Why Resident Evil Fans Should Love Degeneration

It's a well-known fact that videogames make really bad movies. Some are definately worse than others, put it's widely acknowledged that every film that uses a game as it's basis is bad.

Resident Evil: Degeneration, the latest effort, is a full-length CG animation and is, in theory, the first film to do it's videogame inspiration any justice at all.

Forget the previous RE trilogy of movies; Degeneration is completely unrelated and fits in with the overall story of the main series of games. It is set one year after the events of Resident Evil 4, and sees Leon S. Kennedy teaming up with Claire Redfield for the first time since RE 2 to combat a new threat to civilization. 

Of course, most RE fans have already slammed the movie, as have fans of general cinema and videogame fans who aren't particularly into RE but happened to see the film. However, I don't understand why. Ideally, a fan of the RE series should really enjoy this film. 

For a start off, the plot makes little to no sense. It's jumbled, the characters aren't convincing, the voice acting is bad and the script is terrible; just like the games. It's riddles with cliche, has the most ridiculous action scenes ever and it's defining moment is when a character injects pure G-Virus into himself and becomes a giant tyrant with an eyeball in it's shoulder. Again, just like the games.

But of course, this isn't what people want from a film. It's things like this which emphasise the fact that games stimulate people in very different ways to films. They're both two similar forms of media, but what works well for a game doesn't do so for a film, and vice versa.

This brings us to the root problem of videogame-to-film conversions. In order for a movie based on a game to please a fan of the game, it must be like the game. And in order for it to be like the game, it needs to forget the fact that it is in fact a film, a medium which doesn't rely on saving graces such as gameplay to rescue it. This leaves us with a product which can't quite decide which side it wants to lean to, and ends up displeasing both audiences. 

Obviously, this is the reason why films based on games will never work. Uwe Boll needs to read this, and maybe then he will understand and stop butchering perfectly good videogame franchises. It will probably never happen, but we can hope, right?

While we're on the topic, the latest game-to-film project to be released is Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. Remember the first SF film? Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile? Remember how bad it was? Expect more of the same.

- DC Nightmare