Resident Evil review, is the Netflix series the antidote we’ve been waiting for? 💉

12 games in the main saga, 7 live-action films, 4 animated films and now two series on the clock. Franchise resident Evil has seen green and immature ones – and above all beautiful failures – during its 25 years of existence, since its creation by Capcom in 1996. We remember in particular the films with Milla Jovovich which serve as a reference in the realm of mediocrity and disrespect for the source material of the story.

The adventure of the adamtation is therefore a risky affair and, for this time, it is Netflix which is working to deliver the latest, a series in live action which puts in its center one of the main antagonists video games, we named Albert Wesker.

A bold choice that promises to propel us into an atmosphere radically different from other productions stamped resident Evilonly a few months after the animated series Infinite Darkness or the movie Welcome to Raccoon City, which sent shivers down our spines, but not for the right reasons. Will this time the license finally know its moment of redemption? The answer in this review of the Netflix series resident Evil.

The successor is here

History of really freeing itself from the codes established so far, Netflix takes the party to explore two different chronologies. One is set in the year 2022, as Albert Wesker and his two daughters move into a rather seedy residential neighborhood run by the Umbrella Corporation. The company is in charge of designing a pharmaceutical product with questionable stakes. The other takes place 14 years later, in the next world completely devastated, and above all inundated with zombified humans, infected by the Virus-T. The link between the two temporalities therefore seems obvious, but everything remains to be discovered.

Aficionados of the video game saga will have recognized many of these names, and for good reason, the universe of the series is entering a new chapter of resident Evil, while relying rather faithfully on the plot of the video games that preceded it. Everything is not exactly respected, but never mind, the whole remains coherent and this above all allows Netflix to take an interesting direction.

The Wesker girls are at the heart of a vast pharmaco-chemical intrigue that stems directly from the actions of their father, and the drama of Raccoon City, which players are also familiar with. The stability of today’s world hangs by a thread, and it is in the hands of corrupt scientists. As the story unfolds, Netflix tries to connect the story not only to that of video games, but also to the real world, evoking both events and people familiar to us.

However, the resemblance to reality is an illusion, and we have throughout the series this embarrassing impression that the universe in which Umbrella evolves is a sordid alteration of our reality. A feeling reinforced by the sets, which despite their good workmanship border on the stereotype of dull, gray and soulless futuristic environments. We regret not having to deal with more authentic decorations and more faithful to the gloomy atmosphere of video game titles.

Two sides of the same coin

On the other hand, the switch between the two chronologies is a way of adding more suspense to the plot, created by the expectation of answers that only come in dribs and drabs. It nevertheless suffers from a problem of balancing at the level of the intensity of the action in each time period. The future timeline is, in our view, much less interesting from a story progression standpoint, at least in the first four episodes we got to watch.

It nevertheless remains a compendium of action, which propels us directly into the survival horror atmosphere that we expect from a production resident Evil. There are all the classic remedies of horror that are usually popular with fans of the genre: bloodshed, distressing percussion music, slow and dark sequences, elements of surprises and monsters of all kinds. We will surely blame the blow (or the routine) but none of this has yet succeeded in making us shudder, with fear or excitement, even though we considered ourselves to be a public particularly inclined to react to these horrifying methods.

The story is so mysterious, and the action so superfluous, that we end up giving much more importance to the content than to the form. We do not sulk the special effects that manage to cause the desired effect – a mass of enormous disgust – but rather the overall realization of the active moments. If the close shots still pass, we feel in the wide shots a big lack of dynamism and really unnatural movements. We chain the shots to the point of dealing with a linear and predictable action.

A bad for a good ?

In the first four episodes, this considerably slows down the rhythm, which accelerates from the third and which should restore body to the series in the last 4 episodes. At least we hope so, just as we expect the story to refocus more on the character of Wesker. Of all the performances, it is that of Lance Reddick that grabs us the most, as his character remains faithful to his description in video games.

It is indeed the main enemy of the saga resident Evil, and the Netflix series honors him by giving him the same taciturn character that drives him to have an inconsiderable thirst for power. All shenanigans are allowed, even despite the presence of his daughters, which makes him a rather complex anti-hero to analyze.

We will pass over in silence the adolescent intrigues, which do not have a great interest for the whole of the series, and which according to us give a dimension all the less credible to its horror capital. We can only hope Resident Evil’s focus shifts more to Umbrella’s secrets, past and present, and gives the future timeline more grist to grind than hordes of bloody, hungry zombies. This song, we already know it by heart.