Resident Evil- Welcome To Raccoon City

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City Witness the beginning of evil.

Once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corp, Raccoon City is now a dying Midwestern town. Beneath the surface, something terrifying has been brewing. When that evil is unleashed, a group of survivors must work together to uncover the dark truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night. Survival is their only mission.

The Ensemble: Blending Two Timelines

Perhaps the most controversial decision Roberts made was to merge the narratives of the first two games: Resident Evil (1996) and its superior sequel, Resident Evil 2 (1998). Canonically, the Spencer Mansion incident (featuring S.T.A.R.S. members Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Albert Wesker) occurs on July 24th, while the city-wide outbreak (featuring Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield) occurs on September 29th. Welcome to Raccoon City smashes these timelines together into a single, chaotic 107-minute blitz.

This creates a unique, if frantic, energy.

Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario): The film’s de facto protagonist. Scodelario plays Claire as a cynical, scarred survivor returning to her hometown to save her brother. She is the moral compass—grungy, clever, and utterly believable as a woman who has seen the corporate rot of Umbrella up close.
Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia): Rewritten as a rookie cop who is less "cool one-liner" and more "blithering panic attack." This is a bold choice. Anderson’s films gave us super-soldiers; Roberts gives us a man who has never fired his gun in the line of duty. Jogia’s Leon is a disaster, fumbling with flashlights and screaming at lickers. For some fans, this is a betrayal of the character. For others, it is the most realistic portrayal of how a 21-year-old cop would handle a zombie outbreak.
Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell): The All-American meathead. Amell plays Chris as a lovable oaf—brawn over brains. He is the action hero trapped in a horror movie, and the film delights in punishing his arrogance.
Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen): Given the short end of the runtime stick, Jill is competent but underdeveloped. She looks the part (the beret, the shoulder pads), but the script prefers to focus on the Redfield dynamic rather than the "Master of Unlocking."
Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper): A revelation. Hopper plays Wesker not as a suave, trench-coated villain, but as a sleazy, burned-out middle manager of evil. He is a man who signed up for corporate espionage, not biological warfare. When things go wrong, Hopper’s Wesker looks less like a god and more like a guy who realized he forgot to buy insurance. It’s weird, but it works.

The Characters: Subversion or Mischaracterization?

The casting of Welcome to Raccoon City is a Rorschach test. The film plays fast and loose with the personalities of its beloved icons, and whether you hate it or love it depends on your attachment to their video game archetypes.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: Leon S. Kennedy. In the games, Leon is a cocky, slightly clumsy rookie who grows into a secret agent. In this film, he is a bumbling, scared, pathetic goofball. Avan Jogia plays Leon as a man having the worst day of his life, crying in the back of a police car and accidentally shooting his own radio. Purists hated this. Critics called it a betrayal. But look closer: this is actually game-accurate Leon from the first 20 minutes of Resident Evil 2. He is supposed to be in over his head. Jogia’s performance, filled with nervous sweat and terrible decisions, is a brilliant deconstruction of the action hero trope. Resident Evil- Welcome to Raccoon City

Conversely, Claire Redfield is the hyper-competent radical. Kaya Scodelario (channeling a young, angry Sigourney Weaver) is the moral center of the film, connecting the dots about Umbrella’s child trafficking experiments. She is the heart.

Then there is Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen). The script does her dirty. In the game, she is a master of unlocking and a cool-headed tactical expert. Here, she is a glorified extra who mostly follows Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper) around. Hopper’s Wesker, however, is a revelation. He plays the corrupt team leader not as a cartoon villain, but as a weary, guilty man who sold his soul for a promotion. When he turns—and you know he will—it is genuinely tragic.

The standout, bizarrely, is Robby Amell’s Chris Redfield. Screenwriters usually paint Chris as the stoic, meathead hero. Here, he is a traumatized alcoholic haunted by the disappearance of the Bravo team. He isn't a leader; he's a survivor clinging to denial. It is a dark, compelling take that deserved more screen time.

The Characters: Closer to the Source (For Better or Worse)

One of the biggest complaints about the film is that the characters aren't the stoic badasses from the video game cutscenes. And that’s the point.

Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario): This is the Claire from Resident Evil 2. She’s a scrappy, rebellious motorcycle punk with a heart of gold, not a soldier. Scodelario plays her with a desperate vulnerability that makes her escape from the orphanage genuinely tense.
Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia): Casting a handsome, slightly goofy actor to play Leon is genius. This isn't the Secret Service agent from Resident Evil 4. This is his first day. He’s overwhelmed, under-caffeinated, and completely in over his head. Jogia plays Leon as a lovable idiot who is somehow lucky, which is exactly how you survive the Raccoon City Police Department (RPD).
Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen): She gets the short end of the stick in screen time, but her "I don't trust anyone" attitude and tactical vest nod to Resident Evil 3: Nemesis are spot on.
Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell): He is the meathead jock of STARS, which is exactly what he was in the original 1996 game before the series made him a brooding hero.

