FISCHER: Third time a charm for Resident Evil reboot?

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

Here we go again.

It seems that a new reboot is on the way for the Resident Evil movie franchise. This time horror director Zach Cregger will be trying his hand at the zombie outbreak series.

I’m reserving my optimism.

The first Resident Evil movie, made in 2002 by Paul W.S. Anderson, paid the least possible amount of lip service to its source material before going on to spawn a series of increasingly unhinged sequels about Milla Jovovich shooting things in slow motion or something.

If you can’t tell by my completely fair and unprejudiced description, I was not a fan.

After two decades of Anderson’s critically panned yet inexplicably profitable handling of the franchise, Resident Evil finally got a fresh start with a reboot, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.”

Somehow, this long awaited second chance at a Resident Evil movie managed to find new ways to disappoint me. Immaculate set design, some of which could have been pulled straight out of the games, was squandered on an incoherent plot and head-spinning changes to characters. Not even the scenery chewing of Neal McDonough or watching Donal Logue’s unintentionally hilarious subplot of desperately trying to escape from the movie could redeem it.

So, two attempts have been made. Will the third time be a charm?

Who can say?

It’s frustrating because it shouldn’t be this hard. Making a movie that just straight-up adapts the story of “Resident Evil” shouldn’t be this hard, but every time somebody decides they’ve got to spin the story or add characters or otherwise change things that don’t need to be changed.

“Resident Evil,” when you break down the plot of the first game, is about a corporate scumbag luring a heavily armed team into an isolated location where they are picked off by horrific monsters they weren’t prepared to handle, all for the sake of trying to make off with a terrible bio-weapon.

No Resident Evil movie has ever even tried to make this movie even though it’s a great movie to make.

And I know it’s a great movie to make because that’s literally the plot to “Aliens,” one of the greatest action horror movies ever made.

The closest this franchise has ever gotten to a straight adaptation was in 1998 when George Romero, the father of the zombie movie genre, very nearly got a Resident Evil movie off the ground. And even his draft of the screenplay replaced the zombie dogs with robots.

I have no idea what Cregger has in mind for his take on the story.

Am I confident that this will be the adaptation that finally brings the characters and story from the games to the big screen? No.

Will I see it anyway? Probably.

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and can’t understand why a filmmaker given “Aliens” to them on a silver platter wouldn’t just do that.