Character or Genre

I was watching the movies Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse and notice the distinction between the two to be quite drastic. Resident Evil I thought was far better than Resident Evil: Apocalypse for one reason, I cared about the characters. While those are just one example of character and genre it was a pretty good example.

Resident Evil was a rather successful film in the fact that they created suspense, horror and mystery all in one film. The story opened with non stop thrills until the end and had me trying to figure out more of the story with every plot twist. The key element I found was that the movie was a story about characters and their discovery that happen to run into a virus that is infecting people in a bad way, and they don't know how it is happening and they must figure it out or face infection or even death.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is different in the fact that when the movie starts the hype begins with a thought of, "what is going to happen next." The sense of mystery quickly dissolves when there is a lot of blatant exposition that solves all mysteries and leaves nothing to the audiences imagination. This second movie in the series loses its unique intrigue and no longer becomes a movie about characters and what they must learn and becomes a movie about zombies with a few characters in it. To top it off the threat level goes down because the audience now knows how to kill the undead and it becomes a movie about who has the most super powers and is prettiest who will survive.

I think James Manogold hit the nail on the head in his commentary to the movie 3:10 to Yuma. He said that often times directors get all excited about making a western [genre] movie and watch as many western [genre] movies as they can. The result often ends up with them trying to make a movie that has all their favorite parts about the genre result in making a movie about a genre instead of making a movie about the characters. -- The characters are what people relate to because they would be a character in a movie not a genre in a movie.

My end thoughts are: Don't make a movie about a genre, make a movie about the characters.