Review: All Roads Lead to Leon in RESIDENT EVIL: INFINITE DARKNESS
I’m a late comer to the Resident Evil franchise and haven’t had the chance to play many of the games. But the game that got me into them was Resident Evil 2. I always loved the storyline for it, and it has my favorite character of the franchise, Claire Redfield. I remember playing The Darkside Chronicles and loving it as a way to get into her story line. I liked the dynamic between her and Leon, and her overall badassness. The only Resident Evil movie I have seen is Degeneration, specifically because she was in it. So when I saw the trailer for Infinite Darkness, I was so excited to see that she would be in it. Overall, I enjoyed the series, the visuals were good, the music was excellent, and the story was typical Resident Evil.
The first thing to talk about is the way the show looks. In single screen shots, it looks beautiful. The textures of the clothing and scenery especially stood out to me. However, it still felt a little awkward when characters moved casually and their mouths didn’t always match great with the dialogue, mainly in the more stoic characters like Leon. It’s pretty par for the course from what Resident Evil media has looked to me, I was just expecting a little more expressiveness by now after seeing how amazing Village looks. The other nitpicky thing is the women’s hair; it is never animated great. In stills it looks great, but moving around, yikes. It either is completely stiff or moving way more than hair usually moves. Not a dealbreaker, but they still haven’t solved that animation problem.
The music I think is excellent. I really enjoyed listening to the opening and end credits music. Honestly, there’s not much more to say about it, I look forward to being able to get the sound track.
The story is intriguing, but ended up falling a little flat for me. I’m going to do my best to avoid spoilers here, but here is your warning just in case you want to go in completely blind.
It’s a typical evil corporation investigation type story. I think the reason it fell flat for me is so much time was spent with Leon and not enough with Claire. We spend the vast majority of the series with them separate and learning different information from what the other learns. But there was no true payoff for Claire’s investigation efforts, we’re even left dangling on a clue that she finds that we never get to see. While Leon is admittedly learning more about what’s going on, I think they focus too heavily on him and don’t give other characters enough time to develop. If you love Leon, then of course this will not be a problem, but if you are like me and were so excited to see Claire, well, you’ll probably be disappointed at how little time she actually gets to be in this series. They also introduced a few really interesting characters, but we never really get to see what they were fully capable of which is incredibly disappointing. Again, less time needs to be focused on letting Leon be the big hero and letting other characters have moments to shine.
The story could have used more development and action. Like I said, it was pretty typical Resident Evil, but it felt like they wanted to spend more time on it and just couldn’t. I would have rather had another few episodes in order to get more action and more development of its overall theme, how fear and terror evolves, especially with how important it reveals itself to be in the final scenes. It looks like they’ve opened it up for more seasons so I will be interested in seeing if they are able to follow up with more and be able to develop more with it. I think it was done well enough that it deserves at least one more season, but I would like to see a little bit more balance between the main characters.
I enjoyed the series as a whole, but definitely had some hang ups with it. I would give it a 7/10, a good start to a multi season series, but not the most amazing stand alone mini series.
Guest Review by Anna Williams
