Resident Evil is being heralded as the best video-game adaptation to ever hit screens – but a large part of that is Zach Cregger’s willingness to throw out much of the source material, and immerse what’s left in bits and pieces of a whole history of horror. In the end, however, that strength also becomes one of the film’s biggest weaknesses – as it struggles to make itself feel like more than the sum of its writhing, upsettingly squishy parts.
When the first season of The Last of Us premiered, it was announced widely as the best ever film or TV adaptation of a video game. That was a low bar to clear, to put it bluntly – but also a bar the show abjectly failed to clear in the second season, thanks in no small part to its producers’ reverence for the source material. Simply reproducing Part One – which by the standards of a triple-A game is solidly well-written – is something you can get away with. But when it comes to Part Two, meekly regurgitating a hideously tone-deaf allegory for Israel-Palestine is not.
Oddly enough, the Resident Evil franchise was regularly dredged up in the early part of that conversation about how great The Last of Us was. Supposedly, it showed a model of adaptation which was everything that movies of Capcom’s horror series were not…
Oh, how the tables have turned.
Director Zach Cregger raised a few eyebrows when he announced he would be helming this project. Having made a name for himself with Barbarian and Weapons – two surprising, creative, original horrors – the idea he was suddenly going to take on the apparently unfilmable intellectual property seemed like a bad call. One for them, one for me is a precarious production model – not everyone has the transferrable skills, or the luxury of picking and choosing projects, to make it work like Scorsese (Ben Wheatley for example).
Pairing with co-writer Shay Hatten didn’t improve my sense of optimism around this project, either. But despite the dreck he has previously been involved in (Army of the Dead, Rebel Moon), having finally escaped the clutches of Zack Snyder, Hatten gives a much better account of himself here.
This is undeniably the best Resident Evil film. Again, that is not much of a hurdle to clear; but it does still need acknowledging. Many before have tried, and failed, to clear the low-watermark of ‘competent horror’ with this brand. The action-oriented Paul W.S. Anderson seemingly hated horror, and essentially produced a series of Fast and Furious movies with zombies; while Andrew Dabb’s Netflix series did similar, but with more time to laboriously map out the lore of the video-games for its dwindling audience.
Both attempts were infatuated with the megalomania of Capcom’s franchise; the trench-coats, the shades, the seemingly endless explanations of why utterly destroying the world is actually a really cool and smart plan to take it over. And the first thing that Cregger and Hatten’s script does, is to gut that – to render us completely disconnected from that intensely dull history.
We see very little of the how or why of the T-virus (the genetically engineered sickness which is the cause of all the drama) here, while what we do see is largely delivered as absurd satire: a realisation that the people with the most money and power are often the least qualified to use is, even in their own interests. The first half of the movie is not spent in a vast, white, sterile facility with strip-lighting. It is not in a shadowy boardroom, where schemes are hatched by apparently omnipotent pharmaceutical bosses. It is rooted in a common, recognisable reality – as we follow Bryan (Austin Abrams; who I didn’t appreciate in Weapons – coming across like Jay had suddenly been inserted into a horror, sans Silent Bob – but who is perfect for this role), a scrawny courier, through the carnage of a hospital.
Patients scream, blood gushes, Bryan baulks. But the chaos is not the result of some great outbreak, planned by the clandestine powers-that-be. It’s just an American hospital, bursting at the seams, unable to care for the needs of the general public, thanks to decades of corporate avarice and governmental neglect.
Bryan is handed a box – which he assumes contains a donor-organ – and is told if he takes it to Raccoon City’s general hospital, he will be paid double-time. An attractive prospect for someone who is faces a large medical bill in his near future…
That’s on the condition that he has snow tires, of course. Bryan smiles unconvincingly, “I’ve got you.” But nobody has the energy, the time, or cares enough to actually check – so we hard-cut to Bryan’s tires skidding and screeching across a frozen road, while he engages in an excruciating phone call with his girlfriend, Michelle.
It’s an important conversation, one which Bryan ought to have headed home to have – and which he took the bonus courier mission to avoid. The decision to try and dodge this crunch-discussion will haunt Bryan for the rest of the film; including some of its most affecting scares.
Michelle has just found out she is pregnant, and is desperately trying to get Bryan to help her decide what their future should look like. Just as the phone call borders on becoming an argument, however, a wild-eyed woman wanders into the road, and mowed down by Bryan’s car. When she miraculously walks it off, it’s all downhill from there.
Each segment which follows subsequently has the makeup of a video-game level. Bryan arrives escapes to somewhere quiet and dark, potters around for a means to escape the area, and in the process discovers this place is somehow worse than the last. Indestructible locks, (in)conveniently blocked roads, and type-writers present nice little nods to the older Resident Evil games. But in this claustrophobic, grounded scenario, where all we see are the real-world implications through the eyes of an average, schlubby guy, the old Resident Evil movies are immediately eclipsed.
