At first, the Resident Evil movies were barely like the Resident Evil video games, up until the video games became way too much like the movies and it all devolved into a cacophonous feedback loop. Thankfully, Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City writer/director Johannes Roberts has pretty much consistently said that his reboot/origin story for the series is going to be a lot more like the well-crafted spookiness of the early games than the nonsensical bombast of the movies.
Apparently nobody told that to whoever edited this first trailer, though, because it’s extremely in-your-face. It’s not necessarily bad, and it definitely looks like Resident Evil thanks to some specific nods to iconic sequences from the video games, but it also appears to be trying to bridge the gap between the people who actually liked the Milla Jovovich movies and the people who like the more traditional Resident Evil stuff.
The movie is telling what looks like a streamlined version of the plot of the first two games, with Avan Jogia playing Leon, Kaya Scodelario playing Claire, Robbie Amell playing Chris, Hanna John-Kamen playing Jill, Neil McDonough playing William Birkin, and Tom Hopper playing Albert Wesker. If those names mean anything to you, you can probably make some guesses about what’s going to happen to them in this movie.
You can also probably point out the stuff that’s in this trailer for the gamers, like “itchy, tasty” written in blood on a bathroom mirror and the one zombie’s slow turn toward the camera. It’s a little weird that Wesker isn’t wearing sunglasses, but maybe they don’t want to make it too obvious that he’s suspicious—err, not that he’s suspicious at all. We certainly wouldn’t want to spoil a decades-old video game twist about who is or is not working for Umbrella and profiting off of the zombie apocalypse.