Resident Evil · reception & legacy
2002 · Paul W. S. Anderson
How Resident Evil has been received, argued over, and remembered.
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.