Resident Evil reboot featurette focuses on faithful recreation of video game visuals

Screen Gems is bringing Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a reboot of the Resident Evil film franchise, to theatres on November 24th, and in anticipation of the film’s release a new featurette has arrived online in which writer/director Johannes Roberts discusses the work that went into making sure visuals from the first two Resident Evil video games – from set designs to a sandwich – were faithfully recreated for the live-action film. This featurette can be seen in the embed above.

Directly based on the first two games, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City has the following synopsis:

Once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, Raccoon City is now a dying Midwestern town. The company’s exodus left the city a wasteland… with great evil brewing below the surface. When that evil is unleashed, the townspeople are forever… changed… and a small group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.

The cast includes Kaya Scodelario as Claire Redfield, Robbie Amell as Chris Redfield, Avan Jogia as Leon S. Kennedy, Hannah John-Kamen as Jill Valentine, Tom Hopper as Albert Wesker, Neal McDonough as William Birkin, Donal Logue as Chief Brian Irons, Chad Rook as Richard Aiken, Lily Gao as Ada Wong, Nathan Dale as Brad Vickers, and Marina Mazepa as Lisa Trevor. 

Roberts has told IGN,

The thing I loved about the games is they were just scary as hell and that is very much what I wanted to do. That atmosphere — it’s rain, it’s constantly dark, it’s creepy. Raccoon City is kind of this rotten character in the movie and that sort of atmosphere in the games I wanted to put in [the film]. … I’m a huge John Carpenter fan and I really took to that. The way he tells these claustrophobic siege movies and I took movies like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog and these disparate group of characters coming together under siege, and I took that as my filmic inspiration. We have two very separate locations but we split people off into their worlds. One is more of a siege movie style with the police station, and then you have the mansion which is creepy as f*ck.”

The Motion Picture Association has given Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City an R rating for strong violence and gore, and language throughout.