
I don't understand the hate. Seen 2 episodes and I think it's a decent series after all. I think an exact transposition of the game story wouldn't have been feasible for an american series.
1-3 and Outbreak would work just fine. Its just when you get to CV, 0, and 4-6 that the series gets into the goofed out Japanese sci-fi anime nonsense.

And even then 6 could work if you overhaul the Simmons/Carla junk and Leon's campaign turning into a shitty Indiana Jones adventure for the middle part.
 
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assurdum

Banned
1-3 and Outbreak would work just fine. Its just when you get to CV, 0, and 4-6 that get into the goofed out Japanese sci-fi anime nonsense.

And even then 6 could work if you overhaul the Simmons/Carla junk and Leon's campaign turning into a shitty Indiana Jones adventure for the middle part.
Imo no. I literally don't see how they can make a decent series with the story of the games trilogy. It would be a trash cheap live anime show. What they trying to do with this series not seem bad at all to me. Now if we want to say isn't it exactly a masterpiece yeah, but I don't see all that trash I read in the net, indeed I like how they trying to reinvent it.
 
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Tiamat2san

Member
4th episode so far.
1 cool scene every 10 boring or cheesy scenes.
Not a good ratio.

Why can’t they just stay true to the source material and the blueprints the games laid before them is appalling.

I knew it wasn’t canon but damn why do they need to call this resident evil is beyond me (i know the name garanties a minimum of audience but still)

there’s material to love , so cool references but the story…
Time jumps are terrible.

Edit: it’s not a different timeline, it’s AFTER the games.
 
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I'm halfway through the second episode and considering throwing in the towel. This show is bad. It gets almost everything wrong, to the point where I question if the creators have even SEEN a Resident Evil videogame. I'm not usually one that gets hung up on lore/canon but it's just baffling how badly they missed the mark. This is basically just generic modern zombie show mixed with rote teen drama that checks all the Netflix diversity quotas.
 

STARSBarry

Gold Member
I've never played any of the Resident Evil games, but this score put's me off watching the show.

honestly just pick up resident evil 2 remake on the cheap, while I adore the first game I know the fixed camera angles and survival horror isent for everyone, and 2 does a good job of being its own thing with a few nods to the original game while being more action orientated.
 
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"Wesker"
sAtlbBh.jpg

and some humor?

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣Dude looking like a backup dancer for a Janet Jackson music video 😂🤣

I'm glad to see a large number of folks here appreciate Lance. He was honestly the only reason I had any interest in this at all. But it was always rivaled with other feelings, lmao. I hope he got a fat check for this.

Yeah, Lance is a very good actor. I still think his best acting work's in The Wire but from what I've seen in the 1st episode he has the best performance and that doesn't come as a surprise.

But at the same time, c'mon he does not aesthetically match the look of Wesker as established in the actual games. They could've made him a new character working in cohorts with Wesker and that would've been so much better IMO. The show didn't have an issue introducing a ton of other completely new characters, why not one for Lance?

I don't get those racists at Netflix.

Not holding to the universe, and cast people who doesn't look like the lore is straight up racism. It's white washing.

Just see witcher.

Fringilla
the-witcher-3-10-things-you-need-to-know-about-fringilla-vigo-main.webp


Triss
witcher-3-why-triss-is-totally-different-in-the-games-netflix-show-main.webp


Yennefer


Yennefer-Better-Character-In-Witcher-3-Game-Than-Netflix-Show.jpg


But hey, as long as its the crackers we remove then everything is OK because of diversity and such.

Dunno if you have eye damage but the 3rd girl actually looks pretty close to the videogame version. I'm not necessarily hung up over if a person's actual ethnicity lines up more so if they aesthetically fit the character they're portraying.

Because even if you get the race/ethnicity "right" there are large degrees of variance in skin tones, facial types etc. even within the same groups so you can get it completely wrong even going that way.
 
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MiguelItUp

Member
Yeah, Lance is a very good actor. I still think his best acting work's in The Wire but from what I've seen in the 1st episode he has the best performance and that doesn't come as a surprise.

