Good films, like any form of storytelling, do their part to engage an audience with a suspension of disbelief that allows the viewer to feel an equal footing with the characters. That, of course, requires those characters to be relatable and well-drawn enough to care about. This leaves film adaptations of video games with a fatal flaw right from the start, as most video game protagonists are left deliberately thin and generic, the better for a wide variety of players to fill the void with themselves. In fact, most games made in the last several years encourage players to design their own avatars to resemble themselves or whomever they wish. This creates a catch-22 for video game movies: some change too much about the premise and the characters that the fanbase is thrown off and the material is too diluted, whereas others make such a direct translation that it leaves the film feeling empty, like a copy of a copy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One filmmaker who\u2019s circumvented this problem is Paul W.S. Anderson. A glance at his CV proves that Anderson is a fan of video game material; with Mortal Kombat<\/em>, Monster Hunter<\/em>, and even Alien vs. Predator<\/em> and his Death Race<\/em> remake, the director shows a particular knack for adapting video game structure into his films. Yet it\u2019s his Resident Evil<\/em> franchise of six films (of which Anderson directed all but two) that remain the highest achievements to date in merging video game material with the cinematic medium. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the main reasons the Resident Evil<\/em> films work so well on their own is due to Anderson\u2019s refusal to be slavishly devoted to the source material. His first Resident Evil<\/em> movie, released in 2002, was likely expected by fans to follow the blueprint laid out by the first \u201cResident Evil\u201dgame, where a team of special law enforcement agents investigate a spooky old mansion filled with zombies and various other creatures. While the film does contain a team of elite mercenaries investigating a claustrophobic space that\u2019s become zombie-ridden thanks to the outbreak of the Umbrella Corporation\u2019s experimental \u201cT-Virus,\u201d the team are quickly whittled down to just a few members, none of whom are the main character. There is a spooky mansion in the film but it\u2019s only onscreen briefly, and none of the game\u2019s characters make an appearance. An adaptation of a massively popular IP playing so fast and loose with its source material is virtually unheard of now\u2014even back in 2002, when intensely faithful film adaptations<\/a> were being made from the \u201cHarry Potter\u201d and \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d books, this was uncommon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Anderson directed every entry in the Resident Evil<\/em> series excepting 2004\u2019s Apocalypse<\/em> and 2007\u2019s Extinction<\/em> (which were helmed by Alexander Witt and Russell Mulcahy, respectively), he wrote every single installment, which allows for a consistency of tone and structure that mirrors the way video game franchises operate. For instance, game series like \u201cSuper Mario,\u201d \u201cDoom\u201d and \u201cFinal Fantasy\u201d all vary in aesthetic from entry to entry, but at their core utilize the same type of game mechanic\u2014platformer, shooter, and RPG, in those respective examples. Likewise, the Resident Evil<\/em> films each have their own aesthetic approaches that recall other genre classics: the first movie is like The Andromeda Strain<\/em> blended with Alien<\/em>, the second is a riff on Escape From New York<\/em>, the third recalls Mad Max 2<\/em>, and so on. Yet all of them are action-horror movies at heart, with each entry giving the protagonists a simple, concrete goal: escape the facility, acquire the object, reach the destination, etc. The mutation from what Alfred Hitchcock once called \u201cMacGuffins\u201d<\/a> to more video game-esque objectives is a topic for another time, and while Anderson\u2019s work undeniably helped contribute to that change in cinematic tropes, his films were amongst the earliest to employ it in the most unadorned fashion. To wit, nearly every one of Anderson\u2019s movies after Resident Evil<\/em> (even his version of The Three Musketeers<\/em>) makes use of an on-screen map of the story\u2019s geography. More than just a throwback to something like Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em>, Anderson explained in 2017<\/a> how his use of a map presents \u201cgeographic clarity\u201d to the audience in the same way a map or HUD lays out the game\u2019s geography for the player. