The New 'Resident Evil' Netflix Series Is Trending For All The Wrong Reasons

Let's be honest: At under 2 hours in running time, this is just a movie split into four slices that are essentially Act 1, Act 2A, Act 2B and Act 3.

Why Netflix felt it needed to draw and quarter a perfectly legit film and call it a series is unclear, especially since it already has a live-action series in the works. 

This could have just as well just been a movie. We all know it. And we didn't need to sit there skipping recaps every twenty-something minutes. 

Let's give credit where it's due and admit that some of the CGI animation was pretty cool. Some of the battlefield scenes were especially well done, and we almost forgot we weren't in a live-action environment. 

But wow, was it inconsistent. 

One second, we're completely engrossed in the action, the next we're watching shaky CGI people walk awkwardly down hallways or speak words that don't match their lip movements (perhaps because of language overdubbing from Japanese to English). 

Explanation or not, it would have been nice to see every frame get the same attention.

Fans of the Resident Evil video games were more than ecstatic when it became clear that Infinite Darkness would bring together Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield in one animated miniseries to battle the zombies as one cohesive fighting force.

Of course, they're hardly ever together the entire series - until the climactic battle with Jason the Superzombie as he leaps from rafter to rafter trying to destroy the lab and expose the conspiracy. 

As Leon fights him, Claire mostly shrieks and runs for her life until they land on top of each other and...

Is this a rom com now? If you were going to go there, then go there. But don't wait until the end of the series. 

Claire Redfield is a beloved character from the Capcom video game series, and she deserves to be more than a seldom-on-screen incidental character who occasionally finds a clue or chases down the Defense Secretary in a hallway--but mostly wanders around aimlessly as Leon does all the fun stuff (like electrocute zombie rats in soon-to-explode submarines).

And then in the climactic ending, she finally steps up... oh wait, no. Actually she's duct taped to a chair and quite literally a damsel in distress. 

It's really hard to create crazily heightened, monstrously "scarier than the usual zombies" creatures for the climactic endings of zombie stories in which we've already seen zombie rats that get their kicks by chewing through the innards... of other zombies.

But when Jason purposefully forgoes the inhibitor antidote to become his true zombie self, the result is a cheesily rendered CGI disaster that feels like what would happen if you mixed the genes of the Hulk, the Heat Miser, Shrek and maybe a bit of the Night King from Game of Thrones.

Fans and reviewers have pointed out that not only does Infinite Darkness bear remarkable similarities to previous animated feature Resident Evil: Degeneration, but the general storytelling was somewhat lazy and predictable. 

Sure, the political component adds a bit of a Tom Clancy/David Baldacci vibe - but in the end the conspiracy tropes proliferate, complete with an inside job by a high-ranking government official who runs a secret government lab that exists so the heroes can save the day by destroying it.

It's all fine. It works. But it has also all been done before.