Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a reboot of the Resident Evil film franchise, is set to reach theatres on November 24th. Earlier this week, we got our hands on a promotional featurette that put the spotlight on the popular video game character Claire Redfield, who is played in the film by Kaya Scodelario. (You can watch that promo below.) Now two more featurettes have arrived online to tell us more about a couple of the other Resident Evil video game characters who are in the movie. Both featurettes can be seen in the embed above; one introduces Avan Jogia as Leon Kennedy, and the other focuses on Robbie Amell as Chris Redfield.
Written and directed by Johannes Roberts, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is directly based on the first two Resident Evil video games. Here’s the 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.
In addition to Scodelario, Jogia, and Amell, the cast includes 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.