Why the New Resident Evil Might Be the Best Game Movie Ever Made

Movies based on games are generally pretty bad, but the new Resident Evil may have finally cracked the problem that has plagued these adaptations for decades. Instead of changing the game to make it work as a movie, it does something much simpler: it makes the movie feel like the game.

That's strange when you think about it, because while games have spent decades becoming more cinematic, Hollywood kept adapting them by throwing away the very things people loved about them in the first place. Few franchises show this better than Resident Evil. The original films took some basic ideas from the games and turned them into a completely different action franchise built around Alice, a character who didn't even exist in them. Now, more than 20 years after the first Resident Evil movie, Hollywood has taken another shot, and I want to look at how it pulled this off and why it might just be the best game movie ever made.

Super Mario Bros. shows how Hollywood tried to fix games instead of translating them

The first problem with adapting a game into a movie is pretty obvious. They're completely different mediums. A movie is something you sit back and take in, while a game is something you play. Depending on the game, you might spend 10, 20, 50, or even 100 hours playing it, while a movie has about two hours to tell you a story from beginning to end.

On top of that, a lot of older games don't really have much of a story to begin with, and what story they had was often just an excuse to get you into the game. Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach, so Mario has to rescue her. That's basically it. What made Super Mario Bros. fun wasn't an elaborate plot or complex characters. It was running through levels, jumping on Goombas, getting power ups, and trying not to fall in a hole, of which there were many.

Rather than figuring out how to translate that experience into a movie, Hollywood often tried to fix these games by reinventing them for the big screen, stripping away the very things people liked. That's exactly what happened with Super Mario Bros. Instead of taking the colorful Mushroom Kingdom people already loved and finding a way to make it work on screen, the 1993 movie turned it into a grimy dystopian cyberpunk city meant to parody contemporary American heavy industry. Because nothing screams Super Mario Bros. like Blade Runner.

Halo and Doom show why reinventing a game and simply recreating its gameplay both don't necessarily work

To be fair, some changes are unavoidable, because many of the things that make games work simply don't translate to film. Take first person shooters. Part of what makes a game like Halo so immersive is that you're literally seeing the world through Master Chief's eyes. You're not looking on as he fights the Covenant. You are Master Chief fighting the Covenant. That's also why we never see his face and why he doesn't have that much of a personality, since he's a vessel for us to project ourselves onto.

Put that same character into a movie and suddenly you have a massive problem. Now we're not Master Chief; we're observing Master Chief, and a mostly silent guy whose face we never see is a lot harder to connect with. That means you have to give him a personality and a character arc. Now not only are we getting away from what the game was about, but what if we don't like who Master Chief is on screen? That's basically what happened with the Halo TV series.

Going in the completely opposite direction and simply recreating the gameplay doesn't necessarily work either, and the Doom movie demonstrated that perfectly. For several minutes, the camera switches into the main character's point of view as he moves through hallways, picks up weapons, and shoots monsters exactly like you're playing the game. To be fair, it looks pretty cool. But there's one obvious problem: you're still not actually playing it. In fact, it looks like you're seeing somebody else play it, and nobody really likes sitting beside a friend while they play a game. You're just waiting for them to die so they can finally hand you the controller.

Edge of Tomorrow captured what playing a game feels like without being based on one

Ironically, the one movie that captured what it's actually like to play a game isn't even based on one, and that's Edge of Tomorrow. In the film, Tom Cruise's character enters a battle against aliens, dies, wakes up back at the start of the day, and tries again. Each time he learns a little more, gets a little better, and makes it slightly farther before inevitably getting killed again.

That's basically what playing a difficult game is like. You die because you don't know what's coming. Then you try again. You remember where the enemies are, learn their attack patterns, and gradually figure out what you need to do until you finally make it through. That's what makes the new Resident Evil so interesting. Spoilers from here on, because instead of simply recreating characters, locations, and moments from the games, it takes the same approach as Edge of Tomorrow. It figures out what actually makes playing Resident Evil feel like Resident Evil, and then finds a way to translate that experience into a movie.

Resident Evil's main character starts out like a new player and levels up

A big part of that is the film's main character, who's basically a stereotypical gamer suddenly dropped into a world he would normally be playing from his couch. He isn't a cop, a soldier, or some highly trained weapons expert. He's awkward, out of shape, easily panicked, and barely knows how to use a gun. In fact, the first time he uses one, he fires it with the safety still on. Basically, he starts the movie the same way most of us start a new game: completely useless.

He doesn't know what's waiting around the next corner. He doesn't understand the rules of this world, and he's mostly just stumbling from one disaster to another trying not to get killed, which makes him the perfect surrogate for the audience. When we play a game for the first time, we're figuring everything out as we go, making mistakes, learning what works, and slowly becoming more capable. He goes through the exact same process. He doesn't enter the movie as some tough action hero. He enters it like most of us probably would, completely unprepared and desperately scrambling just to stay alive.

