Seven movies in, and the best thing a Resident Evil film has ever done is point the camera at the back of someone’s head.
That’s the trick. Zach Cregger, the director of Barbarian and Weapons, didn’t crack the adaptation problem by cramming in references. He cracked it by shooting the movie like you’re holding the controller.
The six Milla Jovovich films wanted to be action pictures. They got the name and skipped everything that makes the games work: the dread of creeping into a room you haven’t cleared, the math you do in your head when you’re down to four shells and half a health bar. Capcom’s series is about scarcity. Those movies were about explosions.
The camera does the work the script can’t
Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier sent on a last-minute run to a remote mountainside town. It’s Raccoon City, obviously. He’s also sitting on the anxiety of maybe becoming a father, after his girlfriend finds out she’s pregnant. Flawed everyman. Exactly the right shape for this story.
After a crash on a snowy road, the film drops into first person as Bryan approaches an injured woman. It’s a direct rhyme with the camera easing toward the first zombie in the original Resident Evil. Then she turns out to be some sort of crazed monster, not a zombie, and the framing shifts to what feels like an over-the-shoulder chase around an overturned police car.
No film can hand you actual interactivity. Cregger gets closer than he has any right to. We spend a lot of this movie directly behind Bryan or tucked over his shoulder, which is the Resident Evil 4 angle, and at points the camera jerks around like someone’s shoving a gamepad’s right stick.
The ammo count is the tension
Bryan finds a conveniently placed pistol and drops the crazed woman. That’s the opening, not the resolution.
A mad dog runs him into a barn, where he hits a classic ladder puzzle and fails it. He finds an even more conveniently placed shotgun while hiding in an abandoned farmhouse, and it’s dead weight until he turns up shells. There’s a room with a lone typewriter in it, one of the few overt callbacks, standing in for the old save rooms.
What matters is that Bryan always knows precisely how much ammunition he’s carrying, and so do you. He gets guns early. It doesn’t help as much as you’d expect. Resource scarcity stays the engine the whole way through, same as the games.
Fan service isn’t the point, and Cregger knows it
There’s a pile of terrible CG Resident Evil movies built entirely out of references, plus the failed 2021 live-action reboot Welcome to Raccoon City. Recreating things fans want to see isn’t the job.
Cregger’s advantage is that he’s two things at once: a horror filmmaker who can write characters worth following and stage a scare in a way you haven’t seen, and a fan who understands what survival horror is doing. Come in knowing nothing about the games and the movie still works. Know them, and every new room reads as a room you haven’t cleared yet.
The failure modes are well documented on both sides. Slavish recreation gets you the atrocious Super Mario Galaxy or the forgettable Uncharted. Total rejection of the source gets you the terrible ’90s Super Mario Bros. film. A small amount of creativity and effort was enough to make the Sonic and Minecraft movies watchable.
Nintendo is spinning up a Legend of Zelda movie, and Hollywood is broadly eager to crib from games. Somebody on that Zelda set should watch what Cregger did with a shotgun and an empty shell count.
