The Resident Evil Movie Is a Perfect Video Game Adaptation
Zach Cregger's Resident Evil is truer to the games than it seems
On paper, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil shouldn’t be very controversial. It’s not just the best reviewed Resident Evil adaptation of all time, but the best reviewed video game movie of all time by a country mile. If anything, it should be the one game adaptation that fans can finally rally behind rather than another cold body for the pile.
But while critics are eating the horror-comedy up, fans of the Resident Evil games are torn. Cregger’s decision to tell an entirely new story in the Resident Evil universe, with no surprise cameos and minimal overt callbacks to the game, has proven to be divisive for fans who would have rather seen Jill Valentine on the silver screen. (Honestly, who wouldn’t?) While that gripe is understandable, it undersells what Resident Evil is doing with the source material. In a lot of ways, it’s actually the perfect adaptation of the games — just not in the way you’d expect,
This article contains spoilers for Resident Evil, including its ending.
Resident Evil follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a courier who gets tasked with delivering an unknown medical package to Raccoon City. If you’ve played the games, you know where it’s going right away: Bryan ends up trying to survive in a zombie-infested town. No, it has nothing to do with STARS or Leon S. Kennedy, but the premise is very much faithful to the series’ spirit; it’s practically a side-story pulled right out of 2003’s Resident Evil Outbreak. That PS2 release was an anthology of survivor stories that included everyday people like a surgeon and a cowardly subway worker who isn’t that far off from Bryan.
Sure, the moment-to-moment plot doesn’t match any Resident Evil game. There are some hilariously pointed references, like Bryan constantly butting up against locks or fighting off a zombie dog, but much of it sees Cregger inventing his own slapstick scenarios. But even those still feel consistent with the source material, right down to the actual structure of the story. A movie that starts in a claustrophobic house, heads out into the streets of Raccoon City, and delves into the sewers? Sounds like Resident Evil to me. It even ends in an Umbrella Corporation lab, where several games (including Resident Evil Requiem) often culminate. Come on!
To really accept Resident Evil as faithful to the source material, though, you need to remember whose eyes you’re experiencing the zombie apocalypse through. Bryan isn’t a secret government agent; he’s just some average guy, not too far off from Resident Evil 7’s hapless Ethan Winters. Cregger emphasizes that midway through the story when Bryan crosses paths with a supercop who moves and acts like Chris Redfield, right down to staying perfectly still while firing into a group of zombies for an absurdly long time — you can practically feel the tank controls powering her. It’s a familiar sight that always goes fine for Resident Evil’s superheroes, but how would that scenario play out for a normal person?
That’s the clever running joke of Resident Evil. Throughout the film, Bryan butts up against multiple obstacles that we’ve seen heroes from the games effortlessly navigate. And he fails pretty much all of them, as anyone not named Leon S. Kennedy would. Shooting a lock off a door? Nope. Plowing a truck through a fence? Negative. Making a daring escape from a barn on a rope? Flat on your ass, Bryan.
The best example of that comes from Resident Evil’s most direct reference to the game. After leaving the house at the start of the film, Bryan finds a terrified child hiding in an RV. The scene is a pure Resident Evil 2 callback, evoking Claire Redfield’s heroic turn as she rescues an orphaned child midway through her story. Bryan is presented with that exact same Claire moment, giving him his own chance to live up to the heroes of the games. It all goes terribly, terribly wrong, because Bryan is nowhere near as cool and collected as Claire. He’s not long for this outbreak.
It’s important to remember that the Resident Evil games don’t always depict the dead as the most capable people. It’s not uncommon to read a note left behind by an Umbrella Corporation goon that depicts them as a moron. How many times have you read a note about scientists running stupid experiments on sharks and just chuckled to yourself knowing what happened next? Resident Evil specifically pays that feeling off big time. When we finally meet a group of Umbrella Corporation scientists at the end of the film, they are every bit as incompetent as the games teased. It’s pretty believable that Umbrella’s virus spread as far as it did because some buffoon dropped the cure.
The Resident Evil series so often teases that the events that led up to the zombie apocalypse were a comedy of errors. Cregger’s Resident Evil movie just visualizes it.
All of that plays into what Resident Evil is ultimately doing: it imagines the origin story of a video game boss. Midway through the film, Bryan gets bitten by a zombie child. He’s infected with whatever parasitic virus is plaguing Raccoon City (an apparent mash-up of Las Plagas and the T-Virus) and his condition worsens as the film goes on. The climax sees him fighting to get poked with the cure as his body rapidly mutates. It doesn’t work out for Bryan, whose monster instincts lead him to killing Umbrella’s scientists. The last shot shows him transformed into his final form, a hulking monstrosity that looks almost exactly like one of Resident Evil 2’s grotesque bosses, complete with an enormous, bulging eyeball on one shoulder, just begging to be shot.
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Think back on so many of the enemies you’ve fought in Resident Evil games. How many of them are built up with scattered lore logs that clue you into how a real person unwittingly became a biological experiment? In one of Resident Evil’s most inspired jokes, Bryan creates his own collectible backstory when he records a final farewell message to his girlfriend. Put that in the context of a video game where you’re Leon making your way to a boss. You enter a parking garage and find a phone sitting on some bloodstains. A recording of a guy who is about to die plays. You follow the trail of blood up the stairs, into an increasingly destroyed lab office building, and end up in a lab full of dead bodies guarded by a boss. That’s the Resident Evil experience; Cregger just plays it in reverse.
It’s not a satisfying conclusion to Bryan’s unresolved character arc, but it is a great punchline to the film’s ultimate joke. Resident Evil is The Metamorphosis, but for zombies. If that’s not a perfect elevator pitch for a Resident Evil movie that keeps the spirit of the games intact while telling an original story, I don’t know what is.