The moment I knew Resident Evil had me was the ammo check. The protagonist of the director Zach Cregger’s new film is a civilian, a medical courier named Bryan (played by Austin Abrams) who’s been tasked with driving a special package over to nearby Raccoon City in the snow. Quickly enough, strange things start to happen: He almost runs over a woman who seems to be sick with a mysterious virus; as the situation disintegrates, he finds himself fending her off with a dead police officer’s pistol. Amidst all the chaos, Bryan slides out his gun’s magazine to count how many bullets he has left. Confirming how many rounds are in the chamber before venturing further into the darkness is a key aspect of the video-game series that Cregger is adapting. But rarely is that ever shown on the big screen.
Indeed, the seven Resident Evil films that were made before this one (all but one of which starred Milla Jovovich) took the opposite approach. The characters toted comical varieties of automatic weapons, possessed supernatural abilities, performed amazing vehicular stunts, and pumped thousands of bullets into waves of zombies. The new film’s comparative groundedness is perhaps why Cregger’s initial pitch for a fresh iteration of Resident Evil, one of the best-known video-game properties, resonated with Constantin Films, which holds the rights. “I like the idea of somebody with my skill set and my attitude going into this world,” Cregger told me in an interview of that storytelling choice—that is, turning an unassuming young man whose primary concerns include his girlfriend and his sneakers into a mutant-slaying hero.
The director chose not to draw from a specific entry of the game series, which debuted in 1996. Cregger is best known for his first feature film, Barbarian, which announced him as a surprising new talent in the horror world, and for his follow-up, Weapons, which won an Oscar. For his current film, capturing the stressful sensation of actually playing the game was important to him. “Resident Evil is so simple and so inherently cinematic,” Cregger said, noting that he himself plays it “because the game design and the pacing and the dread is so effective. That, to me, is the heart and soul of those games. It is the feeling you get when you walk into a new environment, and you only have two bullets.” Managing resources, making every shot count, and navigating a world where a monster could jump out from behind any corner—they’re fundamental to the feel of this world, he said.
Resident Evil helped create the wildly popular gaming genre known as survival horror, which mixes suspense and action to hook the player. But as with almost any sprawling franchise, it has become burdened by years of continuity. Cregger solves this problem by ignoring most of the backstory for his version. The essential premise is still there: A pharma-bio conglomerate, the Umbrella Corporation, has mistakenly unleashed something called the “T-Virus,” transforming those who are infected into monsters that Bryan must combat in the hopes of survival. The source material usually foregrounds members of law enforcement, most of whom have been featured in past screen adaptations, but Cregger chose to focus on an original character. Bryan fills the role of the average person behind the controller, who’s entered a hostile world barely able to defend himself—forcing him to translate into reality what he’s learned by playing video games.
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The result is a rollicking, often ridiculous viewing experience, as Bryan hits some lucky shots early on but also makes some rookie mistakes. In one sequence supercharged with video-game logic, he foolishly discards a ladder that could have obviously helped him escape an attic he’s stuck in; in another, he evades a zombie attacker by simply running in circles around an overturned car. As he progresses, Bryan levels up his arsenal, coming across a shotgun and then an automatic weapon. Cregger’s homage to a nasty element of later Resident Evil installments (namely the fourth, which he has called one of his all-time favorite games) is especially amusing: Executing a headshot to kill an enemy can actually be detrimental, as some new tentacled horror might sprout from the neck wound.
Bryan’s situation is so absurdly terrifying that laughing as it escalates is inevitable. Humor is, of course, the best way to defuse tension or deflate shocking gore; that’s especially true in moments such as Bryan confronting an infected child or a maternity ward full of mutated babies. Cregger started his career as one of the members of the sketch group the Whitest Kids U’ Know, and his previous movies have a darkly funny edge. He also admitted that the Resident Evil games themselves have “a camp to them that’s undeniable.” Yet Cregger seemed to regret the amount of humor he’d deployed in his take—and that was despite the fact that he’d already pulled some jokes out in the editing process.
He had run out the clock, having “turned the movie in at, like, 11:59 p.m. a week before it hit theaters,” he said. Still, he recounted, while watching the finished film he was thinking, “I could have lost that; I could have cut that.” He’d also done plenty of big edits, other than just culling lines; the climax, in which Bryan makes it to his destination (a fortified Umbrella lab working on a cure to the virus), in particular changed drastically over time. The scene is filled with comedic actors playing frazzled lab attendants, and initially came across as more outwardly zany. “I had to go and make some really painful cuts to some really great performances and funny, clever things that people were doing in that lab and try and keep it hard-core,” Cregger said. Given the audience’s emotional investment in Bryan’s journey up to that point, however, he realized they would “not really be in the mood to be chuckling at clever quips that the lab dudes are telling.”
To me, though, the humor matches the odd and dissonant tone of some video games, and is thus part of the appeal. The way the film moves through scenes that feel akin to “levels” without feeling schematic was also impressive. Bryan’s first major challenge is at the site of a car crash, after which he trudges to an abandoned house nearby; then he moves through the streets and sewers of Raccoon City, before making it to the lab. Cregger replicates in a way that feels organic the Resident Evil games’ tendency to move players from place to place quickly.
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It became obvious how much of a Resident Evil super-fan Cregger is as he referenced detailed aspects of the games that inspired him. (The fairly straightforward path Bryan’s journey takes was another Resident Evil 4 homage, for instance.) Indeed, the entire project came about when he was asked by the film’s producer Roy Lee, who had worked on the Minecraft movie, if Cregger would ever be interested in adapting a video game. “The only one I could think of would be Resident Evil,” he said, because he felt like no film had quite yet captured the spirit of playing it. Nonetheless, he faced backlash online from fans for eschewing the franchise’s established characters and plot—a sense of skepticism from a community that often sees their favorite games clunkily translated to the big screen.
Cregger was unsurprised. “I was expecting, as D-Day was approaching, I’m gonna get shredded,” he said. “I was already getting shredded by the people who were supposed to like the movie. So, I was just like, well, this is just gonna be the humbling that I am due for.” Instead, the film has been a colossal success for the Resident Evil franchise, earning strong reviews and grossing more in its opening weekend—upwards of $60 million domestically—than any prior adaptation had made in its entire U.S. box-office run.Theatergoers, who now comprise multiple generations of video-game fans, have responded to the film’s atmosphere; they’ve never encountered cinema that so closely resembles their side of the player equation. The connection to the source material does matter to Cregger, of course: “The one thing that I really hate is the accusation that I’ve been getting that I just want to make a movie and slap Resident Evil on it,” he said. “This was always supposed to be Resident Evil.” But adapting the franchise doesn’t have to mean engaging with the lore—it can be as simple as capturing a feeling.