The Movie: Resident Evil
The Director: Zach Cregger
The Cast: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser
The Story: Follows a hapless courier tasked with delivering a package to a remote hospital. He soon finds himself caught in the middle of an outbreak and must fight through hordes of mutated creatures to survive.
The Rating: 8 / 10
The Review:
Resident Evil has been one of the most popular game franchises for about 30 years and has been accompianied by a series of movies dating back over 20 years. For most of those, Paul W. S. Anderson was in the director's chair with his wife Milla Jovovich in the starring role as Alice, a character who was created for the films. For the most part I enjoyed those movies although it was probably time for a fresh take on the material and now we have Zach Cregger running the show after his films Barbarian and Weapons both became box office and critical success stories.
While Cregger isn't known for taking on science fiction and/or video game franchises, his work in the horror genre with the two films I mentioned seemed to make him a great fit to put a new spin on material that was getting pretty stale and formulaic. There have been so many movies that try to recreate the video game experience in cinematic form and most have failed miserably because the two are such vastly different experiences. I remember watching Hardcore Henry, a movie that was shot entirely from a first person shooter POV and thinking there was some potential there, but it just felt too much like watching bland video game footage on YouTube.
What Cregger does to combat that while still giving the POV and feeling of a horror video game is to sort of blend the two perspectives together. The cameras never go full on FPS but we do get several shots that are pretty close, more of like over the shoulder than actual line of sight. This makes for some really great tension as well as plenty of opportunities for jump scares which seem to be not as easy to pull off these days. Maybe because horror has gone mainstream so audiences are used to jump scares and have learned to pick up on when they're about to happen.
While mutated zombie-like creatures are why we love this franchise, there of course needs to be a hero ttype person as well and Austin Abrams is on board as Bryan, a medical courier who probably should have just gone home instead of taking on one last job for the night. Abrams is pretty fantastic in the role and I would add it right there alongside the quality horror movie work that we saw from both Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette in Obsession. Gone are the super hero-like abilities that Jovovic brought to Alice and instead we get an every man type character that screams at danger, is terrible with guns, and ends up being extremely relatable to the audience.
Visually, this movie is dark and moody although not bland at all. It nicely recreates the eerie video game vibes that are perfect for setting up the jump scares I mentioned earlier. Cregger has stated that this movie is set alongside the early storylines of the video game series so it could be seen as a sort of companion piece to those films and specifically the outbreak of Resident Evil 2, but in a more current timeline. I honestly don't know much about the video games so I don't have much reference for comparison. All I know is that this movie works in just about every way that it should. It's scary, it's intense, and it has just enough comedy to have a nice balance of emotion from beginning to end.
There's also a bit of a dramatic story that's touched on by Bryan through a couple of phone calls and messages he has with his girlfriend. While they're brief exchanges, they add a nice tough of emotion and humanity to the character to have you really feeling for him as the movie comes to its ultimate conclusion. I really hope we get to see more from Cregger within this world, I feel like he really understands the material and also how to recreate video game horror vibes into a true theatrical experience.
Thank you as always for reading this review. The horror genre seems to be more and more a part of mainstream moviegoing and I'm loving all of it. Horror has always been my favorite genre after growing up watching movies like Alien and Poltergeist so please keep more of this stuff coming, I'm all for it.
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