Resident Evil

I went into this trying not to think of it as a Resident Evil movie.

There’s no Chris, Jill, Claire or Leon. There’s barely even a mention of Umbrella. It does eventually make its way to Raccoon City, but for a good chunk of the film there isn’t really much of the Resident Evil lore you’d normally expect.

As the film went on though, I got more and more sucked into the atmosphere until it slowly started feeling like something I could actually recognise as part of the Resident Evil universe. Dark corridors, blind corners, danger lurking everywhere, low ammo and that constant feeling that you need to think about where you’re going, whether something is worth fighting and when it might be smarter just to run.

It captures that survival horror feeling without needing to constantly throw familiar characters and references at you.

Austin Abrams was brilliant. Instead of getting a highly trained S.T.A.R.S. member or some ridiculously capable SWAT guy, we get an average Joe who is basically just trying to survive the night.

And he’s such a loveable idiot.

That makes a massive difference because he never feels like someone who should automatically be able to handle what’s happening around him. There’s a delivery to be made and that’s essentially the goal of the movie. Simple enough. The question is whether he can actually survive long enough to do it.

The film must only be around 90 minutes long, but surprisingly nothing feels rushed. It knows exactly what story it wants to tell and just gets on with it.

I also don’t usually get scared watching horror movies, and I’m normally pretty good at spotting when a jump scare is coming, but this managed to get me about five times.

I wouldn’t say it’s the kind of horror that’s going to leave you unable to sleep afterwards though. It’s video game scary. There’s still a fun element underneath the horror that stops it becoming pure nightmare fuel, and for Resident Evil I think that’s exactly the right balance.

The zombies were much more interesting than I expected too. It isn’t just the same type of zombie being thrown at you for the entire movie. There are variants and different mutations appearing as things progress, so you never really settle into knowing exactly what you’re dealing with.

That keeps the encounters interesting and stops everything becoming repetitive.

Then there’s the ending.

I genuinely did not expect where this movie was going to finish.

I can’t really say anything about it without completely spoiling it, but I’m still split on how I feel about it. Part of me really likes where it ends because it’s cool, surprising and definitely memorable.

The other half of me was sat there thinking, “WHAT?! You’re ending it there?!”

The strange thing is that the ending is probably the point where the film feels the most like Resident Evil. It just doesn’t feel like an ending. The final scene feels more like the opening scene of a Resident Evil game, and when you see it you’ll know exactly what I mean.

I’d absolutely recommend this to Resident Evil fans, but I also think it works perfectly well as a standalone survival horror movie if you’ve never played one of the games.

Although if you haven’t played them, there’s a very good chance you’ll spend the entire movie with your partner whispering things in your ear like, “That’s actually a parasite called Las Plagas,” or, “That exact thing happens when you try to shoot it in the game.”

It might not look like the Resident Evil movie you expect when it starts, but somewhere along the way it earns its place in that universe.