I Watched Every CGI Resident Evil Movie. I Regret It.

I’m a latecomer to Resident Evil. Not “20 years late to Fallout but now I love it” late, but still pretty late.

For years, I avoided survival horror games. Something breathing in the dark, six bullets, a flashlight to watch it kill me? No thanks. I preferred my horror stylish and empowering like juggling demons in Devil May Cry, not creeping through hallways praying I had enough ammo to survive the next corner.

Then the pandemic hit, and I grabbed the Resident Evil 2 remake on sale. It seemed fitting for the time. And with it, everything about my relationship to horror changed.

Since 2020, I’ve preordered every entry. 2023’s Resident Evil 4 remake became one of my favorite games of all time. The franchise’s stories aren’t subtle — evil mega-corporations, government cover-ups, billionaires chasing immortality — but the grotesque creature design, stylish action, and cornball-yet-sincere heroes make the series work.

Somewhere along the way, I became a lorehound. I watched the 2021 animated Netflix series Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness. It was okay. I even read a decent comic prequel to that series, Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness – The Beginning, about a bio-terror outbreak in Pittsburgh, where I live. Then I watched the other Resident Evil series on Netflix, the 2022 live-action spin-off. It made me wish it were possible to un-watch something. 

I figured the animated films couldn’t be any worse. So, with Resident Evil Requiem having just launched and millions getting hyped to play an older, grizzled Leon S. Kennedy, I got curious and finally dove into the CGI movies.

This was a mistake.

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Every CGI Resident Evil Movie, Ranked

4. Resident Evil: Degeneration (2008)

Botox Leon, airport zombies, and a baffling graphical downgrade

Kicking off the CG Resident Evil movies, Degeneration follows Leon and Claire during a bio-terror outbreak at an airport shortly after Raccoon City’s destruction.

Right away, it’s painfully 2008. The computer-generated imagery is stiff, faces barely move, and Leon looks like a Botoxed K-pop idol remix of himself. His English voice-over performance is equally numb. This is pre-Resident Evil 4 swagger Leon: government-controlled, emotionally muted, permanently scowling.

What shocked me the most wasn’t just that the movie looked dated, but that it looked bad. It’s especially surprising considering that Resident Evil 5 released just one year later in 2009, and that game still holds up fairly well today. Character models in RE5 had weight. Expressions carried emotion. The lighting and animation were miles ahead by comparison. So what the hell happened here?

For the first of the franchise’s Resident Evil CGI films, this doesn’t feel like a technological limitation. It feels like a budget or pipeline issue. The uncanny stiffness undercuts nearly every emotional beat.

Claire, now working for a non-governmental organization, should be the emotional anchor and badass she was in RE2. Instead, she’s sidelined into caretaker mode, protecting a child. 

At one point, she shields a girl from a zombie horde by hugging her and waiting to die. Leon gives Claire a gun; she executes zombies with sudden competence — and then hands the weapon back. But they still had to run through an airport full of zombies. I almost turned the movie off.

The airport chaos is actually promising. The infected plane crash is a strong set piece. But once that sequence ends, the pacing nosedives into exposition, melodrama, and a painfully awkward romance subplot between Leon and Angela, a Special Response Team member.

Curtis Miller begins as a sympathetic villain grieving his family’s death in Raccoon City. Naturally, he injects himself with the virus and becomes a glowing weak-spot blob monster — a formula these movies would lean on repeatedly.

There’s nothing scary here. The action is murky. Leon has zero charisma. The romance is unintentionally hilarious. It feels less like a movie and more like a dated proof-of-concept cutscene experiment. The only redeeming quality is Steve Blum’s brief, hilarious voice acting as a short-lived Special Response Team member.

Score: 3/10

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3. Resident Evil: Death Island (2023)

The dream team on Alcatraz — fumbled 

Leon. Chris. Claire. Rebecca. Jill. The squad all together, in an epic setting of Alcatraz. How do you mess that up?

Resident Evil: Death Island opens strong, showing Umbrella’s private militia during the Raccoon City outbreak. A traumatic event establishes the villain’s motivation — revenge, again — and serves as more of a sequel to 2017’s Vendetta.

Visually, it looks good. The voice acting is the best in the series. But the story is a slog.

The villain monologues endlessly about trauma, revenge, and corruption while psychologically tormenting the heroes. His motivation is the weakest of all the animated films’ antagonists. The pacing frequently grinds to a halt for preachy exposition. Damnation handled philosophical weight with nuance, but in Death Island, it’s replaced by droning manifesto speeches.

Jill gets focus for the first time in CG form, exploring trauma from her time under Wesker’s control in Resident Evil 5. That should be compelling. Instead, she’s written as brash, reckless, and oddly potty-mouthed in a way that doesn’t feel organic.

