Zach Cregger's cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series Resident Evil has sparked complaints from some fans on social media, with claims that it is not a real Resident Evil movie. The film does not feature familiar heroes such as Leon, Claire, or Ada Wong, and lacks recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite this, Cregger's interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.
A Different Kind of Resident Evil Story
On the surface, the film is about a zombifying virus accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation, which are the foundations of the Resident Evil mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. The player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak with no weapons and no idea what is going on.
He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes viewers through a series of locations dragged straight from the games, including an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital, and the obligatory sewer level. As Bryan progresses, he finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle, but he is always short on ammo. Typewriters appear in at least two scenes.
Replicating the Gaming Experience
Bryan's understanding of the world is shaped, as in any Resident Evil game, through found footage such as voice recordings and emails, and via short, enigmatic interchanges with non-player characters. In one sequence in the road tunnel, 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 narrative information and an implied threat – the mother could be lurking anywhere nearby, waiting to pounce.
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. Theories have emerged about Bryan's role as a sort of NPC precursor to a true lead character, leaving hints, tips, and ammo behind for someone capable to pick up.
Focus on Vulnerable Characters
The subsidiary non-playable characters in the early Resident Evil titles have the most interesting stories, such as affable old Barry Burton from the first game, cowardly helicopter pilot Brad Vickers from Resi 3, and Resident Evil 4's omnipresent merchant. Series creator Shinji Mikami once said: "I'm interested in vulnerable characters, in normal human beings. 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 or superhero comics, 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.
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.