But at the same time, c'mon he does not aesthetically match the look of Wesker as established in the actual games. They could've made him a new character working in cohorts with Wesker and that would've been so much better IMO. The show didn't have an issue introducing a ton of other completely new characters, why not one for Lance?
I wholeheartedly agree, the show looks like a complete travesty. I'm not watching it, but I've watched plenty of reviews and snippets of it. That's enough. It literally looks and sounds like something that was originally made as its own series, but they knew it wouldn't stand on its own two feet. I mean, the dialogue is awful, the writing is fanfic level if that, it just seems like a bizarre throwaway. So they slapped Resident Evil onto it, and made some adjustments. A Resident Evil thing here, one there, etc. The name alone will make people watch it, unfortunately.

The real sad part are the people saying they liked it or really liked it. There's no hope for us, lmao.
 

The_Mike

I cry about SonyGaf from my chair in Redmond, WA
Dunno if you have eye damage but the 3rd girl actually looks pretty close to the videogame version. I'm not necessarily hung up over if a person's actual ethnicity lines up more so if they aesthetically fit the character they're portraying.
I do have eye damage, hence I use glasses.

But I don't suffer from severe brain concussion since I can see the difference.
Ethnicity is pretty important to lore I love.

I'd also hate seeing a black lore character been played by a white guy. It goes both ways.
 
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Fbh

Member
This looked terrible in the trailers already so not surprising.


I don't get those racists at Netflix.

Not holding to the universe, and cast people who doesn't look like the lore is straight up racism. It's white washing.

Just see witcher.

Fringilla
the-witcher-3-10-things-you-need-to-know-about-fringilla-vigo-main.webp


Triss
witcher-3-why-triss-is-totally-different-in-the-games-netflix-show-main.webp


Yennefer


Yennefer-Better-Character-In-Witcher-3-Game-Than-Netflix-Show.jpg


But hey, as long as its the crackers we remove then everything is OK because of diversity and such.

I don't really care too much about the race swapping (other than thinking it should always be ok instead of only for certain races).
But the attractiveness factor should't be messes with. Only Yennefer stayed hot, the rest....eh.
 
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Chiggs

Member
This question can be asked for so much modern shit today. Thinking of the new Lord of the Rings series.

The forced diversity and ignoring the canon pisses off the fans so exactly who's going to watch it?

And Wesker’s first appearance was in a 1996 video game, with maybe his most substantial outing being in Code: Veronica in 2000, both of which are 20+ years old at this point.

So there’s a bunch of 30-45 year-old men sitting around chomping at the bit to watch a bunch of teenage girls mope and whine as an unrecognizable Wesker does quasi-RE things in a barely recognizable RE universe?

It boggles the mind.
 
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gamer82

Member
watched it all today, total tripe and have forgotten it already the only decent thing was the creatures other than that boring. poor man resident evil. i was getting res evil 5 vibes from it
 
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NanaMiku

Member
I've decided to approach this series with an open mind knowing that it's non-canon and I'll come back to the thread after I've watched the full thing.

I've checked out the first episode as of now.

So far my positives are as follows:

+Lance Reddick is great as usual

+Them showing the pharmaceutical and business side behind this before things went bad. I liked the touch of showing the ad, showing every day life, and showing how ordinary Umbrella Co. make things appear from the surface. Normally, we only see things from a perspective of when the crisis has already happened.

+The potential of also showing the world already ravaged by the virus and simply having to live in this world. Same point as above. Resident Evil 6 tried to sort of convey this but failed. Resident Evil Revelations 2 showed a little but was mostly isolated land.

+Some really great camera work and cinematography. Some shots seriously looked gorgeous.

