The Resident Evil brand is as popular as ever, with remakes of the classic games and excitement for new sequels spurring hopes of a return to movies for the franchise. The movies released under the banner so far haven't exactly been critical darlings but, given their pulpy roots, that's not exactly surprising.
Video-game-to-movie adaptations have historically always done poorly with both critics and audiences yet the Resident Evil movies endured for far longer than any other game series in the world of movies, with fans having even rated some of them relatively highly. Let's look at all of the movies together, ranked by their IMDb scores, to see what's made them work so well for so long.
10 Resident Evil: Retribution (5.4)
Longtime franchise writer, producer, and director Paul W.S. Aderson's penultimate movie in the live-action series is a bit of a blowout extravaganza, arguably even more so than the final movie in the franchise (which we'll get to next).
Retribution finds Alice and a host of familiar faces teaming up and going head to head in all kinds of weird combinations thanks to the franchise's shift towards cloning as a central plot device. Though clearly not as big a hit with fans as other installments, the huge and varied set pieces of the movie make up some of the franchise's most entertaining moments.
9 Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (5.5)
The grand finale of the Resident Evil movies as we know them, The Final Chapter converges all of the series' numerous characters and plot threads into one final mad dash to a twist-filled finish.
Lead by Alice, the last remnants of humanity wage war on the Umbrella corporation's master plan for world domination with some revelations for the main character being saved for the very end.
8 Resident Evil: Afterlife (5.8)
Paul W.S. Anderson's return to directing duties reinvigorated the spectacle of the action with some memorably stylistic sequences.
The movie opens by fulfilling the promise left by the end of the previous movie, which is something that the franchise didn't always actually do, and the bonkers action sequence involving an army of Alice clones was worth the price of admission alone.
7 Biohazard 4-D: Executer (5.9)
Though only a short animated movie that bearly gets the 20-minute mark, it's easy to see how Biohazard 4-D Executer managed to get a higher score from fans than a number of the huge live-action movies.
The simple story feels like it was ripped straight from the games and not just because of its gloriously nostalgic PS One graphics. The short is full of the kind of horror and suspense that made the original games as popular as they are.
6 Resident Evil: Apocalypse (6.2)
Disposing of all that pesky horror movie build-up that the first movie had to use, Apocalypse transforms the live-action Resident Evil movies into a purely sci-fi-action based franchise and fans seem quite happy with the results.
It was the moment when the live-action movies really started to demonstrate a self-reflexive sense of humor and it helps the quickly-paced story move along.
5 Resident Evil: Extinction (6.3)
Much more in touch with other zombie movies than the original games, Extinction saw the live-action movies strike out more as their own thing, and fans responded well to it.
Mostly a desert-set post-apocalypse movie in the vein of Mad Max, the third movie in the live-action series pushed for things to get even bigger and wilder in the future and it forms the basis of what the rest of the live-action movies would work with.
4 Resident Evil: Vendetta (6.3)
The final animated Resident Evil movie sees fan-favorite characters Leon S. Kennedy, Chris Redfield, and Rebecca Chambers team up to fight the usual mad science of the franchise.
Vendetta proves that the live-action side of the franchise isn't the only thing that can incorporate insane action sequences into the story and the improvements made in motion capture technology since the animated movies began allows for some of the most impressive fight choreography of the franchise overall.
3 Resident Evil: Damnation (6.5)
The second feature-length animated movie contains one of the most unusual and interesting plots of the cinematic side of things, balancing its shameless monster mash of some of the franchise's most iconic enemies with political intrigue.
Leon is the out and out main character this time around in a fictional Eastern European country and the personality that fans have come to love from the globetrotting zombie slayer really has the chance to shine through in this installment.
2 Resident Evil: Degeneration (6.5)
The first feature-length animated movie is a lot slower than the others, almost certainly as a result of the available technology at the time, but the resultingly dialogue-driven scenes add a much-missed sense of mystery to the story.
Degeneration should really act as a lesson to any future Resident Evil movies, whatever they may look like, that slowing down isn't such a bad thing for the series.
1 Resident Evil (6.7)
Paul W.S. Anderson's original live-action adaptation remains the highest-rated among fans and it's almost certainly down to the fact that, of all the feature-length movies, it's the most concerned with centering on the horror.
Its action-heavy elements were still quite prevalent but Resident Evil puts quite a lot of work into building atmosphere and that's clearly resonated with fans over time more than any explosion or chase sequence.
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