There’s just about three weeks left until Resident Evil Requiem launches, and the wait has me feeling itchy and tasty in the best and worst ways.
That wait only got worse yesterday with the newest advertisement for RE9, a short film titled Evil Has Always Had a Name. And you know what that name is: Resident Evil, baby, and this next game is reportedly set to wrap up a lot of storyline threads going all the way back to the original Raccoon City outbreak in 1998.
The short film itself throws it back to 1998 and the beginning of the outbreak featured in Resident Evil 2 and 3. It features Longlegs actress Maika Monroe living through the chaos of a city under siege from the undead with her young daughter. And if you look closely, you can even see the silhouette of Nemesis before he blows stuff up with his rocket launcher amidst the madness.
But what I love most about this short film is how it captures the atmosphere of what that outbreak must have felt like, on a human level, between a mother and daughter. And I think it’s the best live-action Resident Evil we may ever get, unfortunately.
The short film seems disconnected from the game, until it teases at the end that the undead mother still remembers her daughter and may have even memorialized her with a grave and her raccoon plush toy. This would fit with RE9’s tease that zombies in the game retain memories of their past life, and that alone is just very upsetting yet quite cool to think about.
There are high hopes for this year’s Resident Evil film reboot by Weapons writer/director Zach Cregger, but that one is looking and sounding like it will be its own thing, with a comedic structure and none of the characters from the games. It’s coming in September, so we should hopefully see a trailer or hear more info soon.
The first few Resident Evil films with Milla Jovovich were decent popcorn flicks, but bad representations of the game universe. And let’s not even discuss 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a disaster on the same level as the bomb that took out the game’s famous midwestern town.
I really love the aesthetic and overall vibe of this short film. Funnily enough, it was directed by Rich Lee, the same person who made Prime Video’s laughable War of the Worlds film with Ice Cube that got memed on relentlessly. But I have to admit, he cooked here.
Cregger should easily be able to tap into the fear and horror of Resident Evil, given his style. But I have my worries that it may be just a bit too far gone from the basis of the franchise, similarly to what happened with the Jovovich movies.
For fans of the games, there are multiple animated films that feature characters like Leon, Chris, and Jill, so I’m thankful for that. At least, for now, we have this heartbreaking look into what could be or could have been for the series in live-action form, and we can cherish these three minutes and 35 seconds forever.
