The live-action Resident Evil movies have plenty of detractors, there's no doubt about that, and, even to their most ardent fans, they're not exactly awards-quality movies most of the time. That said, they've had a strong enough fanbase to carry them through six movies and even movie fans just looking for a cheap laugh often walk away satisfied.
Here are 5 reasons why the live-action movies are actually kind of great and 5 why the animated movies are more worthy of your time.
10 Live-Action: Shameless Action
While the animated movies often exceeded the action of the live-action movies, as we'll get to in our next point, the live-action movies certainly aren't outdone in the area of quantity.
The live-action Resident Evil movies never seemed hugely confident that they could be great movies but they always did everything they could to be entertaining movies and the shameless amounts of fight scenes, slo-mo and explosions always kept their fans happy.
9 Animated: Fight Choreography
The quality of certain action scenes varies greatly across the animated Resident Evil movies simply due to the rapidly changing nature of the technology used to make them and the work put into the choreography of the live-action movies certainly isn't to be sniffed at.
But the nature of animation itself allows for truly wackier action set-pieces in general where the safety of an actor is almost never a concern. By the time motion-capture technology had caught up to where it needed to be, fans got to see some wildly entertaining zombie fights.
8 Live-Action: Sets and Locations
One of the inherent drawbacks of animation is that, while you can be hyperdetailed in certain instances, you can't fall back on the production value contained within even the simplest real-life location and the backgrounds of scenes are often just bland and repetitive to look at.
The live-action movies, on the other hand, often had some very inventive sets and they always kept the actors moving from location to location to keep things interesting.
7 Animated: Plot
Plotting isn't something that the animated Resident Evil movies exactly excel at but, compared to the live-action movies, it's an easy win.
While the live-action movies were almost all essentially excuses to have action sequences, all strung together by a loosely connected group of characters and events from previous movies, the animated movies could allow themselves room to breathe a little. They could even incorporate mystery elements that would last for the entire movie rather than just a scene.
6 Live-Action: Make-up and Prosthetics
The quality of the make-up and prosthetics varies greatly between the live-action movies but this, coupled with frequency, gives viewers lots of different takes on zombies and monsters to chew on throughout the series.
With plenty of interesting monsters to bring to life as well, the tradition of enjoyable horror movie make-up is kept going in some form or another in each of the six live-action Resident Evil movies.
5 Animated: Closer to the source material
One of the reasons why video-game-to-movie adaptations so rarely work is that movies and video-games aren't actually as similar as you may be tempted to think they are. Superficially, they offer similar experiences. But, dig a little deeper, and you'll find that they achieve similar goals through entirely different methods.
The animated Resident Evil movies may suffer from an overall lack of cinematic quality but they easily make up for that by remaining far closer to the fun a player would find in the story of a video-game. It often makes them scarier, stranger and able to stand apart from other science-fiction action movies to be more of their own unique thing.
4 Live-Action: Comic Relief
Being a 'generic Hollywood movie' does, of course, have its downsides. It does, however, also have a lot of plus points. Which is why producers will so often go down that road.
One of the pleasant consequences of doing things by the book handed down by generations of audience-tested successes and failures is that you can provide effective levity in what is still always, at least partially, a horror story. The comic relief moments and characters in the live-action movies don't reinvent the wheel but they never have to in order to be successful.
3 Animated: Better use of the classic monsters
While the most iconic monsters from the Resident Evil franchise do make appearances in the live-action movies, in one form or another, they're never as big a source of action or fun as they are in the animated movies.
Movies like Damnation and Vendetta dish out Lickers and Tyrants like they're candy while the live-action movies are forced to save them for rarer effects shots in the biggest action sequences and, even then, they're often not on screen for very long.
2 Live-Action: Milla Jovovich's performance
The undeniable MVP of the live-action Resident Evil movies, even beyond original producer and director Paul W.S. Anderson, has to be Milla Jovovich. Many actors returned to for multiple installments of the franchise but Jovovich carried every single movie as the sole protagonist.
In an overarching franchise with so much of its own lore, her character was able to write her own chapter in the wider history while selling fear, anger, determination, superhuman kung-fu skills and even an air of vulnerability to the audience across six feature-length movies.
1 Animated: Better use of classic characters
Most of the major characters from the games do make appearances as supporting characters in the live-action movies, and they're often very enjoyable. But, just like the monsters, they're not around for long enough to make much of an impact.
Fan-favorite character Leon S. Kennedy makes an appearance in the fifth movie, along with many others, but fans get to see him take the lead role in most of the animated movies.
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