The highlight? The Licker.

Furthermore, the budget constraints are visible. The city-wide outbreak feels small. We see maybe two blocks of Raccoon City. The Orphanage (a deep pull from Resident Evil 2 ) is utilized well, but the climactic train escape lacks the scale of "a city of 100,000 dying." Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is not a masterpiece. It is a rough, jagged, lovingly crafted piece of fan-service that sometimes trips over its own ambition. It lacks the slick polish of the Resident Evil remakes and the blockbuster budget of the Anderson films.

The result is a film that is polarizing, messy, and gloriously, terrifyingly faithful. For every misstep, there is a moment of pure, uncanny brilliance that makes long-time fans sit up straight in their seats. This is not a story of heroes; it is a story of survivors trapped in a town that has already died. Unlike the glossy, global scale of the Anderson films, Welcome to Raccoon City shrinks the apocalypse down to a single, miserable night in a dying Midwest town. Director Roberts frames Raccoon City not just as a location, but as a pustule on the American map. It is perpetually overcast, perpetually raining, and populated by locals who look like they haven’t slept in a decade.

In the sprawling, CGI-laden shadow of Paul W.S. Anderson’s six-film franchise—a run that turned Milla Jovovich into a super-powered goddess and zombies into bullet-points on an action movie checklist—fans of Capcom’s seminal survival horror series had long since given up hope of seeing a faithful adaptation. For two decades, Hollywood treated Resident Evil as a vehicle for slow-motion gun-fu and mono-syllabic villains. The Spencer Mansion, the crimson heads, the oppressive dread of running out of ink ribbons—these were sacrificed for explosion budgets.

Then came 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City . Directed by Johannes Roberts ( 47 Meters Down ), this reboot made a bold promise: We are going back to the 90s. We are going back to the game.