It’s a common-sense tweak; but one that evaded Hollywood simply because that’s the reverse of how those producers see the world. The people at the top of that production pyramid are the people who do things to others; they don’t have things done to them. So, when they pick a ‘safe pair of hands’ like Anderson to helm a production, they do so with the expectation that he will give them grand narratives about cloak-and-dagger billionaires plotting to take over the world, or super-soldiers, genetically engineered to kick arse. Neither of those is remotely as frightening as being someone poor and powerless, responding to the latest whims or clusterfucks of the 99%.
A muscle-bound He-Man maybe works when you play as a protagonist in a game – you want to be able to engage with an environment in ways you physically cannot. But when it comes to a film, where you are not directly involved in the action, the opposite is true. Bryan is so well suited as a main character here, because when he bumbles through each environment, he is as big a risk to himself as any monster might be. Figuring it out in real time, the little knowhow he has from his sedentary existence is drawn from video games – and largely this has no practical use (at least when you aren’t a super-soldier). Essentially, Cregger held up a mirror and told us, “this is actually what would happen to you in this scenario, doughboy.”
That works nicely for the ending too. And without wanting to spoil things, that conclusion implies even in this world, in our own existence, we are not ‘the main character’. Instead, Cregger’s film partially delivers us an origin story of a level-boss. It takes a traditionally faceless, anonymised bag of gore to be killed for sport, and humanises them – to a similar message: Oh you think you would be the main guy? No, you are some poor nobody, who got tied up in this because he was struggling to pay rent or afford medical fees.
Like the rude awakening most people would get when they imagine themselves as a person in a past life, thinking they would all be Alexander The Great, the actuality is you would have been one of his slaves. Here, we get just a sniff of the idea I’ve talked about many times before, when it comes to the politics of zombie movies. We are the walking dead, ragged and filthy, terrifying to a tiny, wealthy elite, cowering behind walls and guns – and smuggling a little of that into Resident Evil is a masterstroke, at least when it comes to making a watchable zombie film, rather than ruling-class action-porn.
What we’re talking about here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and imitates ‘em perfectly.
There is a problem though. Cregger and co can still only push their ideas so far, before someone higher up the food chain got spooked. That means the blend of humour and horror often feels like it was cut off before reaching its natural end. Bryan’s sardonic wit is enough to amuse, but never to shock – and the horror unfolds in a similar fashion; it is gross, it is sudden and severe, but it won’t follow you home, or have you checking over your shoulder going up the stairs at night.
On both fronts, the nightmarish crescendos around Bryan’s desire to escape discussing Michelle’s possible abortion seem half-hearted. The mid-section of the joke/scare is great – when he faces the peril of a little girl that suddenly finds him imperilled, before limping away meekly muttering in denial “That wasn’t real” – the later climax finds him in an infected hospital’s neonatal department. The grotesquery here begins to touch on some of the uncomfortable talk he was trying to avoid, but there is no time given to dwell on the catastrophic psychic damage inflicted on us and the character; or to at least quip about it. Suddenly our neurotic, twitchy lead has nothing to say – and given the call of the void would have had everyone else in that scenario think (if not speak) something crass and obscene here (something like, “No more dead babies on my watch…” Or “You know what, maybe we shouldn’t keep it…”), we hurry away from the scenario, back to safe, familiar ground.
Indeed, familiar ground is really all we have. Harking back to the games, this is similar to Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles – a game which repackaged the earlier editions as an on-the-rails shooter. It presented the façade of something new, but without any opportunity to stray from the path ordained by its original producers. And while that path isn’t quite so rigid here, Cregger clearly was only afforded so much room to switch things up.
As such, the horror struggles to really do anything original. For example, one ‘monster’ sees different human bodies knitted together, rolling together like a ball of limbs, in search of others to consume. Some of them seem to still be conscious, and unable to do anything about their agony. The horror of becoming part of some writhing mass of human misery, chasing down other people against your will, is a neat idea – but not one Cregger had.
Against the snowy backdrop, it’s hard not to let your mind wander back to The Thing. But before that, these are ideas which were described as Lovecraftian. Even the score, courtesy of Hays and Ryan Holladay, begins as a riff on The Thing‘s iconic opening sequence. There are more references where that came from – to Resident Evil and its own cast of horrors, or to some historic nightmare fuel from more than a century of genre filmmaking. In some regards, that’s cool. In others, it feels like there is just a little too much of a tribute band about this Resident Evil.
It’s effective, impeccably timed, well-paced and tightly edited. You will jump; you may even scream. But it is largely vanilla. And while Resident Evil be the best adaptation, finally evolved to its highest natural state, that is the limitation this sub-genre will never escape from. Even if it is imitating another organism perfectly, it still isn’t its own organism. Coming after Weapons or Barbarian, that’s a little sad to realise – and I hope that Cregger will soon be returning to thrill audiences with his next one for me, having come through this project unscathed.
