Good horror film, not the best story.
Last night, I finally got to see the new Resident Evil movie by Zach Cregger of Barbarian and Weapons fame. Suffice it to say that I liked what I saw, even if there were significant narrative and storytelling flaws, most noticeably in the fact that this film doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Resident Evil in the first place.
Which doesn’t mean the film is bad; it just felt more like Cregger’s personal art rather than something part of a much larger, sprawling, and recognizable intellectual property. Well, except for the gameplay part.
Resident Evil takes place in our modern day and age, apparently during the events of Resident Evil 2 but in an alternate universe where they all happen in 2026 rather than 1996. That decision only makes sense, and the same has been done time and again, even in more prolific works of fiction like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and others, where instead of ancient Rome, the plays are set in Fascist Italy.
It’s just a way to transpose events and bring them closer to our current era, and while that’s something a lot of people seem to have taken fault with, I actually found it quite nice.
We follow Bryan, a courier delivering transplantation organs to their designated hospitals, who then undertakes another assignment to carry what seemed to be just another regular package to Raccoon City General Hospital. As he grew nearer to Raccoon City proper over the mountains, Bryan started encountering all sorts of strange things, which only ramped up from there until we got to, well, Resident Evil levels of chaos and apocalypse.
The atmosphere the movie sets is oppressive, and the overall lack of knowledge about Raccoon City and what happened there is well-represented both through Bryan and other characters not from the city itself or part of Umbrella. There is a strong mystery in play here, even though most of the viewers who had played the game knew exactly what was going on.
It’s a visually stunning movie, one that takes no quarters when it comes to visual representation, both of this horrifying world itself and of the creatures “living” in it. But this focus on presentation really takes a toll on the story, which is by far the movie’s weakest link, even though the whole of the experience was altogether engaging and entertaining, to say the least.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.destructoid.com/reviews/resident-evil-movie-review/