The big team-up moment? A tentacle blob fight. Again.

After all that buildup, all those characters, all those rocket launchers — it ends in the same oversized mutation every Resident Evil story defaults to. After four films, the blob formula feels less like tradition and instead just plain lazy.

There’s nothing scary. The action lacks energy. The bioweapons are uninspired. It’s a completely failed attempt at fan service. A cast this iconic deserved better.

Score: 4/10

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2. Resident Evil: Vendetta (2017)

John Wick with zombies, and another billionaire with a grudge

By the time we reach Vendetta, the animated movies finally look polished.

Lighting, lip-sync, and choreography are dramatically improved. The zombies look grotesque. The gore splashes with conviction. There’s even a child zombie, which pushes the series into darker territory.

Chris Redfield is on a revenge mission against Glenn Arias, yet another billionaire radicalized by personal tragedy. Leon starts the movie drunk and disillusioned in Colorado, which honestly tracks. He needs convincing to rejoin the fight. I don’t blame him.

The Leon and Chris dynamic is the film’s greatest strength. One is jaded and emotionally detached. The other still burns with purpose. Their hallway shootout sequence is legendary — fluid, over-the-top, and the only moment across these movies where I genuinely wished I had a controller in my hands. Unfortunately, everything around that scene is thin.

Arias lacks presence as an antagonist. His motivations blur into the franchise’s recurring “revenge via extinction” template. The climax eventually mutates into — you guessed it — another grotesque blob monster final boss with an obvious weakness.

For a stretch, it feels like a very expensive cutscene for a game that might not justify its own runtime. Still, among the Resident Evil CGI films, Vendetta delivers the most consistently entertaining action.

Score: 6/10

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1. Resident Evil: Damnation (2012)

War crimes, weaponized Lickers, and the one with something to say

The second entry in the CG Resident Evil movies is an immediate upgrade from the 2008 Degeneration.

Set in the fictional Eastern Slav Republic, Damnation follows Leon investigating reports of Bio-Organic Weapons (B.O.W.s) being deployed in a civil war. Visually, it’s a bounding leap forward from Degeneration. Character models emote. Lighting improves. The horror tone returns.

Most of all, this film actually tries to explore something beyond paper-thin corporate villainy.

Resident Evil: Damnation digs into liberation movements, corruption, the moral decay of revolution, how power twists even well-intentioned leaders, and how countries work to undermine each other. That thematic ambition alone sets it apart from the other animated films.

Leon finally feels like Leon again — dry one-liners, quiet competence, controlled swagger. Lickers return and, for stretches, they’re terrifying. The film slightly undercuts them by turning them into controlled pets, but still, weaponized Lickers carry weight. 

Ada Wong shows up and instantly elevates the energy. Her absurd one-on-one fight with the president — who apparently trained in The Matrix between governing sessions — is peak Resident Evil nonsense.

However, the voice actors’ accents wobble. The pacing drags for a bit in the middle. A comic-relief freedom fighter overstays his welcome.

But the emotional beats land. The villain’s ideology feels grounded rather than cartoonish. Notably, the final confrontation avoids the standard “giant blob with glowing weak point” trap that defines much of the CG Resident Evil movies. The film even gave me a legitimate jump scare near the end.

It’s not perfect, but Resident Evil: Damnation is the only entry that feels aligned with the horror roots of the series. It’s got heart with some genuinely tragic moments that made me feel something. It’s got themes that explore something beyond “corporations bad.” And it’s one that actually scared me — a little. Best CGI-film entry in the franchise, but again, that’s not saying much.

Score: 7/10

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Final Thoughts

If you’re gearing up for Resident Evil Requiem, you genuinely do not need to watch any of these.

None of these introduces meaningful lore shifts. None reshapes the characters in ways the games don’t already handle better. And none captures what makes Resident Evil special: survival-horror tension that you can interact with.

That’s the real issue. Resident Evil thrives on player anxiety — rationing ammo, solving puzzles, deciding whether to fight or flee. Remove the interactivity, and you’re at the movie’s definition of spectacle. Sure, it’s sometimes a stylish spectacle, but more often than not, it’s repetitive and built around yet another revenge-fueled blob.

Resident Evil thrives on player anxiety — rationing ammo, solving puzzles, deciding whether to fight or flee. Remove the interactivity, and you’re at the movie’s definition of spectacle.

Occasionally, the “spectacle” is so mediocre that it makes you ask, “What the hell happened here?”

If you’re late to the franchise like I was, don’t even bother. Watch a YouTube synopsis. Read a wiki page. If you want peak Resident Evil, just stick to the games. You’ll have a better time with the chaotic Milla Jovovich films or even the just-fine 2021 live-action film Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Either way, when it comes to Resident Evil movie and TV adaptations, the bar is in hell.

Don’t make the same mistake I did.