Resident Evil Feels Like Watching Your Stoner Roommate Fail QTEs

Resident Evil is the latest movie by Whitest Kids U'Know’s Abraham Lincoln-reenactor-turned-elevated-horror-director Zach Cregger, the twisted horror-comedy mind behind Barbarian and Weapons. Aftermath’s resident game-to-film-adaptation correspondents Isaiah and Chris saw the movie, currently in theaters. Here, dear reader, are their thoughts on the matter.

Chris Person: I'm gonna be honest Isaiah, I'm was very worried when I saw Zach Kregger was on this. Whitest Kids U'Know as a show is really quite formative for me despite aging about as well as mid-2000s humor can. But I really hated Barbarian and thought Weapons was like, fine. He's really solid with a gag though, I'll give him that.

Isaiah Colbert: That's so funny because I only learned about Cregger's comedy background well after watching Barbarian. I remember quite enjoying both movies, mostly because I'm a sicko that likes horror with appropriate moments of comedy. But I wasn't as worried going into it because the moment I saw how the dude filmed doors as this oppressively unnerving presence in Barbarian and Weapons, I knew he would do a film treatment of Resident Evil justice. I just really wish he didn't have to do an apologia tour in the lead-up to its release with Resident Evil fans, where he had to display his gamer cred the entire fucking time.

Chris: That shit is so annoying. Don't give them an inch.

Isaiah: The glut of the press tour for the movie being hand-wringing about fans upset about it snowing, no Leon, and all sorts of frivolous shit, as if Resident Evil as a franchise is the bastion of storytelling, was irritating as hell. The CGI movies exist if folks actually cared for an Avengers-style team-up.

Chris: To be honest, if the fans got what they wanted and were just force-fed fan service, it would not be an interesting movie. We already had this with Paul W. S. Anderson for years and it's miserable despite the presence of Milla Jovovich. And as far as I can tell, no stuntmen died on the set of this movie, although that's a low bar.

Isaiah: It's a wife guy jingling keys at a fandom at the highest order. Which only made Cregger's movie forgoing the burden of series canon by focusing on how it feels to play a Resident Evil movie such a "keep it simple, stupid" breath of fresh air way to approach a video game adaptation.

Chris: I don't think those movies are accurate, I just think they're what happens when you see your audience as a product first. Remember this? It came out in 2021. No? Point proven. 

Austin Abrams played a junkie in Weapons, very much embodying the family fuck up that should be in rehab, and in Resident Evil he's taking that same nervous shithead energy to play an Uber Eats driver for organs and other highly sensitive medical products. He's clearly a shitty boyfriend at the beginning of the movie, which starts with a charged conversation about if his girlfriend should have an abortion before he runs over the first infected person in the movie in the snowy Colorado woods. If you accept the premise that the movie is not about a hero but about some dipshit that witnesses the events of the first Resident Evil game, he absolutely crushes the role. 

Isaiah: The movie starts out incredibly strong, evoking the fish-out-of-water feel of playing Resident Evil games. Abrams' exasperation over all the goddamn locks pretty much nails my own frustration at how some Machiavellian architect in Raccoon City designed a police station with so many goddamn puzzles. And the way the movie balances naturalistic humor and genuine dread and horror is phenomenal in its first act. That started to get a bit grating for me when more characters were introduced, and my gripes about Resident Evil storylines and Zach Cregger films did a fusion dance.

Before I get on my soapbox about that, what did you think of the film?

Chris: I liked it! It annoyed me the least of most of Cregger's films, which tended to bring up the specter of some larger and more serious issue in a middlebrow way, only to not have the toolkit or rigor to deal with that conversation. He kinda does this with the aforementioned baby bit, making this the second adaptation of a Japanese video game that adds a subplot about paternal anxiety along with The Exit 8, but it kinda fizzles out in a way that I found didn't subtract from my enjoyment of the movie.

For the most part, to quote my friend Stella, he made After Hours with zombies. Watching this movie accurately simulates watching your stoner roommate in college play a video game in the most frustratingly poor way humanly possible. You can see him fuck up the QTEs in real time, and that's the strength of the movie and of Abrams' performance. 

