The best way to describe it is it’s 1) Half classic Survival Horror video game experience, and 2) the first half of Evil Dead 2.
“What if a dumb dipshit like you or me was thrown into a Resident Evil experience instead of a really competent, trained badass like Chris? What would that look like?” That pitch is often as funny and great as it sounds. You would FREAK THE FUCK OUT at this insane shit happening to you. A lot of funny comedy brevity would naturally happen inbetween moments of extreme terror. The movie plays out like one long stress-induced nightmare that just will not end or ease up. Austin Abrams more or less carries a one man show here and he’s just wonderful and relatable.
There’s a lot of game fans complaining that the movie has nothing to do with Resident Evil because there isn’t any Leon or iconic monsters, and that’s nonsense. There IS some basic iconic monsters like dogs and zombies, and the structure of the movie is one of the games through and through, complete with a sewer level and Umbrella lab as the final level. It’s classic stuff.
There wasn’t many changes from the script, but I did notice two. First, Austin gets attacked by the little girl and not the dog, and second somebody’s death in the sewers has been moved around. Which is probably a blessing, because it sounded unbelievably gross originally.
My only quibble is the final ten pages or so didn’t work for me when I read it, and sadly it still doesn’t really work for me in the final film. Feels… Rushed? Tonally off?
It’s crazy how hard the so-called Resident Evil fans were wrong here. This feels more like the games than any previous RE film, and is probably the new gold standard on how to adapt video games in general. While the folks complaining are certainly less contemptible than the anti-woke Odyssey critics, they got faced just as hard by the actual film.
It’s very annoying, because you see Creggar speak in interviews and he is SO passionate. He is a clear lifelong fan, and he says something like “I wanted my version of Raccoon City to be snowy even though that’s not video game canon, because I thought it would look and feel just incredible” and he is clearly, CLEARLY absolutely correct.
But you’ve got these terminally online fanboys whose brains are just BREAKING over the idea that this movie might be loosey goosey about lining up with video game canon. How do these people watch 20 years of MCU movies loosely adapting comics canon in their own way?
It’s so FRUSTRATING on Creggar’s behalf, because obviously he absolutely crushed it. Hopefully the Rotten tomatoes score, and the box office, and the generally glowing fan reception and all the love this weekend fully makes up for the fanboy bullshit he had to put up with leading up to the film’s release.
I’ll be honest, I was already interested in this based on Cregger’s work in Barbarian and Weapons. But anything that pisses off overly-protective geek fanboys has my sword double.