Resident Evil reboot trailer looks like a welcome throwback to the game’s roots

When the first resident Evil The game debuted in 1998, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spawning several back-to-back games, comics, novels and a very lucrative movie franchise directed by Paul WS Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich. But those films were only loosely based on the games, keeping a few main characters and the core concept, but not much else. Sony Pictures has just released the official trailer for its upcoming reboot, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, and it looks like it’ll be a lot closer to the source material than its big-screen predecessors.

(A few spoilers for the first two games in the franchise below, but no major reveal.)

The sixth and final film in the Anderson series was released fairly recently, in 2016. But the franchise made a ton of money, so naturally a full reboot was in the works in early 2017, starring Johannes Roberts (47 meters lower) at the bar.

Despite being a fan of the previous franchise, Roberts told IGN earlier this year that he wanted to bring a very different tone to his film. He wanted to stay closer to the resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 games, even using the same fixed angles of Spencer Mansion in the first game. “What I liked about the games was that they were just scary, and that’s largely what I wanted, This atmosphere. It’s constantly raining, it’s dark, it’s scary, Raccoon City is a rotten character, “he said. “I wanted … to mix it with the fun side, especially with the narrative style of the first game.”

The first one resident Evil The game is set in July 1998, when the fictional Midwestern town of Raccoon City is reeling from a series of brutal murders. The STARS team sends a beta unit but quickly loses contact with them, then sends their Alpha team to investigate. Attacked by zombie dogs, they take refuge in the abandoned Spencer Mansion, except that it is not really abandoned. All manner of mutant zombies and monsters – the result of bizarre experiments conducted by Umbrella Corporation using a biological agent called the T-Virus – roam the mansion and its surroundings.

Players can choose to play STARS Agents Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, and they must find documents with helpful clues and solve various puzzles to figure out what happened. And of course, there’s a lot of monster fighting, including a giant humanoid super-soldier nicknamed the Tyrant.

Resident Evil 2 takes place in September 1998, two months after the events of its predecessor. Here, the main characters are Claire Redfield (Chris’s sister) and rookie policeman Leon S. Kennedy, who must leave the city overrun by zombies. They must fight the Tyrant, who is looking for another mutant biological agent called the G-Virus. (Will those mad scientists at the Umbrella Corporation ever find out?) They must also race to create a vaccine against the G virus, which can stop the process of mutation in the human body.

Do you remember the night of September 30?

The trailer for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City opens with the welcome sign for Raccoon City and the date: September 30, 1998. This puts us squarely in the period of Resident Evil 2. True to his word, Roberts seems to have brought not only the look and feel of the game to his film, but most of the characters and several plot points as well. The cast includes Claire and Chris Redfield (Kaya Scodelario and Robbie Amell, respectively), Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen) and Leon Kennedy (Avan Jogia), who team up to uncover the truth about Umbrella Corporation and Spencer Mansion – and of course , fight the mutant monsters and hopefully save the world.

William Birkin (Neal McDonough), the mad scientist who leads the disastrous experiments for Umbrella Corporation, will clearly play an important role (as he does in Resident Evil 2). Donal Logue plays corrupt Raccoon City police chief Brian Irons, Lily Guy plays mysterious spy Ada Wong, Tom Hopper and Chad Rook play STARS team members Albert Wesker and Richard Aiken, and Marina Mazepa plays Lisa Trevor, the unfortunate subject of one of Birkin’s twists. experiences. And of course, we get all the zombies, wild mutant dogs, and severely deformed monsters that any fan of the original games could hope for.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City opens in theaters exclusively on November 24, 2021. We strongly recommend that you only view films in theaters if you have been fully vaccinated and wear a mask for the duration of the screening.

Listing Image by Sony Pictures