Isaiah: I liked it almost up to when Abrams gets in the elevator toward the end of the movie. The whole “watching a Let's Play” part of the film was really great but, as you said, the movie doesn't really have the tools to really tackle the real conversation it presents. And honestly, that's a problem I've found both Cregger and Resident Evil as a franchise kinda share. I think Resident Evil is his weakest film in comparison to Weapons and Barbarian, though that comes with a huge asterisk for me. Cregger films always feel like the dude starts with a really interesting idea before it feels like he doesn't know where to go with it. What follows is a second half that feels like he stitched an entirely different movie onto the first.

In Barbarian, it went from stranger danger about capital-M men to being chased by a giant woman. In Weapons, it went from an eerie child-abduction story to a somewhat deflating reveal about a witch and her vanity. And with Resident Evil, it's a cruise-control Resident Evil final act where things go off the rails, insane. While I can excuse Weapons for the catharsis of a witch getting eviscerated by a bunch of kids being worth the trip, the second half of his films always feels a bit lackluster compared to how they start. And Resident Evil's felt the most egregious. I think Jake Steinberg said it best, saying the movie felt like he kind of gave up writing it.

Does Resident Evil deserve all the accolades and box office acclaim it's been getting as the best video game film? Sure. But looking past the grading on a curve projects of its ilk get, I think it's a decent 3 1/2 star movie that I'll remember more fondly for how it started and less so for how it got a bit too cute for its own good towards the end with the introduction of more inept people on top of Abrams. It became a bit like The Boys to me, with everyone playing Deadpool when one funny man was plenty. Learning that the movie we got was the one with fewer jokes blows my mind.

Chris: It's a perfectly fine time at the movies, honestly. I think, in general, I'm not bothered by the third act falling apart, as his other movies in this case, because Resident Evil games also tend to descend into nonsense where there's a big, sloppy monster in the final act. RE9 also starts strong and then by the end you're playing an entirely different game.

The part that actually bothered me, the movie being 20% annoying, was the elevated key jangling. There's this constant need to remind the audience that this is based on a video game, with shots of items in the game scattered throughout. Some of that is kinda fun; some of it feels like "we gotta give these fucking hogs something", and then you have the character shouting "video games" and it's like, alright man settle down. If you are going to do that, I need at least a few stationary isometric shots like it's a PS1 game. Huge fuckup there.

Isaiah: You can't convince me that the video game line wasn't tailor-made for an accolade trailer revealing a Rotten Tomatoes score.

Chris: I know directors that use subtext and they're all cowards. Also I'm not strict on what the T-virus should or should not be because that's nerd shit, but it is funny we did also get a Katamari adaptation out of this movie by accident. 

Isaiah: Somehow the second movie this year with one alongside I Love Boosters. And I feel you on the whole not giving a shit about what game storyline the movie is cribbing on. To me, and this might sound controversial to some, Resident Evil is a lot like Christophe Gans' first Silent Hill movie: it's a demo disc of all the hits, doing its own thing by someone who clearly gives a shit about it. And by that metric, the movie succeeds. It delivers a pastiche of all the Umbrella, crazy fetch quest, and gory mutated zombie nonsense that are staples of the franchise. It just kinda sucked that the expectation to laugh trumped any sense of being scared or emotionally moved while watching. There was a guy in my theater that full belly laughed when Abrams saw the bumper sticker of the family before his final phone call to his girlfriend about how he was a coward. 

That's pretty much sums up the film for me: A perfectly fine video game adaptation with the garnish of being something greater that's better than what Resident Evil fans crying about snow and Leon deserve.

Chris: And hey, another role for Zach Cherry! I love seeing Zach Cherry in a movie. Also, Umbrella Corp uses a version of the chair I am currently sitting on that I have blogged about for this site. Smart choices, lads.

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AftermathChris Person

But yeah, it's fine. Does what it says on the tin, Cregger should probably work with a better screenwriter, but if you wanna see a mediocre guy reacting to a zombie outbreak like Shaggy from Scooby Doo with a shotgun, this movie is for you.