Resident Evil Is a Deeply Unhinged Send-Up of Video Games
Zach Cregger's horror–video game adaptation is a pulpy comic delight.
Finally, a movie for people who love shooter video games but are terrible at aiming.
Of the many running gags in the new Resident Evil, the one that amused me the most was the protagonist's frustration with guns. The character, a medical courier named Bryan, first discovers a pistol, and then a shotgun, and then eventually heavier weaponry, in an escalating power progression that mirrors the common gaming trope. He has to root through drawers for bullets and food, maneuver conveniently placed ladders, shoot a maddening number of padlocked gates, and defend himself against all manner of creepy-crawly monsters.
And all throughout, he struggles with his aim, firing just a few inches from the target even at close range, and occasionally firing stupidly and accidentally, for no reason at all. (This can happen with video game controllers.) He repeatedly gripes that he doesn't know how to use guns. As he explains to another character at one point, he's not a gun guy. He's only used guns in video games. Ha ha. But…actually…ha ha.
If you're the sort of person who enjoys playing violent video games but isn't very good at them, you've almost certainly found yourself in a similar predicament, cursing at your screen and yourself as you miss obvious shots, accidentally firing new weapons when you're trying to figure out how they work.
The difference is that Bryan is in a movie, not a game. But it's a movie based on a game, where all of his experiences are filtered, often hilariously, through video game mechanics.
The repeated misses and misfires are just one of the meta-meta gags in this meta-meta movie, a literally gut-busting comic romp derived from the Resident Evil games that turns gameplay into twisted, terrifying plot beats.
Most video game movies take one of two approaches: They either try to replicate specific moments and sequences from a game, as in the notorious first-person sequence in the first Doom film, or they attempt to craft a character-driven story out of a nonsense game world while dutifully adhering to its inane lore, as in the recent Super Mario Bros. films and this year's dismal Mortal Kombat sequel.
The previous Resident Evil film franchise, which spanned six films starring Milla Jovovich, most of which were directed by B-movie maestro Paul W.S. Anderson, split the difference, leaning heavily on the inscrutable lore while nodding to key concepts from the games. The movies had their lowbrow charms, but were fundamentally camp—goofy, trashy, pseudo-serious video game movies that leaned into their goofiness and trashiness.
With his excellent new Resident Evil reboot, director Zach Cregger takes a different tack: He draws loosely from the franchise's lore—the zombie-esque monsters, the strangely empty and distinctly creepy Raccoon City, the Umbrella Corporation, and so forth—and then builds his film around a simple video game–style quest, with a series of discrete environments that might as well be levels that the main character plays through. The film is structured as a series of escalating challenges and encounters, with a mix of white-knuckle action, platform movement, and environmental puzzle solving. You've played this game before, or something like it. But you've rarely seen it in a movie.
I would say that Cregger is the first director to make a successful movie that plays like a game, but the little-seen Exit 8 beat him to the punch earlier this year, and the Portal-inspired Backrooms, while not technically based on a video game, came rather close too.
But Cregger outshines them both through his sheer propulsiveness—the movie runs a crisp 90 minutes—and inventive humor, treating the game-like scenarios as both realistic challenges that a person must overcome while also underlining their comic absurdity. Before becoming a horror auteur with Barbarian and Weapons, Cregger was in a sketch comedy troupe, The Whitest Kids U' Know, and it shows. Each of the "levels" in his Resident Evil plays like a little sketch, a series of increasingly ridiculous yet somehow-just-plausible-enough yes-ands that stack on top of each other until the whole thing collapses and the next level begins.
I am not sure how this movie will play for non-gamers who have never found themselves muttering self-curses while accidentally firing a newly upgraded gun into a wall or failing to aim properly as a hidden monster delivers a surprise attack. This is very much a movie for people who know how satisfying it is to finally time a complicated series of jumps juuuuuuuust right.
Resident Evil is the rare video game adaptation that respects the language of games even while knowingly converting that language into delightfully unhinged pulp cinema, as if John Carpenter had adapted a shock-comedy version of Doom.
Near the end of the film, the hero, having just dispatched a major monster, triumphantly yells "VIDEOOOOO GAAAAAAMES." As a climactic slogan, it's a little on the nose. But it's also exactly right. This film is about a guy who, like so many of us, can't shoot straight. But the movie is dead on target.