So far my criticisms are as follows:

-Episode length is far too long and should have been between 20-35 minutes. Lately I've been feeling like that's around the perfect length for a show because great creators have been utilizing that range of length perfectly. Not every show has the intricacies of The Wire or Game of Thrones, and having shows be 40-60 minutes each just tends to make them drag, because most writers don't have good enough talent, content, nor the budget to make those long silent moments feel any better. There's a lot you could cut here while still keeping just enough of it to convey the message that it's trying to. Because of this, my next point:

-Drawn out drama. Again, episode length factors into this. It's my same complaint with CW hero shows. When the hero stuff actually happens it can be exciting and engaging at times, but then it grinds to a complete halt after the action is over with bad dialogue, characters not simply talking to each other, and meaningless drama. It looks like they need to fill time so they use adult drama, angst, and teen relationship drama to fill that time. Drama isn't a bad thing but when it's written silly or in a CW fashion, then I'd rather prefer they start making cuts instead.

-Enemy creatures doing that thing where they stop to roar before trying to kill someone, and one even did it twice in a row before deciding to try to kill a main character. Video games need to stop this too. Creators just need to look up why animals roar and why it isn't nearly the same as when a dog barks, because a part of me feels that's what they're drawing from.

-Mixed acting performances. Some great, some serviceable, some bad. However, with Resident Evil comes a level of cheese so this isn't too much of a negative for me, as it just becomes funny at times.
This makes me want a RE spinoff game that we manage an Umbrella Co. business
 

Sleepwalker

Member
I finished this today, at least lance had fun playing all those characters and was basically the only performance worth a damn.


Kids are annoying as hell, the main character is STILL annoying in the future lmao, absolutely hated every character except wesker and the fat dude that turned out to be kind of badass in the future.

The monsters were cool at least.
 

TheInfamousKira

Reseterror Resettler
This question can be asked for so much modern shit today. Thinking of the new Lord of the Rings series.

The forced diversity and ignoring the canon pisses off the fans so exactly who's going to watch it?

Like, I'll even play devil's advocate and say that, for adaptations' sake, taking the general riffs, or setting or characters from an established work and putting them into another story in a different medium is cool, and maybe a series about two teenaged siblings surviving the zombie apocalypse or an anime waifu bioweapon fist fighting Nemesis would be a fun little different flavor of the same IP ice cream, but here's the caveat: it has to be done with competence and with reverence for the IP.

Is Resident Evil/Biohazard a proven Horror genre spooky property? Yes. Is it also a proven silly, campy celebration of zombie tropes and haunted houses? Why, yes. Is it a worthy story of being told in a film? Sure. How about a television series? I think so. Are there black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or gay or transgender stories worth being told in the universe? I'd wager absolutely. But in the rush to bid on the modernized telling of such a story, they neither respect the franchise roots, or write their diverse characters with so much as an iota of nuance or depth. This is a CW script grafted onto the corpse of a good story - likely the closest this whole thing comes to succeeding at ANY element of the series, and it's fucking meta and sad. This joint failure betrays not only the originators and fans of the property, but also is another failure feather in the hat of shows that are trying so hard to be inclusive.

Give these ideas and the rights to use this universe to people who can do both justice, please. Black Wesker? I'm cool with it, canonically there are Wesker siblings sharing no blood relation. Diverse cast? Awesome, no one batted an eyelash at Marvin, Sheva, Josh, Luis, or Ada, because the problem isn't race or nationality, it's writing characters that are believable, and this is a franchise that's ridiculous enough by its own merit that this shouldn't be a hard job.

People rag on Infinite Darkness, or Vendetta, Damnation, Degeneration, but I VASTLY prefer those canon entries over other adaptations if only because Capcom knows not to reinvent it's own wheel. Chris Redfield is a guilt ridden jarhead. Claire Redfield is a retired warrior turned activist. Leon is 90's bravado that never grew up and the quintessential 'bad enough dude,' They made these choices, and they followed through on them. Leon wasn't suddenly a gay disabled black man. No, he's a smarmy little cocksure tryhard, because they decided to take his character in that direction in 2004, and by God they stuck with it. Even as soft reboot like RE7/8 manages to maintain consistency despite the HARSHLY different atmosphere, and that's why, as dumb and loud and cheesy as it gets, there will always be people invested in the games while projects like this wither and die.
 

