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The trouble with video-game movies is that they tend to adapt everything except the game itself. Most adaptations amount to a string of cutscenes, the janky animated interludes that allow you to grab a drink while waiting for a fight to load, or function as free-flowing riffs on characters that were never built to exist in three dimensions. The joyless translation from console to screen has produced some of the worst movies ever made, and no more than a handful that could be called so much as good. But Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil sets itself apart by caring more about what it’s like to play the game than what it would be like to live inside of it.
First order of business: Discard all of the games’ characters and most of their plot. Some fans of the Capcom series have complained that Cregger’s movie doesn’t include figures like Leon Kennedy, a rookie cop who has the bad luck to start work on the night a plague of mutant zombies infests his police station. But as much fun as it can be to see the world through their gun sights, battle-ready fighters can make for dull movie protagonists. A scrawny medical courier with a scruff of not-quite beard, Bryan (Austin Abrams), the hero, so to speak, of Cregger’s movie, looks more like someone you’d find clutching a PlayStation controller than a souped-up submachine gun. Cregger has said that his Resident Evil, which covers the first hours after a potent bioengineered virus escapes from the top-secret labs of the nefarious Umbrella Corporation, takes place alongside the events of the second game in the series, but neither you nor Bryan would ever know it. As far as he’s concerned, he takes a last-minute assignment to deliver a cooler to Racoon City, and the world simply goes nuts.
Cregger throws in plenty of Easter eggs for fans of the games—I heard an appreciative murmur when Bryan opens a door in a creepy, deserted house to find an old-fashioned typewriter sitting on a desk—but what feels most familiar is the way the player-protagonist slowly acclimates himself to his deadly new world. There’s the gradual escalation of weaponry as Bryan finds a pistol and then a shotgun, furiously hunting ammunition and wasting bullets like a noob as he tries to shoot through padlocks rather than hunting for the key—the increasing level of difficulty as the enemies get more monstrous and harder to kill, and the moments when it’s better to sneak around to a side entrance than charge in guns blazing. Unfortunately, Bryan isn’t much of a player. He’s still fiddling with the safety on his pistol as a snarling zombie comes bearing down on him, and when he finally locates a box of shotgun shells, he can’t manage to load them into the barrel without scattering ammo all over the floor. He picks up a few skills along the way, but even when he does manage to take out a creature, the pithiest quip he can come up with is “Stupid fucking monsters.”
Because it’s much scarier to be in a game than it is to play one, Resident Evil tilts heavily toward humor. Bryan doesn’t have the safety of knowing that if he gets his throat ripped out he can just respawn at the last save point, but Cregger plays his mortal terror for laughs; the high-pitched squeals he emits after one especially messy brush with death are not a sound you’re likely to hear in a first-person shooter. The movie gives him the barest of character arcs, beginning with his panicked response to the announcement that his unseen girlfriend is unexpectedly pregnant. (The scene in an infested maternity ward embodies the fear of fatherhood with more gooey gusto than any movie since Eraserhead.) But Cregger is poking fun at the idea of character development more than he’s indulging it. Are we really meant to think that blowing the heads off a bunch of shambling monstrosities would make him more ready to be a dad?
A true representation of what it’s like to play a video game would be one of the most avant-garde movies ever made. (Imagine a four-hour stretch where the main character fights the same enemy over and over again just so they can learn how to dodge their attacks.) But Resident Evil approaches its task with the right mixture of fidelity and irreverence, in tune with the thrill of scoring a perfect headshot and the knowing groan you emit when you turn a corner and see yet another nightmare trudging ineluctably toward you. After the bone-deep scares of Barbarianand Weapons, it’s a bit of a letdown to see Cregger blow his creative capital on a gory goof. But video games aren’t meant to be a good use of your time, and he’s done enough work to earn a few hours on the couch.
- Video Games
- Horror
