I grew up reading comic books and video games. Just as my enthusiasm for the former peaked, the first Spider-Man movie came out; by the time I stopped playing video games in 2005, the movies still hadn’t caught up. There was the successful Paul W. S. Anderson film of Resident Evil in 2002, but after catastrophes like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Alone in the Dark, Doom, and BloodRayne, Hollywood cooled on video games and blamed it all on Uwe Boll (he did direct three of those four flops). But even successful adaptations like the Resident Evil and Tomb Raider series were ripped apart by critics and video game fans; they made money, but made little impact beyond further demonstrating the divide between cinema and gaming.
Zach Cregger wanted to take a crack at it, and his first job after last year’s smash hit Weapons is a new 94-minute Resident Evil movie. It’s a reboot, a restart, whatever you want to call it—just know that no knowledge of Anderson’s Evil or Milla Jovovich are necessary to enjoy what an old friend called a “sublime soda experience.” Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, the player character charged with transporting vital organs from one hospital to another. He’s sent into Raccoon City, where the Umbrella Corporation have been “conducting research”—all of this will ring alarm bells for anyone who’s played the games, but Abrams is apparently unaware of the emerging zombie crisis. On the way, driving down a snowy road, he accidentally hits a wandering woman; when he gets out to help her, she’s suspiciously even-keeled, if silent; as they drive along to the hospital, a cop pulls up and signals for Abrams to pull over. They clear up the situation, and the cop agrees to take the woman in his car as they both drive to the hospital.
Big mistake! She’s a zombie and chomps him up. Now Abrams is stranded in the middle of nowhere with no idea what’s going on, but nevertheless, he persists. Why? Because he’s the player character. Cregger’s real success here is in evoking the gameplay experience rather than the ostensible story and lore of the Resident Evil series. When Abrams is walking through the snow, the camera follows him and stays just over his right shoulder, just as it does in the games; there are moments of first-person and third-person gunplay, and a whack-a-mole aspect to the characters Abrams encounters that’s more familiar to gaming than to cinema. When Abrams blows a little girl’s head off, we see the mess it leaves on the wall, even if we don’t see the actual headshot; this is something you’d never see in any movie, forget horror. It’s especially noteworthy because the kid immediately recalls those trapped in the basement by Aunt Gladys in Weapons.
Abrams moves deeper into Raccoon City even as those around him are picked off one by one. Characters, like Paul Walter Hauser, are introduced and quickly knocked off, a real exception to the rule when it comes to movie deaths (rarely is death so impersonal and poorly timed in film—a mid-century exception are the war films of Wiliam Witney, such as Paratroop Command, where you get to know guys who are blown up or killed in long shot or off screen). Altering something so fundamental to conventional cinema structure does a lot without being showy; Cregger, more than anyone before him, has brought the video game experience to the movies.
How much mileage can you get out of this? The Super Mario Bros and Sonic movies took conventional kids movies approaches, and the upcoming Legend of Zelda movie (if that’s still on) will likely look to fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings for its concerns and structure. Cregger’s Resident Evil is a one-and-done, and although Abrams may be included in future installments (an inevitability, given the film’s financial success), he’ll have to be a zombie, or some other character. But does it really matter who Austin Abrams plays? It’s easy to enjoy the “sublime soda experience” of Resident Evil because we know this guy from Weapons (along with The Americans and Euphoria), and all we’re asked is to follow him into a doomed city as he nobly tries to deliver a crucial medical package that ends up being the cure for the zombie virus. He doesn’t know that, and neither do we for most of the movie, but we’re on board because we know what he’s doing is right, even if it isn’t safe. Ninety-four minutes riding sidecar with a hero, the kind of person who deserves statues even if he’s forgotten. A “sublime soda experience” indeed!
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM