Resident Evil has dethroned Stranger Things at the top of Netflix UK’s TV rankings.
The series, a live-action adaptation of the hit horror video game franchise, was released on the streaming service last week.
While Resident Evil has already set two milestones for the franchise on Rotten Tomatoes, viewer reactions to the series have been extremely mixed.
Specific criticism has focused on the dialogue in the series, with the contemporary pop culture references proving to be a particular source of irritation for some longtime fans of the franchise.
“The dialogue in Netflix’s new Resident Evil series feels like it was written by a bot that was forced to play Life is Strange for 10,000 hours and then threatened with a Windows update if it didn’t type out a script,” one person wrote on Twitter.
“What is this script?” another person asked, sharing screenshots of various lines of dialogue from the series.
“Trying out the new Resident Evil show, and this dialogue is… UGH,” someone else complained, while another person wrote: “I’ve never heard such bad dialogue this bad in a long time.”
Others, however, embraced the show’s imperfections. One person wrote: “Okay the new Resident Evil show is everything I needed it to be: camp fun, AWFUL dialogue and silly spooky vibes. I love it.”
In a two-star review for The Independent, Nick Hilton wrote: “The zombies themselves – and let’s face it, a Resident Evil adaptation is only as good as its ravenous swarm – look like a flash mob of A-level drama students, until they start running, at which point the frenetic action sequences are lit more sparingly than a medieval boudoir.”
“Perhaps the makers of this show felt that escaping the video game aesthetic was enough. And for some it will be: in the Wesker origin story and the skull-crunching violence, there’s something to appeal to devotees of the landmark franchise.
“But for those unfamiliar with the fabled video game series, this will feel like little more than a muddled, and somewhat tacky, zombie serial, saddled with the baggage of pre-existing lore.”
Read the full review here.
