How Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil stands out from all other game adaptations
There’s no Leon, Claire or Ada Wong in Cregger’s adaptation. Instead, it re-creates something more fundamental – the strange, terrifying experience of actually playing the game
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I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. “It’s not a real Resident Evil movie,” they’ve claimed. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.
On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!
Bryan’s understanding of the world is shaped, as in any Resident Evil game, through found footage (voice recordings, emails etc) and via short, enigmatic interchanges with non-player characters. There’s a sequence in the road tunnel where a recently infected young girl says to Bryan: “My mom bit me, I don’t know where she went.” This is a classic Resident Evil exchange: in one terse sentence she gives us narrative information and an implied threat – the mother could be lurking anywhere nearby, waiting to pounce …
Aware perhaps of online discourse, Cregger released a video explaining his vision for the movie, and how he has sought to reflect not just the fictitious universe of the games, but also the experience of playing them – that sense of quickly moving through a world of endlessly evolving horror. It’s also been interesting to see theories emerge about Bryan’s role as a sort of NPC precursor to a true lead character, leaving the hints, tips and ammo behind for someone capable to pick up.
I always thought thatthe subsidiary non-playable characters in the early Resident Evil titles had the most interesting stories: affable old Barry Burton from the first game, cowardly helicopter pilot Brad Vickers from Resi 3, Resident Evil 4’s omnipresent merchant. “I’m interested in vulnerable characters, in normal human beings,” series creator Shinji Mikami once told me. “The horror experience is most scary when the player really isn’t sure whether their character is going to live or die – death and survival need to be on a constant see-saw. If there’s a situation where you’re not 100% sure that you can avoid or defeat the enemies, if you feel maybe there’s a chance you’ll make it – that’s where horror lies.” Bryan Hodukavich lives in that space for the whole film.
Cregger’s Resident Evil should perhaps be put alongside Kane Parsons’s Backrooms and Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 as a movie that is as much an exploration of video game mechanics as it is any sort of translation. These movies make us feel like players, trapped in an unfamiliar nightmare world with its own rules, characters and temporal conventions, which we have to gradually unpeel. Cinema has always deconstructed other media, whether that’s the theatre (Les Enfants du Paradis, The Producers) or superhero comics (Unbreakable, Logan), and it’s fascinating to see video games having the same sort of scrutiny. This is, after all, the most self-reflexive medium – the audience is spectator and participant, the world is naturalistic yet necessarily artificial, with its yellow-painted walls (see: Keza’s newsletter just last week), and its indestructible barriers (to stop a player wandering out of the rendered environment).
So yes, this is definitely a Resident Evil movie – it’s just that the camera pans away from Claire as she blasts another zombie, or Leon as he makes a daft wisecrack. Instead, it takes us just around the corner, to where the huddling masses of Raccoon City await their destiny, with maybe three bullets, two lines of dialogue and a voice recorder.
What to play
First appearing as a browser-based game back in 2010, the ragdoll-physics gore-fest Happy Wheels is now on Steam – and it’s just as ridiculous as ever. Your aim is to make it across an obstacle-laden landscape in whatever vehicle you’re given without falling into a chasm or being chainsawed in half, or stabbed or eaten. There are dozens of levels but you can also design your own and share them with the community. I’m not surprised the Steam version has been wishlisted by 750,000 players. This kind of hilarious, awkward, experimental game thrived in the Flash era of the noughties and it’s lovely to see a classic example return in all its blood-drenched, clipart-esque glory.
Available on:PC
Estimated playtime:Several laughable hours
What to read
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It’s been weird to watch Microsoft and Sony seemingly trying to find yet more ways to antagonise gamers after concerns over mass redundancies and the death of physical media. Two weeks ago, the gaming site Respawn First discovered a Microsoft patent to serve ads to Xbox players during down times in games, perhaps while loading a level or after a boss battle. Not to be outdone, Sony has filed a US patent for technology allowing players to tap their phone or credit card on a PlayStation controller to pay for digital goods. Call me cynical, but perhaps more convenient advertising and monetisation models are not the best way to win back hearts and minds.
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Naughty Dog studio head Neil Druckmann has revealed that there are twoLast of Usprojects on the go, expanding on the canon of the first two games. Both are in the very early stages of development, and it’s not even known if they are games – they could include a new TV series, movie or graphic novel.
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Looking for somewhere nice to visit? Minecraft is getting its <a href="https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/minecraft-is-officially-getting-its-first-new-dimension-in-15-years/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>first new dimension in 15 years, a particularly lush world named The Sift, filled with pastel-hued meadows, multicolour lakes and bunny-like mobs. It arrives in Minecraft Dungeons II this month, and will be in the main editions of the game next year.
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Question Block
“Last year I ended up spending a lot of time supporting mydad during a roughpatch with this health, and this led to me playing a lot of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete on my iPhone. I havefound it really soothing during a challenging year but I’ve pretty much exhausted it.[Someone] recommended [playing] Stardew Valley but it doesn’t feel especially suited to playing on a relatively small mobile, nor my limited free time. Any suggestions? Hopefully nothing involving micro transactions?”
Smartphone games can be an amazing tonic during tough times – I’m glad they helped you through them. If you’ve not played Unpacking yet, it’s an extremely relaxing narrative tidying game with lots of subtle emotional touches. I also like the gentle platforming adventure Spiritfarer about shepherding spirits to the afterlife. If you’re looking for more of an Animal Crossing vibe, there’s Wilderness: Meadowfell, a lush exploration game set in a procedurally generated landscape, or try one of the classics from Japanese developer, Kairosoft, such as the Game Dev Story or Jumbo Airport Story. If you can stomach a couple of suggestions with very noninvasive in-app purchases My Leisure Time and Animal Restaurant, have been recommended to me as great life sims with bags of character.
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