Resident Evil Finally Feels Like the Game, but Something Is Missing
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Resident Evil.
Adapting Resident Evil should be easy. Take an ordinary person, trap them somewhere unpleasant, scatter ammunition in the least convenient places possible, and release something with too many limbs.
Yet previous films have rarely captured what makes Capcom’s games effective. They borrowed familiar characters, creatures and storylines, but often missed the vulnerability at the heart of survival horror.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil comes closer than most. Rather than retelling Leon Kennedy or Jill Valentine’s stories, it introduces Bryan, an inexperienced medical courier played by Austin Abrams. A routine delivery becomes a fight through Raccoon City, where every locked door, missing key, and empty weapon feels designed to torment Bryan and anyone who has played the games.
For once, Resident Evil does not simply look like its source material. It feels like playing it.
That feeling has resonated. The film currently holds a 96% Tomatometer score and a 91% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Before release, its projected $35–50 million domestic opening also placed it within reach of the franchise’s box-office record.
Welcome to Raccoon City
Bryan’s nightmare begins when he is asked to deliver a potential cure to another hospital. After hitting an infected woman on a snowy road, he becomes trapped in an escalating journey through a farmhouse, tunnel, sewer, and hospital.
Inside the farmhouse, Bryan finds an empty shotgun. The ammunition, naturally, is hidden
elsewhere. Later, a padlocked gate blocks his escape, but the key falls out of reach after he
crashes into it. Weapons, bullets and solutions are rarely found together. It is inventory
management translated into cinema.
Cregger’s first-person camerawork, confined environments and weapon progression make each location feel like a new level. Bryan begins with a pistol, finds a shotgun and eventually acquires a machine gun, all while counting bullets and collecting injuries.
That design comes from genuine affection. Cregger has spoken about playing Resident Evil 2 before the original and loving its resource conservation. He deliberately positioned the story alongside Resident Evil 2 because adapting Leon’s story again risked disappointing players. Bryan instead acts as an avatar for how an ordinary player might react inside the game.
The trailers revealed Umbrella, Raccoon City and an increasingly desperate delivery mission, but concealed the infection’s strangest evolution.
Something Borrowed, Something Bleeding
Cregger’s Barbarian and Weapons showed his ability to build tension, subvert expectations and mix disturbing horror with humour. Resident Evil gives him an even larger, bloodier playground.
After Bryan shoots an infected couple, tentacle-like growths pull their bodies together. It is as though the infection recognises what one lacks and sources it from another. The resulting mass feels recognisably Resident Evil without being borrowed from a boss battle.
The maternity ward is even worse. Infected babies, awakening bodies and a blood-filled sack dangling from the ceiling create the film’s most disturbing sequence. When the sack bursts over Bryan, Cregger fully commits to grotesque body horror.
Not every comedic moment works. After escaping the creatures outside, Bryan pauses to pour cereal and milk directly into his mouth. Forget zombies. Eating food inside a potentially monster-filled house might be his most questionable decision.
Waiting for Leon
The film understands Resident Evil, but Bryan is its greatest weakness.
As the danger increased, I repeatedly thought, “Don’t worry, Leon will show up.” I knew he would not. The problem is not that every adaptation needs Leon, Claire or Jill. Resident Evil Requiem proved players could connect with someone new through Grace Ashcroft. Its success, reaching six million sales faster than any previous instalment, showed the franchise could attract audiences without relying solely on nostalgia.
Grace received enough development to make her fear personal. Bryan spends most of the film running, screaming and reacting. Abrams convincingly portrays his panic, but the screenplay gives us little reason to become attached to the person underneath it.
This weakens the ending. Bryan reaches the laboratory while transforming and begs the scientists to inject him with the cure. Instead, he is left beneath a helicopter’s spotlights as the merged creatures close in.
Then the film ends.
An unresolved ending can leave an audience haunted. Here, it feels unsatisfying because Bryan’s journey lacks the emotional connection needed to make uncertainty powerful.
Cregger has not completely broken the Resident Evil curse, but he has come painfully close. He understands its atmosphere, mechanics and monsters better than most filmmakers who have entered Raccoon City.
Now it just needs someone worth surviving alongside.
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