Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City will be more faithful to the video games than the previous movies, but it looks like it's betraying a core element of its survival horror roots. While zombies seem to be everywhere in popular culture now, this wasn't the case in the '90s. Zombies movies had - pun intended - mostly dried up by this point. It was both 1996's Resident Evil and The House Of The Dead arcade game that helped kick off a resurgence of the genre.
The original Resident Evil movie from 2002 also helped bring zombies back to the big screen. Despite this, the Milla Jovovich-led Resident Evil movies had little in common with the game series and eschewed horror in favor of action. The upcoming reboot Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City is promising a return to the roots of the series, with the story merging the first two games in the franchise and featuring classic characters and monsters.
The trailer for Welcome To Raccoon City shows that in terms of visuals and tone, it's sticking somewhat close to the source material. That said, one key element of early survival horror games is that the player character is often completely alone, and must work with limited supplies to survive a horde of monsters. Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City's trailer seems to have missed this note, as the main characters appear to be partnered together most of the time instead of being split up.
In the RPD section, Kaya Scodelario's Claire Redfield spends the whole trailer with rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia), while in the Umbrella mansion Hannah John-Kamen's Jill Valentine is with Wesker (Tom Hopper) and so on. In contrast, both the original Resident Evil 2 game and its 2019 remake split up Claire and Leon for the bulk of the story. That's because having characters isolated and alone - often with little to no ammo - is much more intense than having a partner helping out.
When the original Resident Evil games switched to action, they often paired players with a partner, either A.I. controlled or with a second player. These games could be great fun, but they ruined any real chance of building a horror atmosphere too. Having a partner ready to help at any moment diluted the tension, and it appears Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City might make the same error. Of course, the preview may not be an accurate representation of the story, so maybe Chris, Claire, Leon and others will be on their own for large parts of the story, but it currently doesn't look that way. The reboot is promising to restore a sense of horror to the movie series, so hopefully, it lives up to that vow.