The film leans into the campy, B-movie dialogue of the original games. The characters quip, argue, and make stupid decisions because that’s what happened in the games. It isn't Citizen Kane; it's a horror movie based on a Japanese video game from the 90s. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City Witness the

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City – A Haunting, Flawed Love Letter to the Survival Horror Purist

For nearly two decades, the live-action Resident Evil film franchise was synonymous with one thing: Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich’s bombastic, slow-motion, super-powered action saga. Those films were wildly successful, grossing over $1.2 billion worldwide, but for fans of Capcom’s iconic survival horror video games, they were a frustrating paradox. They carried the name "Resident Evil" but traded claustrophobic dread for bullet-dodging pyrotechnics. The zombies weren't terrifying; they were target practice.

Then, in 2021, director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, The Strangers: Prey at Night) threw a Hail Mary. He pitched Sony a different vision: a lean, mean, R-rated throwback that would ignore the six existing films entirely and drag the franchise back to its roots. The result is Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City—a film that is simultaneously the most faithful adaptation we have ever received and a beautifully messy, structurally awkward B-movie that only a true fan could love.

This is not a "good" film in the traditional, Oscar-bait sense. It is a vibe. It is a rainy, neon-lit, synth-drenched panic attack that tries to cram the first two games (the Mansion Incident and the Raccoon City zombie outbreak) into a single 107-minute runtime. Did it succeed at the box office? No. Did it enrage casual viewers? Absolutely. But for a specific breed of zombie obsessive, Welcome to Raccoon City is the cult classic we didn't know we were starving for.

Cramming Two Classics Into One Night

Here lies the film’s most controversial decision: it adapts Resident Evil (1996) and Resident Evil 2 (1998) simultaneously. The plot follows Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) returning to Raccoon City to warn her brother, Chris (Robbie Amell), about the sinister Umbrella Corporation. Simultaneously, rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia) shows up for his first day on the job, just as the dormant "T-Virus" spills out of the mysterious Spencer Mansion and into the city’s orphanage and sewers.

For the uninitiated, this is chaos. Characters teleport from the police station to the mansion to the underground lab within minutes. The intricate, branching puzzles of the games are reduced to a frantic montage of "we need a keycard" and "look, a crest." The plot doesn't breathe; it hyperventilates. Key antagonists—like the mutated giant serpent or the Plant 42—appear in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos that serve more as Easter eggs than actual threats. The Ensemble: Blending Two Timelines Perhaps the most

However, for fans who have spent hundreds of hours navigating these environments, the film’s structure feels like a fever dream speedrun. You know the map. You know the lore. Watching Chris Redfield push a bookshelf to block a door or hearing the ding of a typewriter save room feels less like lazy writing and more like a secret handshake.

Where It Falls Flat

To write a balanced review, one must address the pacing. By mashing two games into one film, Welcome to Raccoon City has no breathing room. The Spencer Mansion segment feels rushed—the team enters, solves two puzzles, discovers Lisa Trevor, and escapes in roughly twenty minutes. The slow-burn dread of exploring a haunted mansion is replaced by a sprint to the next set-piece.

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."

The Setup: A Tale of Two Cities (and a Mansion)

The brilliance of the 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake proved that the franchise works best when it is claustrophobic, dark, and wet. Johannes Roberts understood this assignment immediately. Unlike the sterile, high-tech labs of the previous movies, Welcome to Raccoon City is grimy. It’s rainy. It’s shadowy.

The film makes a daring narrative choice: it mashes up the plotlines of the first game (the Spencer Mansion incident) and the second game (the Raccoon City outbreak). While this creates some serious pacing issues, it allows the film to utilize the full roster of the S.T.A.R.S. Alpha team alongside the Raccoon City survivors.

We follow Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) as she returns to her dying hometown to warn her brother, Chris (Robbie Amell). Meanwhile, the S.T.A.R.S. team heads into the Arklay Mountains to investigate the Spencer Mansion, while rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia) deals with the outbreak at the police station.

This structure is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it gives the audience exactly what they want: the mansion puzzles and the city chaos in one sitting. On the other hand, it creates a disjointed narrative that often feels like two different movies stitched together. However, the atmosphere in both segments is undeniably "Resident Evil."