My strongest gaming memory turned 20 last year. I'm playing Resident Evil 4 on my GameCube: it’s my first M-rated game and I honestly don't know how I convinced my parents to let me get it… but it more than earns that rating in minutes. The first big arena battle of the game takes place in a Spanish village: as our beloved protagonist Leon S. Kennedy walks up, he sees a burning corpse in the center of town hung up in some kind of punishment; spooky folks mill about. Soon, he’ll walk in and they’ll come after him. But those not-quite-zombie monsters, the Ganados, are not the real problem. No, the problem is the sound of a chainsaw in the distance signalling the entrance of “Dr Salvador.”

In the next half hour, I watch Leon be brutally decapitated a dozen times. I turn off the game for a while. I feel, for the first time, kinda sick.

Eventually I came back, shot that guy’s bag head off with a shotgun and etc. etc. Like everyone else, I loved the game. Not like everyone else, I loved it to the point where I took “Leon S Kennedy” as a username on at least one Internet forum. (For more on that and how it all relates to the existence of The Week I Review, space/time travel to London in July 2021 and attend the live reading of The Anthropocene: Reviewed, Reviewed.)

All of which is to say, there is no non-Nintendo franchise I have as much affection for as this one. Especially in this modern era kicked off by Resident Evil 7, I’ve been super onboard with everything they’re doing and had a great time playing new entries and remakes alike.

But I’ve never been particularly interested in the movies. Paul W.S. Anderson’s film series is its own franchise, entirely unlike its namesake, and I saw the first one, thought “eh,” and then moved on with my life. There have been other attempts, but I just couldn’t bring myself to be careful about a piece of Resident Evil media outside of the main-line games.

Until Zach Cregger got involved. Until I got to imagine the guy standing on set shouting at zombie background to be “happier and with your mouth open”:

I don’t think there’s a filmmaker alive who is better suited to make a Resident Evil movie than Cregger. It’s easy to forget how colossally dumb and weird the series is when you’re remembering all the scary shit that’s happened. You don’t remember that one of the bad guys in Resident Evil 4 is a tiny castle-dwelling man dressed like someone from centuries before who turns into snakes or some shit when it’s finally time to fight him.

Silly! But silly in the same way a monster forcibly breastfeeding Justin Long is silly. Like, it’s kinda horrifying but also very funny.

And that’s an excellent way to describe Cregger’s Resident Evil. It’s a film that exists within the world of Resident Evil — the bulk of it taking place in the same Raccoon City as the original games — but it does not feature any of the games’ characters nor is it indebted to their logic. The zombies do not follow any game rules and tbh don’t follow any rules that I’m aware of in any previous piece of zombie media, where the damage from a bite can selectively transform a person who actually seems kinda fine-ish except for the fact that their foot is a swirling mass of tendrils.

I genuinely wonder if any/how many of the ideas in this film will end up in future games, because there’s absolutely some horror worth mining.

At Resident Evil’s center is Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical delivery driver who takes on a high-paying gig that sends him to Raccoon City in part because it’s high-paying but also because he’s trying to avoid a face-to-face conversation with his girlfriend about their future.

This choice is obviously the wrong one on a lot of different levels… but there are also a whole lot of worse things he could have done. Bryan is obviously not a “Bad” guy, and sometimes the “wrong” choices he makes do really seem right in that moment. When he hits a woman who walks right in front of his car on the snowy road, he goes to find her, puts her in his car, and starts bringing her on down to the hospital with him. If he had actually been a Total Piece of Shit and left her there, maybe things would have turned out differently for him.

The best word for Bryan is weak.

Which he has in common with Grace, protagonist of the game franchise’s last entry, Requiem. She is afraid of everything, is pretty bad at shooting guns, and just kinda can’t deal with what she has to deal with. She seems like someone who could genuinely just fail in her mission at any moment the way that e.g. Leon S Kennedy (who is also here to give the player the opportunity to go ham on some undead) wouldn’t.

Grace also gives some commentary on how upset she is by everything that’s going on, though Bryan’s is far more annoying. Dude never shuts up, but it’s not like he has much valuable to say. By the 90minute mark, I was getting a little sick of all the “What the fuuuuuuck”s and “Well that happened!”s. I wonder if it was always like that, if the script actually had “WTF” a thousand times or if Cregger wanted him to just throw in a line anytime it felt right. And it's not like I think someone wouldn narrate this experience in precisely this way: I almost certainly would be even less articulate than he is, but it's different when it's you than when it's Bryan, ya know? Austin Abrams is a pretty charming dude… but that charm only goes so far.

The general response from fans who aren't annoying has been that Resident Evil (2026) feels like playing a Resident Evil game for the first time as you are forced to figure out the sometimes Byzantine rules of the world (can your gun shoot through a lock? How would you unlock the lock if the gun will not shoot through it (is the key with a shape that matches the shape of the lock)?

Bryan is learning those rules (and also, like, how guns work) in real time, and we the audience get to see that alongside little fun nods for fans (matching key shapes, a typewriter that he’s like “What the fuck” about, a green plant that he doesn’t acknowledge but those of us who’ve relied on them for health over the decades feel all fuzzy about): but it’s not obsessed with catering to those fans.

Which is a key difference with the “feels like watching someone play a game” of the Super Mario Bros films which are basically non-narrative eye-candy. It’s just a series of set pieces, but to no real end.

Whereas there is meat to Resident Evil’s playthrough. You even get the over-the-shoulder type third person camera that RE4 pioneered as well as some pretty-awkward-looking first-person segments (the one in the sewer sucks cuz there’s no motion on his arms and video games haven’t had actually fully static first-person arms in an extremely long time!). But it doesn’t make me wish I could just pick up the controller and do it myself. I was invested in seeing how Bryan was gonna get himself out of that fucking thing instead of wanting to do it myself.

And I would actually be super stoked if this were the blueprint for game adaptations going forward, focused on building out existing worlds with new stories rather than just bringing us the same characters in a new medium. It’s okay for them to be their own things and have their own ideas and do their own things, ya know?

That said, if Resident Evil 10 has an ever-present monster that gets bigger and bigger as it sucks up the zombies you’ve killed? I’d be pretty stoked.

Eight Point Three / Ten