Yeah, it is only Resident Evil in name, and I'm happy with that. If you want Capshit movies, there are the CGI ones, remakes of the older games, the terrible series and the whole movie franchise run by a fetishist who wants to see his wife running around wearing leather clothes.
As far as the RE franchise goes, the structure of going around, finding keys, starting from being stuck in one place and then going from place X to Y has always been there, as has the way the suspense is structured, except in RE5. Even 6 had a bit of it.
So the movie does capture that idea. It includes other things too, like how the suspense is structured, a big monster chasing the protagonist, the fact that you don't always see the threat, etc. It even makes fun of the whole fan idea that has been part of decades of debates about how "protagonists should just shoot the padlock," although it plays with that concept way too many times for my taste.
The suspense is really cool, and there are some nice scares, along with some funny moments, like a reference to Zombieland.
That being said, there are two moments that are very weak. The first is the arrival in Raccoon City, and the second is, well... the ending. That ending was the least RE thing this movie had, and no excuses, whether it's a director preference or "this is just a random NPC story," will satisfy me. RE7 was also a "random NPC story," and it still had a very RE ending.
I give this 3 Powrinas out of 5.
#PAMR #Powrina