Resident Evil: Welcome To Racoon City Timeline Explained - Collider

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a franchise reboot from director Johannes Roberts, has a clear aim of providing fanservice to longtime players of the hit video game series published by Capcom. The film borrows heavily from the original video games by Capcom, especially Resident Evil (1996) and Resident Evil 2(1998). One particular character also originates from Resident Evil (2002), a remake of the original game that first appeared exclusively on the Nintendo Gamecube.

Welcome to Raccoon City's backdrop and timeline are heavily reminiscent of events and locations from the games, but don't follow the events beat-for-beat. Instead, the film borrows significant events from the first two games chronologically but places them on a concurrent timeline, allowing the Mansion Incident of the original Resident Evil to play out at the same time as the Raccoon City Outbreak of Resident Evil 2 and 3.

Image via Sony Pictures

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The film's narrative shifts between S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team as they investigate the lost contact of Bravo Team at the Spencer Mansion, and Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) and Leon S. Kennedy's (Avan Jogia) view of the unraveling situation in Raccoon City and its police station. These events occur simultaneously over the course of a single night, although in the video games they were separate incidents that occurred months apart within the official game timeline. However, given the rapid nature of the spread of the deadly T-Virus in the games, it's a feasible move to bring the two major events together in the interest of telling a story that fits within a film's runtime. Fans of the games will recognize key moments, such as the doomed long-haul trucker crashing his tanker right in front of the Raccoon City police station and the S.T.A.R.S. helicopter being brought down in the woods outside of town, but they've been shuffled around into a slightly new order of events that better serves the film's merged storylines. Much of the backstory and subplots of the original trilogy of video games have also been condensed and shifted around to coincide with the events that are depicted in the movie, such the story of the tragic Lisa Trevor, a fan-favorite enemy from the games.

Welcome to Raccoon City takes place in the year 1998, just like the original trilogy of video games. This stands in fairly stark contrast to the Resident Evil titles headed by Paul W.S. Anderson, which all took place in a contemporary setting full of cutting edge technology. In the first of those films, artificial intelligence and body-slicing laser traps are featured, making it clear that Anderson's take on the game franchise was more of a "near future" take than the source material it was adapting. Keeping in line with the year, Welcome to Raccoon City keeps its universe grounded in the late 90s. Consequently, none of the working class characters in the film have a cell phone, and the internet is essentially nonexistent, which adds to Raccoon City's isolation.

Image via Sony Pictures

Where Capcom created a short gap between the two most major incidents in the early Resident Evil timeline, Welcome to Raccoon City brings all of the survival horror danger together to culminate in one terrible night in 1998. You have to feel for the film's characters, who experience two games' worth of hell breaking loose over the course of an especially bad 12 hours. That's "wrong place, wrong time" taken to the extreme.