Last night, I finally got to see the new Resident Evil movie by Zach Cregger of Barbarian and Weapons fame. Suffice it to say that I liked what I saw, even if there were significant narrative and storytelling flaws, most noticeably in the fact that this film doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Resident Evil in the first place.
Which doesn’t mean the film is bad; it just felt more like Cregger’s personal art rather than something part of a much larger, sprawling, and recognizable intellectual property. Well, except for the gameplay part.
Here is our full review.
Welcome to Raccoon City
Resident Evil takes place in our modern day and age, apparently during the events of Resident Evil 2 but in an alternate universe where they all happen in 2026 rather than 1996. That decision only makes sense, and the same has been done time and again, even in more prolific works of fiction like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and others, where instead of ancient Rome, the plays are set in Fascist Italy.
It’s just a way to transpose events and bring them closer to our current era, and while that’s something a lot of people seem to have taken fault with, I actually found it quite nice.
We follow Bryan, a courier delivering transplantation organs to their designated hospitals, who then undertakes another assignment to carry what seemed to be just another regular package to Raccoon City General Hospital. As he grew nearer to Raccoon City proper over the mountains, Bryan started encountering all sorts of strange things, which only ramped up from there until we got to, well, Resident Evil levels of chaos and apocalypse.
The atmosphere the movie sets is oppressive, and the overall lack of knowledge about Raccoon City and what happened there is well-represented both through Bryan and other characters not from the city itself or part of Umbrella. There is a strong mystery in play here, even though most of the viewers who had played the game knew exactly what was going on.
It’s a visually stunning movie, one that takes no quarters when it comes to visual representation, both of this horrifying world itself and of the creatures “living” in it. But this focus on presentation really takes a toll on the story, which is by far the movie’s weakest link, even though the whole of the experience was altogether engaging and entertaining, to say the least.
What it feels like to play Resident Evil
Bryan’s journey through the world seemed to have been framed from the POV of the player in a Resident Evil game, with the character encountering various enemies for the first time, getting armaments, and then being able to fight the same monsters he had been running away from. Bryan does a ton of puzzles, encounters incessant roadblocks, and always sees his main quest—delivering the package—sidelined in favor of solving present matters that are preventing him from moving forward.
All of the creatures Bryan meets are film originals. None of them appear in the games, at least none that I can remember, and while the movie takes liberal inspiration from the source material, Cregger also has a bunch of his own takes on the universe and the concept of what is scary and horrifying, which to him seems to be mostly body horror of all things.
And body horror does work tremendously well with Resident Evil as a franchise, especially considering the scale of the film’s events, which inevitably lead to very, very extreme and gruesome body horror scenes. They’re great scenes, though, and they ramp up from small-scale, like random zombies, up to apocalyptic, Nemesis-like creatures. Like the plot and the pace of the movie, they progressively escalate and even turn the movie into a sort of splatterfest by the end.
Bryan navigates all of these creatures and events to the best of his ability, which is very evidently based on how a player might control a Resident Evil character, or rather how a player would behave were they transposed into the game they were playing. Bryan constantly misses things that were easy to hit; he shoots at incessant padlocks he encounters because that’s what he saw worked in games and movies; he tries to break through a padlocked fence, thinking a truck is enough to destroy thick chains, etc.
He also comes across various elements of the games themselves, like doors requiring keys hiding in strange spots, conspicuous empty guns with inconspicuous, missing ammunition, and even the damned typewriter that in the games is used to save progress.
As the movie (the game) progresses, Bryan starts to become much more skilled with guns, finds new weapons that are significantly more powerful than those he had before, meets characters who tend to die three seconds later, and so on and so forth. The spirit of Resident Evil and, indeed, of gaming, is incredibly well captured by the film.
But that comes at a cost of storytelling, and while the film does have a plot and characters that you can care about, it never really goes too deep into either telling a compelling story or trying to adapt any particular plot or narrative from the series. It’s its own, self-contained thing, and while I believe it’s much better in every way than the OG film franchise, it is pretty far removed from Resident Evil as a setting.
That’s good in some sense, because it allowed Cregger to just make a good movie, but it also leaves the viewer yearning for more.
It’s a good film
At any rate, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is an entertaining, fun, and visually spectacular movie. It’s also incredibly funny, with the comedy, whether intentional or otherwise, being present throughout the whole ordeal. The absurdity of the plot is sometimes tough to follow and take seriously, but then again, it is a Resident Evil flick, and that was always going to be a side effect.
Is it as good as Barbarian? No. Is it better than Weapons? Absolutely yes. If you’re looking for a new horror film to fire up with the squad, then this is probably your movie of choice, but probably not your first pick if you wanted to know more about Resident Evil‘s universe.
