Relatively little is known about the upcoming Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, but it's already clear that the reboot has a better understanding of Raccoon City than the original movie adaptations. A successful series of movies that adapt the premise of the Resident Evil franchise have been released before, starring Milla Jovovich, but the series veered heavily towards the action movie genre. Writer and director Johannes Roberts has emphasized that the new film will focus on the horror aspect of the games.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City will adapt the story of the first two games for the big screen. The first Resident Evil video game took place in and around Spencer Mansion in Raccoon Forest, a front for a secret lab where the Umbrella Corporation conducted viral experiments. Resident Evil 2, however, moved the action to Raccoon City itself with a new cast of characters. Leon S. Kennedy reports for his new position in Raccoon City’s police department and Claire Redfield searches for her brother, who was a member of the team that explored Spencer Mansion in the first game.
As well as leaning into the action elements of the games, the previous movie franchise also relied on an early-2000s sci-fi aesthetic. This meant that both the inside of Spencer Mansion’s secret lab in Resident Evil (2002) and Raccoon City itself in Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) were presented as highly-glossed versions of themselves. Raccoon City’s history is as a 1960s tourist town that flourished under the Umbrella Corporation’s investments but suffered during an early 1990s depression, and that is set to be more directly reflected in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.
Roberts has emphasized this point as, in conversation with IGN, he said “Nothing in this town feels hi-tech. It feels dilapidated […] a ghost town forgotten by the rest of the world.” With every scene of the movie reportedly shot at night and with it constantly raining, Raccoon City can become its own character in the new movie. Rather than merely being the backdrop for extreme action sequences such as those between Nemesis and Alice in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City the setting will be able to drive more of their horror aesthetic.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is not technically billed as a reboot or a revival. However, Roberts and the team behind the movie are clearly making a self-conscious choice to divorce their film from adaptations that have come before. With a whole new cast and a more faithful adaptation of both the story and the spirit of the original video games, it is clear from the title that they intend to completely reintroduce audiences to a new, grimier Raccoon City.