As the movie goes on, he learns, becomes more confident, figures out what works, and gradually gets better at surviving. By the time everything completely falls apart in the third act, he's no longer the same guy fumbling around with a gun. He's actually gotten pretty good at this. Basically, he levels up, and I think that's such a smart way to translate the experience of playing a game into a movie. His character arc isn't just about becoming braver and more confident. It actually mirrors the experience of a player getting better at the game.

His weapons and ammo follow a classic Resident Evil progression

The movie doesn't just make him progress like a player. His weapons and resources progress like they would in the game, too. He starts with basically nothing. Then, after the cop is killed, he takes the cop's handgun, which is about as basic a starter weapon as you can get in Resident Evil. Not long after that, he stumbles into a farmhouse looking for food and warmth, which basically functions like a health pack.

While he's there, he finds a shotgun mounted on the wall. Except finding the shotgun isn't enough. He still needs ammunition, so he starts opening drawers and searching through the house until he eventually finds a box of shotgun shells, just like you would in a game. Later he upgrades again when he finds a submachine gun in the back of a car.

On top of all this, he's constantly checking how much ammo he has left, because every bullet matters when he has no idea when he'll find more. That's just like a game, because unlike in most action movies, he can't keep firing forever. So over the course of the movie, he essentially follows the same weapon progression you would expect in a Resident Evil game: a handgun to a shotgun to an automatic weapon.

The enemies in Resident Evil level up right alongside him

As his arsenal gets better, naturally his enemies get a lot worse. His first real enemy is basically just an infected woman, the same woman he accidentally hits with his car at the beginning of the film. Then he encounters her infected dog, whose face splits open as it chases him into the farmhouse. Once inside, he encounters the woman's infected husband. After he kills both of them, their bodies literally fuse together into a disgusting mass of arms and legs that rolls and cartwheels after him, which the filmmakers call the amalgamation monster. It only gets bigger as the movie goes on, because it keeps absorbing more infected bodies into itself.

From there, the enemies just keep getting bigger and more ridiculous. Later he encounters an obese infected man in the sewers who looks like Baron Harkonnen from Dune, then a mutant that vomits acid inside the hospital, while the amalgamation monster keeps growing into a gigantic monstrosity with many limbs chasing him through the city.

Basically, the enemies are leveling up right alongside him. At the beginning, one infected woman is enough to completely overwhelm him. But by the time he has better weapons and actually knows how to use them, the movie has graduated to throwing gigantic mutated monsters at him. It's the same basic progression you get in the games: as a player becomes stronger, the game responds by becoming harder.

His journey through the movie plays out like a game map

Even the way he moves through the movie feels like progressing through a game map. He starts out driving through a snowstorm on an isolated mountain road to deliver a package, only for his car to break down in the middle of nowhere. The only place he can see is the farmhouse, so naturally that becomes his next destination. From there, he gets picked up by another group of survivors and hitches a ride into the city, only for them to get killed, leaving him completely on his own again.

Then he escapes through the sewers and eventually makes his way toward the hospital. Once inside, he still isn't done. His objective is at the top of the building, so he has to keep working his way upward, floor by floor, through increasingly dangerous areas. Basically, the movie keeps moving him through one distinct environment after another, like he's progressing through different levels, and every level presents a new obstacle, a new enemy, or some new problem he has to figure out before he can move on.

The padlock becomes one of Resident Evil's best running jokes

Resident Evil has one enemy more powerful than any zombie or mutant monster: a padlock. The movie turns that completely ridiculous piece of game logic into one of its best running jokes. When he's trying to escape the farmhouse, he reaches a gate secured by a giant padlock. He has a gun, so naturally he shoots it, but nothing happens. Then he gets in a truck and literally rams the gate. Again, it doesn't break. Only afterward does he discover that the key to the padlock was sitting under the sun visor the entire time.

That's exactly how Resident Evil works. It doesn't matter if your character is carrying enough weapons to kill a gigantic mutant monster. If the game says you need a key to open a door, you're finding the key. The lock isn't really there because it would realistically stop you. It's there to tell you that you can't access that part of the map yet. So throughout the movie, he keeps running into these padlocks and getting increasingly angry that he can't just shoot his way through them. It's a great little inside joke for anyone who's played the games, and it's also another example of the movie taking an actual gameplay mechanic and turning it into part of the story.

Resident Evil might be the best adaptation because it recreates the feeling, not the plot

So does all this mean Resident Evil is the best game adaptation ever made? Maybe. But not because it follows the games more closely than other adaptations. In a lot of ways, it does the total opposite. It features a new protagonist not found in the games and tells a new story. That's also kind of the point. A good adaptation isn't about photocopying something from one medium onto another. It's about figuring out what made it work in the first place and finding the cinematic equivalent, and that's what Resident Evil understands better than most game movies.

For almost 20 years, Hollywood tried both extremes with this franchise. The Paul W.S. Anderson movies moved further and further away from the games until Resident Evil basically became a giant action franchise built around Alice. Then Welcome to Raccoon City went in the opposite direction and tried to cram as many recognizable characters, locations, and storylines from the games into one movie as possible. The new Resident Evil doesn't simply recreate one of the games. It recreates what it feels like to play one, and it might just do that better than any game movie ever made.

Which approach to adapting a game do you think works best on the big screen?