Resident Evil did not need to be called Resident Evil. Paul W.S. Anderson coulda called this film Biohazard or something and I would have had just as fun a time while being far less disappointed that the movie bore very little resemblance to its video game inspiration.
The movie stars Milla Jovovich, who’s probably ready for another action role that’ll make us all forget about that horrible Joan of Arc movie she made a couple of years ago. She’s joined by Michelle Rodriguez, a.k.a the tough girl who they actually let behind the wheel of the cool cars in The Fast and the Furious. The women, along with a bunch of dudes we don’t really care about and who aren’t really interesting, are sent to investigate The Hive, a secret bioweapon research facility that has been sealed by its rogue AI. There they find it’s been overrun by the undead and must escape before they’re trapped forever.
As a Resident Evil property, the movie fails. It’s actually a bit upsetting that the movie puts an opulent mansion in your face in the opening moments, tempting you with promises of the puzzle-box horror experience that made the first game so cool, only to abandon that setting for a sleek and shiny medical research facility. The characters we’ve come to know and love over the last four games (five if you count the first-person arcade-y Resident Evil Survivor) are also nowhere to be found, tossed aside in favor of a cast of wholly original characters. In fact, if it weren’t for some very good dogs in some very gross makeup, the occasional Umbrella logo sighting, and CGI Lickers running around in the movie’s third act, I don’t think any gamer would recognize that this movie is supposed to be a video game adaptation.
And I’m oddly okay with that! Because the lack of clear Resident Evil signifiers aside, it’s not a bad zombie movie. I had a lot of fun watching a bunch of trapped ding-dongs I don’t really care about get picked off one-by-one in some truly fantastic kills. I can tell Paul W.S. Anderson is a fan of the movie Cube, and he was smart to not let that happen to anybody named Claire, Chris, Leon, Jill, or Ada.
Some of the characters we do get are great. After Tomb Raider last year, I’m pleased to see another big video game adaptation led by women. Jovovich and Rodriguez kick ass all throughout the movie, getting their own pathos that doesn’t have anything to do with the men around them. Jovovich is an amnesiac who is desperate to remember how she fits into all this Umbrella Corporation bullshit. Meanwhile Rodriquez just wants to get outta this thing alive, go home, and get laid, reminding me very much of Private Vasquez from Alien.
You ever heard of the Bechdel Test? It’s been around since 1985 but is slowly creeping into how we talk about women in movies. Basically a movie passes the test if it features more than one woman in the cast playing a named character, they speak to each other at some point, and when they talk, it’s not about men. For a testosterone-fueled franchise like Resident Evil, it’s actually surprising that its first movie adaptation passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors.
And even though the movie very much isn’t Resident Evil, it’s not without references that should please Capcom’s biggest fans, including dogs crashing through glass windows and a whole action sequence centered on opening a door.
I understand why some of the choices made for this movie were made. Gaming isn’t really that mainstream and you’re not gonna put butts in theater seats if you play to that tiny sliver of the population. But now that we’ve piqued folks’ interest with this first entry, I think this Resident Evil movie franchise will really take off once we start marrying the movies with the games.
The story you just read is part of the 2002 edition of Warp Week, a Kotaku series that takes readers back to gaming’s past through a mix of time-dilated reviews, retrospectives, and on-the-ground reports.
