Resident Evil remains a decent gaming franchise, but no entry has ever quite hit me the way Resident Evil 1 & 2 did on the original PlayStation.
DECADES LATER – RIP youth – and we are once again staring down the barrel of another live-action Resident Evil movie, this time from horror director Zach Cregger.
I’m excited because Cregger knows how to make a horror film. Whether he can make a good RESIDENT EVIL film? I’ll hold my breath.
Anyway, in preparation for the new film, the Movieland gods bestowed upon me the task of revisiting the first ever live-action Resident Evil movie from 2002, directed by everyone’s favourite game-to-film director, Paul W.S. Anderson.
The film opens deep beneath Raccoon City inside Umbrella Corporation’s underground research facility, The Hive, where employees are developing biological weapons, viruses and all the usual evil mega-corporation goodies.
A viral outbreak occurs and The Hive’s AI security system, The Red Queen, responds in the most reasonable corporate fashion possible:
KILL EVERYBODY.
Cut to Alice (Milla Jovovich), unconscious in the shower of a mansion sitting directly above The Hive. She awakens with amnesia after being exposed to a security gas and barely has time to work out who she is before – naturally – UMBRELLA OPERATIVES BURST INTO THE BUILDING.
Soon the movie becomes one long race to escape The Hive while zombies, mutant experiments, evil computers and increasingly stupid human decisions murder the cast one by one.
We get laser hallways. Machine guns. Industrial techno. Computer countdowns. People screaming “MOVE MOVE MOVE!” Michelle Rodriguez looking angry. Milla Jovovich discovering she can apparently perform Matrix-level martial arts.
And, yes…
Alice PARKOURS OFF A WALL AND FLY-KICKS A ZOMBIE DOG IN THE HEAD.
Cinema.
This movie is VERY 2000s.
And I mean VERY.
Industrial metal. Blue-green colour grading. Leather outfits. Fast cuts. Slow motion. Computers everywhere. Everyone looking intensely serious while saying ridiculous things.
And strangely enough…
I kind of love that about it.
Paul W.S. Anderson went for a high-tech action/sci-fi thriller rather than slow-burn horror. The whole movie operates at fever pitch.
The problem is… that isn’t really what made Resident Evil scary.
What I remember most about playing the original game wasn’t shooting zombies.
It was the QUIET.
THAT is Resident Evil.
The calm is what makes the chaos terrifying. And Anderson’s film barely has any calm.
Resident Evil never needed to be an enormous action movie. It needed to be creepy. Claustrophobic. Slow. A handful of people trapped somewhere they don’t fully understand, slowly piecing together what Umbrella had done while something moves around in the darkness.
And the laser hallway sequence?
Come on. ICONIC.
If you want slow-burn survival horror that captures the unsettling atmosphere of the original games… this ain’t it.
If you want Milla Jovovich roundhouse-kicking zombie dogs while industrial metal blasts through an underground laboratory?
COME ON IN.
And yet…
Resident Evil is FUN.
Sometimes that’s enough.
As for Zach Cregger’s upcoming Resident Evil… I am VERY interested to see what he does with it.
Give me the mansion. Give me the silence. Give me Umbrella scientists slowly losing control. Give me footsteps in empty hallways. Give me that feeling that SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE…
Then have a zombie smash through the bloody door.
Please.
Bring it, Cregger.
6.5/10
James J