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This aspect of the audience-as-player is key to Anderson and Resident Evil<\/em>\u2019s successful marriage of video game and cinema. The major innovation Anderson adds to the Resident<\/em> mythos is the character of Alice, played in every film by Milla Jovovich. Although the character is a literary reference on the surface\u2014to make the allusion to the works of Lewis Carroll even more explicit, Anderson calls the first film\u2019s A.I. antagonist \u201cThe Red Queen\u201d\u2014her actual purpose is to function as a blank slate proxy character for the audience, a \u201cplayer character\u201d in essence. Sure, there are numerous examples of films featuring protagonists who are out of their depth and need the world around them to be explained as a way of easily solving the problem of exposition, but Alice isn\u2019t just new to the outbreak of the T-Virus\u2014she\u2019s also an amnesiac. While her arc over the course of the first film concerns recovering some of her memories, they\u2019re only a couple memories pertaining to the outbreak at hand. In other words, Alice is not a character with a richly detailed backstory, but rather someone whose history and knowledge is expressly on par with the audience\u2019s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the Resident Evil<\/em> series continues, Anderson keeps the experience of the films on an even playing field via the Alice character. While several major characters from the game series make appearances in various entries, the films assume the audience has no prior knowledge of them. Each installment begins with Jovovich as Alice recapping the prior films\u2019 events, moments that feel less like a film series burdened with continuity than a game giving the player the essentials of what they need to know. Thanks to the evil Umbrella Corporation (who created the T-Virus) continually experimenting on Alice\u2014giving her new powers, clones of herself, and other attributes\u2014she discovers her abilities at the same time the audience does, such moments reminiscent of a tutorial level in a game. This approach means the Resident Evil<\/em> series is particularly terrible at continuity\u2014in a way, it\u2019s almost an anti-MCU, because those paying attention are not only unrewarded for it, but left confused as to how the big picture might reconcile itself (which makes it an anti-Fast & Furious<\/em>, too, since that franchise revels in attempting to balance the scales of its narrative\u2019s increasing improbabilities). In order to continually bring on new players, game series make a habit of remixing their narratives without relying on strict continuity between entries, and Anderson has the Resident Evil<\/em> films follow suit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, this\u00a0 means the Resident Evil<\/em> films contain considerable flaws if taken solely as cinema. For one thing, their repetitive nature and constant ret-conning of characters (not to mention some characters unceremoniously disappearing) can seem obnoxious, especially those with any emotional investment. This is one franchise that has every installment end on a cliffhanger only for those cliffhangers to either be obscurely resolved or even brushed aside at the beginning of the next film. Yet it comes from source material where such aspects are features, not bugs, with narrative streamlining a way to get a player up to speed and into the heart of the action. Any fan of video games in general, not just the \u201cResident Evil\u201d games, can see the way Anderson structures the films much like a game, with Alice often entering specific areas or rooms that she needs to clear of enemies before she can progress. While this approach lacks the subtle nuance that differentiates the average action film from a video game, Anderson\u2019s blatant melding of game and movie gives each Resident Evil<\/em> entry a pulse and an ethos that most other video game movie adaptations fail to achieve. Look no further than Sony\u2019s reboot of the film franchise last year, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City<\/em>, a reboot that was explicitly intended to mirror the games more closely; it has its moments but feels far more rote than any of Anderson\u2019s movies. It presents the same story and characters from the games while taking away the engaging interactivity, something Anderson was quite aware of<\/a> when he made his films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sly irony of 2017\u2019s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter<\/em> is that it ends with Alice finally gaining a history and identity\u2014her victory, becoming a fully fledged character, means the series must end because she\u2019s leaving the \u201cplayer\u201d behind, and the game is now over. The fact that The Final Chapter<\/em> feels as fulfilling as it does speaks to how effectively and cleverly Anderson merged the two mediums, providing a superior template for video game movies to follow. Or perhaps I should say, a superior HUD navigation map. Hollywood keeps getting the video game adaptation wrong. So how did the ‘Resident Evil’ movies get it right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":18331,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21970,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18329\/revisions\/21970"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/resident2-1024x576.jpg\")
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