For a very long time, a curse hung over the land. Any time a video game was adapted into a movie, it failed miserably. Movie directors and film studios fundamentally did not understand what made video games tick. The rights were sold, screenwriters who weren’t gamers were hired to write the scripts. From the actors to the directors to the suits, nobody involved had any clue what made a video game popular, how they worked, or who their fans were.

This curse had infected other adaptations, of course. We still see bad adaptations of books all the time. Look no further than Netflix’s clumsy, arrogant bungling of The Witcher . Despite having a lead who was passionate about both the books and the video games, Netflix managed to run that show into the ground. (Then again, Henry Cavill has his own curse; the two just collided into a perfect storm in this instance).

But the video game curse was unique. After all, lots of books have been adapted into terrific movies and have been for decades. The Wizard Of Oz is almost 100 years old and it’s a book adaptation and a brilliant cinematic achievement. Video games only just started getting decent adaptations in the last few years, and it took a kids movie – Wreck-It Ralph – to get that ball rolling. That wasn’t even an adaptation, it was an homage to video games.

And that, dear readers, is my segue. You see, Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil movie isn’t really an adaptation, either. It’s also an homage to video games, but whereas Wreck-It Ralph was a playful tribute to video game characters and tropes and the sillier side of gaming, Resident Evil is a movie about what it feels like to play a Resident Evil game. Gamers were worried that he was going to change the lore or mess with the timeline or that they were just slapping “Resident Evil” on an original horror film as a naked cash-grab, but none of these things are true.

This is a movie about what it’s like to play Resident Evil, to be the protagonist in one of these games, bad at guns and barely surviving and cursing god every time you find another locked door, and muttering f-bombs to yourself after a narrow escape.

A straight adaptation of Resident Evil could be a great movie, I have no doubt, and I’d love to see one someday. But I think Cregger was the right director for this particular kind of video game movie. It’s very funny, for one thing, and as anyone who’s played horror video games knows, the scary stuff is often also very funny. It’s hilarious when you’re playing with a friend and there’s a jump scare, or everyone gets super creeped out by some mutated vile creature. You laugh it off. It’s how we cope with fear. Light spoilers ahead, but only for the opening act of the film.

So What Is Resident Evil About?

Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier, who is given a Difficult Quest after he makes a routine delivery to a hospital. His Main Quest is straightforward: take a package up into the mountains to Raccoon City and deliver it to the hospital there ASAP. The Quest Giver tells him he needs a car that can handle snow and ice, and chains on his tires. He assures her that he’s properly equipped and heads off on his mission.

This is a lie, but off he goes, sliding around on the ice while talking with his girlfriend on the phone about her recent positive pregnancy test. He gives all the wrong answers and soon they lose connection. That’s when a woman steps out from the trees directly in front of Bryan’s car. He crashes into her and then goes back to find where she’s walked off to. It’s obvious she’s a zombie – a victim of the t-virus or “cannibal disease” at this point – at least to us, but to Bryan she’s just an injured woman who needs medical attention.

Things get worse when a cop pulls him over, but the cop agrees to escort him to the hospital after he passes a breathalyzer test. Bryan suggests that the injured woman ride with the police officer, and he grudgingly agrees. Moments later, the police SUV goes careening off the road, rolling over into the snow. Bryan rushes over to see what happened and finds the cop dead and the woman missing. When she reappears, she’s changed. A hungry look in her dead eyes. Bryan grabs the cop’s gun and runs away. In the ensuing chase, he shoots out his own car’s engine before taking her down. He’s bad with guns. He’s only ever fired them in video games. And he makes poor choices with ladders and elevators.

I won’t go through every encounter, but the story builds just like a video game with increasingly difficult areas and an increasingly useful arsenal. He finds the pistol first and soon only has four bullets left. Bullet scarcity is a big part of the Resident Evil franchise. Thankfully, he soon finds a double-barrelled shotgun, though it’s not loaded. He has to go searching through drawers to find ammo, and he has to do it fast. Later, he finds an SMG. It’s harder to use and much, much harder to shoot with any accuracy. Cregger throws in some first-person camera work and other little video gamey tidbits to really drive all this home.

There are also locks. Everything has a padlock and shooting these does not break them. Driving through padlocked gates does not necessarily knock said gates down. The world is gated in much the same way a video game level is gated. Find the key or you don’t progress. To get to the other side, you’ll have to go through the creepy tunnel, and then through the creepy RV blocking the tunnel with some creepy horrible thing lurking inside. That’s a video game level. This isn’t some open-world GTA-style game, after all. This is linear, and you must progress from point A to point B no matter what. There’s no turning back for Bryan because he’s in a video game.

The NPCs are scarce and short-lived. Paul Walter Hauser plays Carl, an employee with the Umbrella Company who just so happens to be looking for the MacGuffin / Quest Item that Bryan has with him. He’s the real Quest Giver, it turns out, but this is not the end of Bryan’s Quest.

Carl is accompanied by Kali Reis’s Pauline, a tough mercenary Hero Type who can actually hit what she shoots, which both Carl and Bryan find super cool. But neither Carl nor Pauline is the video game’s protagonist, so don’t count on getting to know them very well. Same goes for Zach Cherry’s Dave, a lab worker waiting at the top floor of Raccoon General, the Final Stage our hero must traverse to get to the end of the game, replete with new monsters, narrow ledges to shimmy across, and lots and lots of stairs.

Things get increasingly bonkers by the end of the movie, and it’s increasingly hilarious and absurd the closer to the finish line Bryan gets. I won’t spoil the ending, but I thought it was perfect, with quite a clever twist especially when you view it through this lens.

Ultimately, this wasn’t an adaptation of Leon Kennedy or Claire Redfield’s stories. This wasn’t Resident Evil 2 or any of the many other beloved games in the franchise brought to life. This wasn’t even a creepy spinoff like Resident Evil 7 biohazard. This was a movie about what it feels like to play those games.

Was it perfect? No. I didn’t like it nearly as much as Cregger’s previous film, Weapons , and a part of me does wish we’d get an actual adaptation of Resident Evil 2 (Robert Pattinson is the perfect Leon Kennedy, so please just hire him and get it made Sony!) It also wasn’t very scary, leaning much more into laughs and gore and some shock value rather than the kind of tension and dread that makes some moments in Resident Evil so frightening.

Weapons was more cerebral and it earns extra points for being a wholly original story, but this is about as original as you can get when it comes to adapting an established IP. It isn’t the Resident Evil adaptation I expected, and maybe not the one I thought I wanted. But Cregger has done something stranger and more interesting: He’s adapted the act of playing Resident Evil itself, and that’s pretty cool when you think about it.

Have you seen Resident Evil? What did you think? You can check out my video discussion of the film below and drop a comment:

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