Resident Evil

Our second feature on our annual Halloween Haunt outing double-feature was Zach Cregger's take on Resident Evil. 

We've seen plenty of Resident Evil movies in the past. Well, I have. Of the six films, I think I saw all but the last one, and in the theater to boo! The Boy saw 3, 4 and 5 with me, starting with Resident Evil: Apocalypse and culminating with Resident Evil: Retribution. The sub-heds are entirely decorative, shedding no light on the contents of the film which are, of course, a series of ridiculous special effects organized loosely around—well, not a plot, but organized around other special effects.

In fact, the reason we didn't see the last Anderson Resident Evil, which savvily borrows from the fourth Friday the 13th movie and calls itself The Final Chapter, was that we didn't think anything could top Retribution. There's a big fight in Red Square in Retribution, featuring zombie communist motorcycle cops, and in my memory, they all have sidecars full of Kodiak bears wearing ushankas with little red stars on them.

I would watch that movie again because I don't remember if the bears are lobbing grenades or wielding machine guns, but I'm worried they edited the bears out.

So. Uh. Mr. Cregger. He of the excellent Barbarian and Weapons got himself hired to do a franchise. I didn't like this as much as either of those other films, but it was educational on a lot of levels.

First, and foremost: I think Cregger understands that his job is to entertain you. That's kind of refreshing.

Rather than borrow from the stilted, '80s-cop-drama feel of the video games, Cregger's main character is more like a Zoomer dropped into a Resident Evil game. To wit: He is not particularly competent. He's a slacker of course—aren't all generations entering adulthood regarded as layabouts by the previous generations? But getting back to his lack of competence, he's not great at his job and he's really not great at not his job, i.e., fighting—

Well, what the hell are the creatures in Resident Evil anyway? Some of them are zombies, but beyond those, it's really just a mishmash of visual concepts and game mechanics. There's not really any logic or consistency I've ever been able to suss out. 

Whatever they are, though, our hero, Bryan (Austin Abrams, who is in Weapons and whom I first saw nearly 15 years ago in an obscure Jon Lovitz project called Jewtopia) stumbles across and through them by the skin of his teeth, like a guy playing Resident Evil.

Cregger does something very interesting here: When we see Bryan first, he's got his girlfriend on the phone and she's pregnant, and he's being politic about this. Instead of going to talk things out with her, he accepts a delivery job he's not really suitable for (but which is profitable), and while trying to hash things out, he hits a woman.

A zombie woman, though he's not aware of this.

He could drive off, but instead he does the right thing and tries to help her. She's not dead, of course, because she's undead. But this leads him to an encounter with a cop. When that goes bad, he once again does the right thing, and gets himself into deeper trouble.

Over and over, Cregger puts him into situations where being selfish could really pay off, but he always chooses to do the right thing.

Which, I guess, means it's not really like someone playing the video game, because games train you to place self-preservation above everything, generally. 

One remarkable thing about the film is that, while it doesn't hew to the Resident Evil games storyline, this doesn't appear to be a matter of disrespect or opportunism. This is a dramatic story taking place inside the game universe, not a Paul W. S. Anderson "I rewrote my zombie script to kinda-sorta fit into the game franchise." Cregger grew up in a video game world.

And this probably is why when the game slips into a first person P.O.V. mode that resembles the video game, it's almost seamless. It might even be seamless to someone who doesn't know movies don't do that without a very specific narrative purpose. And there's probably a fascinating thread to tug on here: movies evolved from stage plays (especially once sound entered the picture), and stage plays are never first person, obviously. (Although that's a kind of interesting idea, somebody call my agent!)

Anyway, that's not a thread I'll tug on here. You're welcome.

Despite being about an inch deep, then, we start rooting for Bryan beyond the usual "well, he's the hero" kind of rooting. As he encounters characters from the game, we sometimes veer into what looks to be "woke" territory—but, no, the inch-depth of this means almost everything is played for a dark laugh, a quick scare or some genuine suspense as Bryan fights, flees and finagles his way into Raccoon City.

This is not a diss, by the way: I think Cregger did the right thing, a light touch was the wawy to go, and I think the movie will probably turn something like a profit—although $75M seems like a lot of money to spend on a movie with no stars. It won't make as much money as the much cheaper Weapons which didn't get as good a return on the production budget as Barbarian. I'm guessing all the money for this film went into the effects, which work.

Some people complain that the movie is too short and ends too abruptly. They are wrong. There is no place else for the movie to go at the end. The entire conceit of the film is that nobody is competent to handle the situation. It's like someone engineered a deadly virus and then couldn't manage to get the cure—oh, well, I guess you could argue it's too close to reality.

I don't know if the tone is sustainable. I know the movie would've broken under the change needed to draw it out further. But can there be a Resident Evil series where everyone is a dweeb? The monsters in that game (beyond the zombies) aren't exactly pushovers.

So, not only could I not see it going longer, I can't see a sequel that doesn't shift tone. That could be fun, I suppose: Make different movies, each with radically different tones.

This film knew what it wanted to do, did it, and got out. I respect that. The Boy also liked it, probably more than I did, though both of us afterward thought a lot more about our first film—a video-game-feeling monster flick from Korea which nearly ran three hours just to get to what is, at best, a halfway point in the story.

Sidebar: Frequent movie-thread contributor Mark Andrew Edwards wrote a long post on The James Madison's Phone's site about horror that's in the sidebar here. It's a good read and a theory I disagree with almost completely, and so I responded with a nearly as large rebuttal.

I'm guessing Mark would say Resident Evil (2026) is a horror movie. I would probably agree, but argue that it's almost a fluke. Survival horror is a legit genre, but when we get into comfortable game territory, whatever the "demonic epiphany" was becomes just another threat to manage: Bruce becomes just another shark, zombies become just another [insert politically inappropriate comparison here], et cetera. Horror stops being horror at the point it becomes manageable and comprehendible in prosaic terms.

Anyway, it's a good discussion and if you're into horror, you should check it out. I'm handing out free copies of my book Lair of the White Worm to everyone who agrees with me! (No, I'm not.)