In case you are unaware, Welcome To Raccoon City is a Resi reboot film (Fs in the chat for the old canon of Mila Jovovich films) based on the first and second Resident Evil games, and it’s coming out at the end of next month. Those too ravenous to wait can feast their eyes on how some of the cast look right now, including Avan Jogia and Kaya Scodelario as Leon “Leon S” S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield (L-R in the header image there). The shot of Jogia and Scodelario isn’t the only one doing the rounds, of course. Here’s a nice group shot: Welcome To Raccoon City is, according to comments made to IGN, going to be more of an ensemble piece going for a survival horror vibe, a bit removed from the gruesome zombie action-horror of the previous film franchise where a man got turned into meat cubes by lazers. In any case, it’s reasonable enough that two real life actors do not look exactly like fictional people, especially since they’re not attending a convention in almost drag-esque theatre makeup designed to make their nose look a different shape. Because also, they look good! Leon’s in a police uniform! Claire has a red leather jacket on! And her hair is amazing! I don’t care if it’s not up in a ponytail, those defined waves are incredible. There’s a lot of shine and bounce in that hair. Maybe it was in a ponytail before this scene and a zombie pulled the hair tie out, you don’t know! In fact, Jogia’s fringe is looking pretty healthy too, John-Kamen does have a ponytail and is making it work, and Hopper and Amell are rocking those Hollywood army-boy dos. The look is something director Johannes Roberts addresses directly with IGN, saying, “they are not just cosplay characters who have the exact hair and costume of the characters,” and that a flaw in game adaptation is “just casting someone to look visually like the characters.” Apart from anything else, the people they’ve cast clearly have great hair already, so I respect that. All I know Tom Hopper from is being a sad gorilla boy chewing scenery in The Umbrella Academy which… well, sounds pretty bang on for the kind of thing I apparently enjoy in Resi adaptations. I will admit to two things, though. 1) I am something of a fair-weather Resi fan, and I’m presumably not the main target audience. On the one hand, I think that when an adaptation is 1:1, it ends up being quite boring. What’s the point in remaking something in exactly the same way? Just play the games again if you want a CTL+V experience of them. On the other hand (that has been cut off and stapled back on several times), if a movie is called Resident Evil Colon The Franchise You Need To Have Heard Of, that’s not really a mass market property, right? 2) The Lisa Trevor monster does look kinda rubbish in this picture I have been more terrorised by dolls my grandmother owned. I’d just kind of assumed all the live action Resi monsters would be played by Doug Jones bending his joints the wrong way. Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City is out on November 24th, after being delayed twice from Septembers 3th and 9st. I will also admit a third thing, which is that delays are normally a bad sign in film production. But in this year, who knows? At least the hair is great.
