Sightlines · reception

How Resident Evil was received

2002 · Paul W. S. Anderson · Resident Evil on Sightlines

The arc

Critics trashed it in 2002 — Roger Ebert gave it one star — but audiences turned it into the launchpad for a six-film, billion-dollar franchise, and the 'vulgar auteurism' wave of critics has since recast Paul W. S. Anderson as a sleek genre stylist worth taking seriously.

What’s debated

The forever-war: is Anderson a secret auteur or a hack, and does the film's total indifference to the games' survival-horror tone make it a betrayal or a liberation?

Its footprint

The laser-grid hallway is the film's immortal image — parodied, referenced, and so iconic that Capcom folded a laser corridor into the Resident Evil 4 game — while the Red Queen's 'You're all going to die down here' remains its most-quoted line.

Where it stands

A cult rehabilitation case: dismissed as video-game junk on release, now a fixture of the Anderson-defender canon and a reliable Letterboxd 'actually, it rules' pick.

Did you know? George A. Romero — whose zombie films inspired the games — wrote a script and was attached to direct before being dropped from the project; Anderson's version also introduced Milla Jovovich to Anderson, and the two later married.