Resident Evil Review

“I don't believe that. I didn't just shoot a little girl in the face. I like kids.” – Bryan

It’s an odd thing. I’ve never liked the original 2002 Resident Evil movie with Milla Jovovich. I’ll go even further and make a confession – I’ve never actually managed to stay awake throughout the film – and I’ve tried several times. I have those films on disc, but as the first is kind of a psychological stumbling block, I’ve never ventured further into that particular series. I wasn’t playing the games at that point either.

Steve persuaded me to give Welcome to Raccoon City a chance in 2021 – and I enjoyed that. It was according to him the best film representation of Resident Evil to date. Since then, I’ve started exploring the games, happily discovering that the first series of movies really don’t represent the games with any kind of accuracy. So, when I started looking forward to this new Resident Evil film, I surprised myself.

Resident Evil isn’t an adaptation of any of the existing Resident Evil games – I’d say it’s more of an appreciation of them. It’s a film set within the universe of the games. BUT – and I stress this, you don’t have to be a gamer by any means to enjoy the film, and that’s the beauty of it. I’ll explain that shortly, but let’s get some perspective by taking a spoiler-free look at the film.

The film is directed by Zach Cregger, who helmed Weapons, one of my favourite movies from last year. Cregger is fast becoming a major force in the horror movie genre. The story centres on Bryan (Austin Abrams) a medical courier making his last delivery of an urgent medical package at the end of his shift on a treacherously snowy night. He is asked to take one more critical package for double the pay. And so, he agrees.

This will be the worst evening of Bryan’s life, not just because of the weather, but as he’s on his way to drop off his package at Raccoon City hospital, on a deserted, lonely rural road, a woman wanders into the path of his car and is run over. This is just the beginning of Bryan’s problems.

The woman isn’t dead.

Well, she is, but she won’t stay dead. She keeps getting up and attacking him. As a passing cop stops to investigate, she kills him and goes back to attacking Bryan who has to abandon his car and runs to hide at a nearby farm, and she’s still crazily in pursuit.

This is the night that the Umbrella Corporation in Raccoon City have accidentally released the virus that causes people to become at first, zombies, and later mutations. Mutations that are multiple zombies all fused into one repulsive being that is hard to describe, arms and legs everywhere. Not knowing what’s happened there, Bryan keeps heading for Raccoon City, which is literally Ground Zero for the virus, the zombies and the mutations.

As I said earlier, if you’re new to the whole Resident Evil universe, this is an ideal movie to watch because it’s not based on any specific game, it contains elements of the games that you can expect to see in those games – but no prior knowledge of them is needed to get the most out of the movie. This is literally where it all begins, and even Bryan isn’t a character from the game.

However, if you ARE a gamer, there are plenty of background easter eggs to look out for that refer to the games and don’t form part of the story, so they’re there for you to spot, but they’re not intrusive. A particularly clever camera angle that is used, but not over used, is the POV angle (point of view) giving a first person shooter feel to an action scene.

A thing that struck me as particularly effective is that the film has extremely gory scenes and a couple of effective jump scares (One, involving a tentacle rearing and striking like a snake actually had me unconsciously put my hand up defensively – and I wasn’t even seeing it in 3D – yeah, they got me good, as the kids say.) But Bryan’s reaction to everything he sees and experiences on this evening are comically realistic. And this comedy, which runs through the movie is expertly juxtaposed with the abundant terror of a survival horror.

But, I stress, this is by no means a horror comedy.

It’s an expertly executed gorefest that constantly keeps you alternating from repulsion and uncertainty to the other side of your emotions where you’re laughing, before it slaps you again with something shocking that you’ve never seen before.

Rob Rating = 9