Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness Episode 1

Your right hand comes off?

Adaptations; an unfortunate part of life that we all are stuck with and have to deal with until further notice for no good reason whatsoever. People just can't be happy with the story as it is, no they want to 'adapt' it, which is great when the adapter has some cool ideas to make the story work in the new medium, but that's so rare it's pretty much the exception over the rule. Most times people just see a property that's popular and are trying to exploit that property on a new audience for their own benefit. Nothing innovative and exciting about that. For every adaptation like David Production's Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (full of ingenuity and passion which takes the base stories and imbues entirely original artistry to it) you get an Assassin's Creed movie, (clearly written with no regards to how movies are formed and, oddly, sidelining the historical stuff which you'd have thought would have been the main draw) Hitman the movie, (Two films that only could have been made by a team who looked at the cover for these games and nothing else) and, of course, the Paul W. S. Anderson Resident Evil movies. (Anderson's very own zombie fan fic story loosely draped around a sort-of approximation of the Capcom series.)

What I'm trying to say is that Adaptions are usually a bad idea, because few people out there apparently possess both the passion to create and the care to try and do so with another person's work without gutting the thing and killing it's charm. That's part of the reason why I've never really been automatically down whenever I see a movie-game in production, no matter how many people say it looks like the curse breaker, because I've seen it all before and it's always a disappointment. This blog has successfully driven me out of my comfort zone for several different areas, however, and this 'adaptation' side of games has been one of them because now I want to seek out and asses how strong/ transformative these adaptations really are. Luckily for me, one such TV show that I've seen do the rounds recently does the whole 'adaptation' game (if that word is even applicable here) right.

See, when I think of properties being transferred into a new medium, I pray that it's not to retread the same content that was already designed to work the way that it did, and instead hope it's to expand upon the established story. Similar to what the Wachowskis wanted to do with The Matrix series through their animated shorts and video games. Tell me a story that wouldn't have worked in print, or on TV, or in a console, because then you prove how this is a story that can be bigger than itself. Resident Evil, excluding those aforementioned movies, is generally a series that really gets this, and even when they were in their darkest days (RE6/ Umbrella corps) the rest of the franchise was putting various animated movies, novels and even a Manga that I literally just found out existed called 'Heavenly Island'. A few of these stories even cover brand new outbreaks never touched on by the games. The quality of such content can be... varying; but the effort is appreciated.

Thus when I saw Resident Evil Infinite Darkness first teased all that while back, I was actually rather encouraged thanks to a great many factors, chief of which being the fact it would feature the RE2 Dynamic Duo Leon and J- I mean Claire. Claire Redfield is the one who gets paired with Leon, duh. Jill only ever meets Leon in... in... wait a second... I've got to look this up... Never? Jill Valentine never meets the only other survivor of the police station she worked at? (Excluding Rebecca, because who cares about Rebecca?) That seems deeply wrong, somehow. How can those 2 faces be the one's that represent Resident Evil when the two of them haven't so much as crossed each other in the street? Is it because Chris Redfield is a shapeshifting doppelgänger from beyond the spheres who's face would be unrecognisable on promotional material? It's probably that.

Now I've actually got a chance to watch the first episode for myself and I can say right off the bat that it wasn't exactly what I was expecting from the various teasers we saw. The vision I formed in my head, from those dark and intimidating little glimpses, was that this was going to be a show that focused a lot more on the creepiness and danger of there possibly being zombies around every single corner, taking it's time with setting up the terror and establishing the danger of even a single one of these shambling crawlers. That couldn't have been further from what I saw, however, because whilst there were a few darker moments, that's only visually, Leon and gang manage to dispatch armies of undead with frankly unnerving efficiency. I don't think there was a single scene of this show which took it's time to let a scene sit, which I suppose is understandable with 20 minute episodes, but it still isn't what I expected.

So was it bad? Not necessarily, just different; and even with some days to process it I can't for sure say whether that was a style which ultimately suited the show. The first episode actually covers a surprising lot, going from a previously undiscovered outbreak to a seemingly targeted bio-warfare zombie attack in the White House, and even touching on potential international espionage along the way, all the while the show speeds by it so fast there's no time to really swallow it all and process. I was still trying to get to the grips with the fact that despite the show featuring the acting talents of the RE2 Remake cast, this game takes place after Resident Evil 4. There was even a moment where we see a rendering of new age Ashley Graham, and I had a terrifying flashback to that escort-quest nightmare girl. ("LEON!!!")

Getting the voice actors involved was a nice touch however, and it fits in nicely with this much more concentrated and comprehensive timeline that Capcom are trying to establish now. (Even if the animation team couldn't be bothered to redo the lip flaps for the English Dub. It's really noticeable in some scenes) For an introductory episode I'll say that this was pretty lukewarm, really just introducing the mystery of these new zombies, but I was, at least, tickled a bit by the casual attitude with which zombies are now treated in the Resident Evil Universe. I suppose it makes sense, given that the United State Government literally had to nuke one of their own cities to end an outbreak, making it pretty hard to keep their existence under the rug, but it still just seems like so a-typical from your usual zombie-story MO. I was too tickled by the somewhat conscious joke at this point where Leon Kennedy finds himself invariably attracted to the closest Asian woman in the vicinity. The woman he shared a life and death adventure with shows up, he sleeps, but his Secret Service colleague Shenmei even exists, and Leon is trying to slide into those DMs before the first episode is up. (My man has a type. Ada Wong got him shook)

I can't lie and call this one of the most exciting introductions to a series that I've ever seen in my life, especially not when Wandavision and Loki are still fresh on my mind as absolutely stellar examples for how a limited series can present itself. But it is by no means the pits of despair either and I'm at least recognising Resident Evil enough to want to follow this through and see which new angle in the Resident Evil world this show is going to open up. With the recent announcement of a new live action series coming down the pipeline too, it really seems like Capcom are committed to expanding the famous zombie franchise to new horizons, and I'm rooting for them to nail the execution. One more thing, I noticed in the credits that Jojo's Yugo Kanno is working on the music, I expect to see his brilliance more at work in the rest of this limited run or I'm going to be very upset with Capcom.