The six Resident Evil films starring Milla Jovovich comprise simultaneously one of the most successful and most mocked video game film adaptations ever made. For fans, it feels like no one can ever do the series justice. But while the video game series has been able to reimagine itself and regain its past glory, the film adaptations haven’t been so lucky.

The final Milla Jovovich film, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter came out in 2017, the same year Resident Evil 7: Biohazard revitalized the game series. In the time since then, the film franchise has admittedly at least tried to find new ground with last year’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a more faithful horror adaptation of the first two games in the series, but a critical flop.

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With the new Resident Evil series on Netflix, many fans anticipated another fresh interpretation of the franchise. Perhaps it would be another faithful recreation of the games or a new story with familiar characters. But although the series had a strong start on Netflix after its release on July 14, 2022, becoming one of the platform’s most-watched shows that week, the response has not been good. As of writing, the show sits at a 26% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and for many beleaguered fans, it is yet another in a long series of disappointments.

One of the reasons fans are so disappointed with the show is that it feels completely unrecognizable from the source material. It fails to incorporate the most basic and important elements of the games: military-style protagonists, a specific mystery/crime to be solved, a zombie outbreak in one small area, and strong elements of horror.

The Main Characters Are Cops/Soldiers

     Sony Pictures Releasing

In the original Resident Evil (1996) game on PlayStation 1, the protagonists were members of the elite police force known as S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics And Rescue Service), essentially a fictional S.W.A.T. team. This added several things to the game. First, the protagonist was a highly skilled fighter who could gather and use advanced weaponry and equipment such as a handgun, a shotgun, a grenade launcher, a lockpick, and so on to eventually get the upper hand on the roaming monsters.

Second, it granted an atmosphere of seriousness to the story — if the protagonist failed (as most of their team, already killed by zombies, had), then all of Raccoon City and perhaps the rest of the world would be destroyed by the monsters.

This has been one of the most consistent elements of the game series. One always plays as a military-type character: a S.T.A.R.S. member, a police officer, a government agent, a member of a private security force, an anti-terrorism unit, a Vietnam veteran, or a gun-toting biker. This was an essential element of the games’ atmosphere and separated it from its rival series Silent Hill, whose protagonists were regular people with no special skills whatsoever.

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In the new Resident Evil Netflix series, however, this is all thrown out the window. The series cuts between two timelines, one in the past and one in the future. In the past timeline, the protagonists are two ordinary high school girls. In the future, the protagonist is a scientist with some apparent experience fighting zombies.

Because the protagonists are regular people, the show does not have the same sense of seriousness; furthermore, it spends the vast majority of its time on dialogue scenes and drama, and little on horror, monster-fighting, and mystery-solving, which are the essential elements of the games’ narrative premise.

Investigating a Specific Crime/Solving a Mystery

     Netflix

The plot of the Resident Evil games is almost always the same. There has been a string of mysterious murders, a kidnapping, or an apparent viral outbreak. The protagonists are military-style experts or police officers sent in to solve the crime, find out what’s going on, and contain the monsters.

The gameplay usually involves a series of almost Indiana Jones-style puzzles involving keys, gems, and riddles that must be solved as the characters descend deeper underground until they find the secret laboratory where the zombie virus was produced. They then kill an extra-large zombie, activate the self-destruct sequence, and escape on a train, jet-ski, or helicopter.

In the Netflix show, very few of these elements remain. Yes, over the course of 8 episodes, there is one scene infiltrating a mysterious secret lab, one solving a few puzzles, and two discussing hidden secrets with an investigative journalist. Outside of this, however, there’s not much. Equal time is spent skateboarding, putting on plays, and discussing high school crushes. Without this central plot motivation, most of the series feels aimless and fails to capture the atmosphere of the games.

A Zombie Breakout in One Small Region/City (Not the Entire World)

     Capcom

Another consistent element of the games is that the zombie outbreak occurs in one small geographical region. This includes an abandoned mansion in a forest, Raccoon City, a rural town in Spain, a town in West Africa, a few cities in Europe, China, and the USA, a Louisiana swamp, and a remote village in Eastern Europe. It is crucial that the zombie outbreak be limited to one small region because the plot always revolves around the military-style characters being sent in to save the day and contain the outbreak.

What separates Resident Evil from other zombie properties is that it is not post-apocalyptic; the world can be saved, survivors can be found, and mysteries must be solved.

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In the new Resident Evil show, however, the zombie outbreak in the future timeline encompasses the entire world. This completely changes the vibe of the story and makes it virtually indistinguishable from other post-apocalyptic zombie shows like The Walking Dead.

Characters are not on a mission and are not solving a mystery, but instead are rather aimlessly scrounging around the remains of society to survive. Lost is the uniqueness of the concept, the tension of containing the outbreak, and the intrigue of uncovered secrets.

Horror vs. Action

     NETFLIX

A central dynamic throughout the Resident Evil series is the tension between horror and action. The first three games lean far more heavily toward horror, but by the end of even these, the player has gathered so many high-powered weapons and healing items that the final bosses can take only a few seconds to defeat.

After the 4th game, the series far more resembled action than horror. The Milla Jovovich film series, which began in 2002 and developed alongside the video games, similarly started with a horror movie and devolved into ridiculous, over-the-the-top action movies.

The new Netflix show features a decent amount of action, some light and infrequent horror, and a lot of drama. A solid chunk of the show, especially of the past timeline, consists of high school drama and family foibles, a very strange choice for a Resident Evil property.

What is interesting is that in the last five years, the Resident Evil games (7 and 8, plus the remakes of 2 and 3) have returned to their roots in pure horror, to incredible critical and popular acclaim. But unlike the recent video games, the new show does not return to the series’ roots as a mystery-fueled horror story. The characters, the setting, the story arc, and the mood are all wrong and feel completely unrecognizable as a supposed Resident Evil property.