Personally I found FF:TSW much better than RE, perhaps mostly because of the ground it broke with visuals, which it did on a scale not seen in any other movie. The plot was at least different. It turned out the aliens weren't just aliens - which made a pleasent change. Although a lot of it was kinda "haven't we seen this before", in particular the evil general wanting to use military might on the thing that they didn't understand, which I've seen so many times before.
But similarly RE just seemed to be a rehash standard action movie. Nice zombies yes - but surely we've seen dozens of weird science labs over-run by some weird evil that a small group of people including at least one civilian or something have to destroy/escape from. It was like a combination of Cube, Event Horizon and any number of research labs gone bad. It did add zombies to the mix though, but it was nothing special.
I know this kinda goes back on what I said earlier - but I think it depends what you want out a movie. As an action it's great, as anything new or interesting it's poor.
