This write-up contains FULL SPOILERS for the new Resident Evil movie, including its ending. If you don’t want to find out what happens, come back later after you’ve seen it for yourself.
I’m a little late to the party with this, but I finally saw Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil over the weekend.
Despite Capcom’s survival horror series maintaining its status as my favourite of all time, I’ve never been the biggest fan of the film adaptations. Paul W.S. Anderson’s six-movie franchise starring Milla Jovovich as Alice is fun to an extent, but I can’t in good conscience say that any of the entries are actually good.
Johannes Robert’s reboot Welcome to Raccoon City, meanwhile, is a guilty pleasure of mine. Objectively, it’s absolute garbage, but it goes so ludicrously hard on game references that I kinda love it in some weird, Stockholm Syndrome kind of way.
But now, with Cregger’s fresh reboot, it feels wonderful to finally have an adaptation that is genuinely brilliant – not just brilliant for a video game adaptation, but brilliant full stop. It’s right up there with the director’s previous films, Barbarian and Weapons, and a non-stop thrill ride from start to finish that pays homage to Capcom’s games without being held hostage by them.
The film stars Austin Abrams as protagonist Bryan, a hapless courier who’s tasked with delivering a super-important package to Raccoon City General Hospital. Right from the start, we get a sense that things aren’t quite right in the city and surrounding areas, with the opening hospital flooded with injured patients and TV broadcasts hinting at a wider disaster.
Soon after Bryan’s departure, then, his day quickly descends into chaos, beginning with an unfortunate car accident in which he runs down a lone woman on a snowy, isolated road. Surprising absolutely no one, it turns out that the woman is a zombie – but not one you’d recognise from the games. The zombies here are fast and aggressive, and they possess a frankly horrific ability to merge with other zombies to form a grotesque creature with dozens of flailing limbs.
As the film’s protagonist, Bryan is exceptional. We know little about him other than the fact that he has a pregnant girlfriend who he attempts to contact at several points on his journey. He’s just a normal guy trying to finish his job, make sense of the horrors that surround him, and most importantly, survive.
In other words, he’s us. He’s quite literally the player in a Resident Evil game, making his way from one outrageous scenario to the next. As he inches ever closer to Raccoon City General, he obtains new weapons, going from a handgun to a shotgun to a machine gun. We know exactly how many bullets are left in his handgun at any point, and we can instantly relate to his growing sense of panic when trying to locate shotgun shells in an abandoned farmhouse.
Rather than cram the movie full of direct references to the games, Cregger has instead pulled off something significantly more impressive – it feels like Resident Evil. From Bryan running into multiple locked doors to planning out his route on a map, every moment feels like a thoughtful homage to the iconic game series. It’s a lot better than some zombie screaming “Itchy, tasty” in Welcome to Raccoon City, that’s for sure.
A lot of folks were understandably worried about the film’s deviation from the games, with some claiming that Cregger was simply using the name to get a budget for what would otherwise be an original story – bit of a stretch, in my opinion. But let’s just imagine that was true, for a moment. If this was a completely original film with a different title, you know what people would say..? “Man, this sure feels like Resident Evil”.
I’ve seen some comments online that liken the film’s narrative to an in-game file, and this feels like a pretty accurate comparison. I could just imagine Jill Valentine or Leon Kennedy stumbling across a diary in Raccoon City that tells the events of a courier called Bryan who fought his way toward the Hospital. It’s a spot-on analogy.
The film’s ending, however, is what really blew my socks off, and this is where we get into proper spoiler territory, so consider this your final warning.
About halfway through, Bryan gets bitten on the arm by an infected girl, and so from that point on, we see his bite get more and more gnarly as the infection begins to take hold. It also turns out that the package he’s delivering contains the final ingredient for a cure, dialling the stakes up to 11 as he gets closer and closer to Raccoon City.
Eventually, he makes his way to the top floor of a massive skyscraper, handing the delivery over to a group of scientists while looking considerably worse for wear. As the scientists complete the creation of a cure, Byran – now morphing into a grotesque creature – begs to be injected to rid him of his infection.
Unfortunately, with his transformation almost complete, tentacles shoot out toward the scientists, pulling them toward Bryan, who, now boasting a massive mouth in his torso, gobbles them up and absorbs them into his body. Eventually, with only one scientist remaining, Bryan dies as his mutation robs him of consciousness. Standing atop a skybridge with helicopters circling him, the creature roars as the film concludes.
I absolutely adore this ending, and really any ending that has the balls to kill off the main protagonist. It’s not something you see very often these days, and I frequently see horror authors in particular lament publishers’ reluctance to have a ‘bad ending’ in novels, with conclusions like this often relegated to short stories.
So to see something like this in a proper, high-budget production like Resident Evil is awesome, and it feels like an antidote to the games’ refusal to kill off its main characters (and no, Requiem’s bad ending doesn’t count).
All in all, Resident Evil felt like the perfect adaptation for me. It was expertly paced, funny in all the right places, and genuinely pretty horrific at the same time. Direct references to the games were brief and subtle, with Zach Cregger instead tapping into what it feels like to play through a classic Resident Evil game.
In short, it feels amazing, and I can’t wait to watch it again.
