This film (and more generally the series of films) does seem to attract its fair share of opprobrium and, looking at the spread of ratings it's got here on Amazon, it's not even just a "love it or loathe it" film - it's pretty much fairly covered by every point on the spectrum. One fairly common theme of the "hate it" reviews appears to be that it offends devotees of the computer game from which the film series originated. Only having played RE on the PS1 once, I personally have no concept of whether the transfer to celluloid has been appalingly botched but, in any case, I think that it's a little unfair: there can't be many films that were able to faithfully reproduce the game/book/comic/etc from which it was derived. Similarly, another common theme is that it's some sort of failed pretender to the Romero throne. Again, I haven't seen any of his films (I did see the Dawn remake) so I am unlikely to be offended on that score either.