Directed by Zach Cregger
Welcome to day 1 of our new theme week, Zombie Week! I don’t know offhand, but Resident Evil might be the video game franchise with the most adaptations. Including the Milla Jovovich movies and the Welcome to Raccoon City film from a few years back, Capcom has been trying to turn their beloved horror game franchise into a movie series and frankly all of these have been bad. Definitely different types and levels of bad, but bad nonetheless. When news broke that Zach Cregger, of Barbarian and Weapons fame, would be directing the new Resident Evil movie, I was extremely hopeful, and now that it’s out I can safely say that we finally have our first good Resident Evil movie.
Down on his luck medical courier Bryan takes a risky job with a high payout – delivering a mystery package to a hospital in Raccoon City. Braving the dangerous snowy conditions on the mountain road to Raccoon City, Bryan begins having a rough night as he strikes a pedestrian with his car, and then things get much worse when he learns that this woman was exposed to something much worse than a car accident, some kind of unspecified zombie virus. Dealing with zombies as well as the cold and isolation, Bryan decides to keep traveling to the Raccoon City hospital on the off chance that someone desperately needs the contents of his medical bag, facing danger all along the way.
Reboots, especially second reboots, need to learn hard lessons from the failures of the movies before them, and luckily Zach Cregger learned these lessons perfectly. Unlike many adaptations, Resident Evil never gets caught up in the mythos, there aren’t any big info dumps about what Umbrella Corporation is or what kind of virus is making the zombies. A lot of videogame adaptations trip over this exact stuff because they want fans of the games to see that the movie is acknowledging the history BUT they also need casual viewers to understand exactly what’s happening, so that’s a razor’s edge for any director to walk on. Cregger manages to capture the feeling of the game while also getting rid of the baggage that the games carry with them.
The unique tone that Cregger brings here, which is really similar to Barbarian in a good way, is his combination of horror and comedy. A lot of horror comedies have funny parts and scary parts, Cregger movies are funny because they’re scary, and scary because they’re funny. Bryan is an average guy facing zombie hordes and his reactions are often over the top and tend to be humorous, which could easily lead this into being parody, but that’s what makes it relatable and personal. He sees horrors beyond imagination and babbles about how this is messed up and unfair, and it’s not treated as a joke, it’s treated as a realistic description of what is happening, because it is. This universe is laughing at Bryan along with the audience, that’s why the jokes land, that’s why the cruelty of the story works, Bryan is a cosmic plaything in a situation far too big for him to be in. It’s such a great juxtaposition to similar movies where there are mind breaking horrors but the main character is a stoic badass who never acknowledges how scary this is. If the characters don’t care, I probably won’t either.
I need to talk about how well made this movie is from a filmmaking perspective. Its pacing is incredible, I was never bored, never waiting for a scene to end, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, regardless of whether we were seeing action scenes or quieter introspective scenes. When the film started wrapping up, I was confused because I thought there was another hour left, I wanted more. The spectacle here was also top notch. The action, the gore, the shooting style of the movie, it all melds together so perfectly into this frenetic trip through hell that I dug so much. If this sounds like something you’d want to see, go for it, it’s still in theaters and I’m sure it will be through Halloween.