What's particularly cool about Cregger's Resident Evil is its simplicity. He completely eschews the expectations placed upon those who are brave and/or foolish enough to take on the responsibility of turning a popular video game into a movie by refusing to recreate a specific game or digging into the franchise's lore. Instead of forging down the comfortable fan service path, he elected to build a movie around dropping an original character named Bryan (Austin Abrams, who somehow manages to be even more magnetic and hilarious here than he was in Weapons) into a real time survival situation as he tries to transport an important mystery medical package into Racoon City mere hours after the heinous virus that mutates humans into bloodthirsty zombies accidently made its way out of a lab at the Umbrella Corporation.
Without having to strictly adhere to any characters or events from the franchise, Cregger gets to focus on something much more important: Accurately recreating how it feels to blindly step into a Resident Evil game. Every new place you encounter is a new opportunity to be greeted with the sight of some unholy monstrosity that's trying to kill you and through a combination of traditional movie photography and video game-inspired POV shots, he frames every scene in a way where Bryan is scanning every inch of his immediate surroundings to see where something could pop out from before deciding where to move. Unleashing a bumbling regular guy protagonist into such an unknown world of immense, horrifying danger only adds to the authenticity of this approach as he's doing shit on screen like dropping a flurry of f-bombs every time a threat announces its presence, frantically running around in circles trying to evade whatever nasty creature is chasing him and quickly pivoting from jubilation to panic when he discovers the thing he just shot in the head isn't actually dead mimics how the player behind the controller would be reacting to being confronted with these horrific scenarios. Constructing the movie in a manner that is centered around the sights, sounds and feelings that drive the experience of playing the game is great way to show reverence for the source material without shamelessly pandering to the fans with recreations of the scenes they like the most from the series (although from what I've read online from people in the know, there are plenty of easter eggs for them throughout). As much as I liked the trashy stylized action horror aesthetic of Anderson's movies, this movie's uniquely unqualified hero, visceral intensity and vile creature design/VFX made it an even more fun ride.
The cherry on top of this whole ordeal is that Cregger wraps things up on a definitive note that gives him the freedom to not return for a potential sequel. After all of the shit he's gotten from a vocal group of hardo fanboys online for being a "tourist" in the world of Resident Evil, he deserves to return to the solace of making original movies while quietly reflecting on the success his first IP-driven movie has enjoyed.
Grade: B+
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