What does it take for something that isn’t a video game to feel like a video game?
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil released following a varying response of both criticism and anticipation. After all, the audience was promised a jaunt through the iconic nostalgia of Raccoon City. At the risk of being honest, Resident Evil fans have been met with plenty of interesting adaptations in the past, so the speculation surrounding the movie’s release wasn’t completely unwarranted. There had been plenty of conversation regarding whether or not Cregger could accomplish making a movie that felt like a video game, since that was one of the biggest talking points leading up to the movie’s release. Cregger himself stated he is a longtime fan of the franchise, which ideally earned him some brownie points in the eyes of the audience even before the film hit the big screen.
So, with all of this being said – how well did the newest Resident Evil movie deliver on its promises?
(Spoilers ahoy. This is your warning.)
I ended up seeing Resident Evil twice over opening weekend, and I was lucky enough to go in with a fairly fresh perspective after playing through the mainline games in preparation for Resident Evil Requiem before its release. While I have my qualms about the movie itself, I have to say this: it delivered on the expectations it set within the scope it was given.
There are a couple of scenes in the beginning of the film that personally started things off strongly for me. Our protagonist, Bryan, finds himself in an abandoned barn on a piece of property after being chased down by an obviously very normal dog, leaving him to clamber up a ladder into the barn’s loft to safety. In the process of continuing forward, he finds he has to solve what is effectively a small puzzle to aid his escape, but unbeknownst to Bryan, this barn presents us with the first handful of familiar mechanics. The audience can spot dried healing herbs hanging from the rafters, and there are even two cans of First Aid Spray (which, unfortunately for him, remain untouched). Soon after, Bryan makes his way to the abandoned farmhouse next to the barn, where he finds his first weapon upgrade: a shotgun. He still has to scour the upstairs of the home for bullets for his new gun, endlessly opening desk and dresser drawers until he finally scores some shells. Been there, done that. Not to mention the typewriter within an empty, dark office of the house he chooses to ignore. My personal favorite is when he’s presented with what is essentially an indestructible padlock with a diamond embedded on the front that he repeatedly takes unsuccessful shots at – just for a “diamond key” to be revealed moments later after he fails to pummel through it à la Resident Evil 2.
As I was watching the beginnings of Bryan’s journey begin to unfold, I was thrilled to see all of these things. It was exciting to be watching a Resident Evil movie that wasn’t afraid to actually be about Resident Evil. To me, it truly felt like it wanted to deliver on these game-inspired angles. Like the diamond padlock and key, I couldn’t help but to think about how the barn scene felt like a nice nod to Resident Evil 4, or how the farmhouse was referencing Resident Evil 7. While Bryan unfortunately doesn’t make his way through the Raccoon Police Department in the movie, there’s still another sequence in an underground parking garage that evokes the same energy as the garage in Resident Evil 2 (sans the endless slew of annoyingly endless infected dogs. Lucky him). Hell, we even find out the item Bryan is delivering to Raccoon City is a direct reference to Resident Evil 5.
There are a handful of times where you experience instances of familiar-feeling first-person shots as Bryan aims down the sight of his gun and peeks around corners, just to retreat and regain his composure. Within one of his first encounters with one of the infected, you can’t help but notice how the camera mimics the feeling of holding the right joystick on a controller as Bryan effectively runs in a circle to try to escape it. You’re even made aware of his ammo count multiple times throughout the movie, and if you’re anything like me, you can’t help but internally count down every time he takes a shot at something. Then again, that could be due to my own unfortunate affinity to panic shoot and waste ammo, even when it’s a precious resource. A knife in an RE game hates to see me coming.
There’s something else about Resident Evil that would be a disservice not to mention, and that is Bryan as a character – more importantly, what Bryan represents: the epitome of a new Resident Evil player. Watching Bryan felt like watching what I likely looked like when I was playing through the games for the first time. He screams and panics and gets a bit too trigger-happy at times to the detriment of his ammo supply, curses out monsters and the infected, mutters in frustration as he comes across yet another padlock he doesn’t have the key for, and freaks out when the Big Scary Monster that’s been following him the entire time makes itself known again. To me, Bryan represents a true experience of playing a Resident Evil game, if only because he’s freaking out the first few times he encounters the Big Scary Monster, but ultimately gets completely fed up and exasperated with it by the end. It felt almost too reminiscent of my own experiences with Nemesis the first time I played through the games– ”He’s seriously not dead yet?”
It also helps that the movie follows a pretty linear arc of a typical Resident Evil game, so we get to watch Bryan figure out what exactly is going on in Raccoon City just like we all had to at one point. Personally, one of my favorite things about this movie is that Bryan isn’t a Leon, or a Chris, or even an Alice– he’s just a guy who was thrown into an unheard of situation and forced to figure out how to play and fight his way out of it. One of my first experiences with Resident Evil was actually the remake of Resident Evil 4, and I effectively felt like I had been pushed into the deep end with the opening fight sequence in the village. It was a flood of enemies and new things to learn (and a decent amount of mounting frustration before I actually figured out what was going on), and I’m sure I exhibited a fair amount of Bryan-esque shouting at different points as the game progressed. Bryan is ultimately a great mirror of all of us, or at the very least, someone experiencing a survival horror game for the very first time.
Overall, while I ultimately wish there had been more of these moments more consistently throughout the movie, I do think this new iteration of a Resident Evil film used the source material to its advantage. In my humble opinion, it feels about as close as you can get to making a movie about a video game that feels like a video game without leaving the audience walking away thinking “this guy actually just wants to make a video game.” The first-person shots are used sparingly and intentionally; there are some fun references to iconic items and mechanics, and we essentially get to watch someone experience a Resident Evil game for the first time through a new character’s perspective.
I do wish Bryan got to use a rocket launcher, though.