Rambone

Member
Finished season 1. I didn't really like it but I didn't hate it either. The teenage drama that dragged on throughout the episodes really killed my ability to keep interested. If Cowboy Bebop didn't get a season 2 I can't imagine this one will either but who knows. The new Wesker is an interesting take, at first I was disappointed but the actor did a pretty good job. Once more plot got revealed I stopped caring about Wesker not being closer to the source material since this whole series is more of a re-imagining.
 
I love Resident Evil. The video game series is one of my favorite series of all time. The first three movies with Milla Jovovich are kind of a guilty pleasure for me. The rest are absolute hot garbage, and they got worse and worse with each release. I even watched that abomination Welcome to Racoon City. It sucked hard, but at least some parts of it were kinda cool I guess.

I even enjoyed some of the CGI movies. I mean, they were not great, but at least a lot closer to the source material than most of the live action adaptations and at least somewhat entertaining.

The Netflix series is by far the worst of them all. I would take Welcome to Racoon City over this any day. I could only make it through episode 1. It was hard to do that. I had to pause every once in a while to shake my head. Many an eye roll was had. The first episode showed me enough to convince me to not watch the rest. A rare feat, since I'm the kind of person that once I start something, I like to finish it, even if it's bad. Not this time.

OK, there are three good things I can say about this show: some of the shots look gorgeous. The Albert Wesker actor is awesome, as he usually is. I liked the structure of having a before the infection in the past, and after the infection destroyed everything set in the future. That's it.

The biggest thing against the show, IMHO, is not even wokeness, but the absolutely unbelievable bad script. I feel like a 2 year old wrote the story and dialogue.

  • Exhibit A: the main protagonist Jade studies zombies. Zombies are blind but have a keen sense of smell. She sits around with skin exposed next to sharp things. Gets cut in front of the horde. Somehow survives despite being a complete idiot.
  • Exhibit B: let's break into this mega corporation pharmaceutical facility! The AI at the door gets fooled by two teenagers wearing head lamps to prevent facial recognition and being able to get in using their dad's phone that conveniently had a recording of him saying his name for some reason. Like, I couldn't believe how stupid this was. The AI didn't care there are clearly two people coming in. The AI didn't care about verifying with facial recognition, but only the voice was needed. The heck? There are zero guards in this top of the line super important facility with super secret stuff, not to mention the T virus itself. The girls somehow know how to go to a testing lab, even though they have no reason to know how to get there. And all this to free some animals, because "vegans and animal testing bad".

This takes me to one of the worst parts of the show. The two sisters Billie and Jade. They are obnoxious stupid teenagers. Jade is your stereotypical "edgy me vs the world, I'm gonna go against everything and everyone just to spite them" type of person. Billie is a vegan for mostly activist reasons ("oh noes the animals", I have no problem with people being vegan for health reasons) that can never stand up for herself, taking all sorts of crap, saying sorry when she did nothing wrong, etc. Both are the "broken home, I'm so broken, look at me fam issues" girls that can't go a sentence without swearing. I couldn't stand a second of them when they were on screen. If anything ruined the show for me, it was these two.

The idiocy is spread out through out the entire episode. In the final scene, future Jade gets captured and she is going to be delivered to Umbrella authorities. Apparently she is one of the top wanted people by them for some reason. She is in some sort of fort surrounded by zombies. All the helicopters fly in. All they needed to do to get her was literally walk up to secure her. For no reason whatsoever, they start killing everyone in the fort. She runs away in the commotion. Like, why?! If you were gonna kill everyone, why not wait until you have secured your super important top wanted person. Alas, she runs and jumps over the walls INTO the horde... And then she episode ends. Like, wtf? I'm sure she'll somehow survive that too, but at this point I couldn't bring myself to care.

So yeah, I don't see a point of wasting my time with this show anymore. After all these adaptations, I would've thought that someone that gets Resident Evil would get put in charge. Alas, the IP just keeps getting tossed around incompetent teams that probably have never once in their lives played the games, add some agendas for good measure, and you get this adaptation. I think I have abandoned all hope of a good live action adaptation for Resi at this point 😢.
 
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