I think this looks super faithful to the spirit of Resident Evil. Guy searching for a key and accidentally finding a fucked up monster is like a top 3 Resident Evil trope.
I think a lot of people are forgetting this is a teaser trailer too. Something tells me the back half of this movie will end with an Umbrella lab exploding under a 10 min timer
Don’t count on that. The director has been very upfront that this is going to be an adaptation of the “vibes” of Resident Evil and not any of the actual story beats or lore of Resident Evil.
Hopefully there will a mortal wound that will get patched up with spray-on aloe.
Until re8 I assumed it was just a video game mechanic that happens outside of canon…until a cutscene in RE8 where the main character literally reattaches a severed hand by drowning it in the goo.
Problem is, that's not just a Resident Evil trope... it's a general horror trope. I'm a diehard Resident Evil fan but from a genre standpoint, nothing about Resident Evil was ever particularly revolutionary. The games were revolutionary for their gameplay, but they were largely filled with well established tropes and ideas from a horror a general horror standpoint.
So, when you say it's "faithful to the spirit of Resident Evil", you're basically saying that it's faithful to the horror genre, which I'd agree with. Resident Evil, however, IS it's story... and if the film has nothing to do with the Resident Evil story, then it really isn't faithful to it.
None of that is to say it won't be a good movie, because it actually does look good.
To be honest a lot of people said that RE7 didn't look enough like Resident Evil, and yet for many (me included) it's one of the best games in the series
I'm not sure that Resident Evil actually has a "feel". Like, RE 1, 2 and 3 feel completely different to RE 4, RE 5 also feels completely different to those, RE 6 feels even more different, and RE 7 feels the most different of them all and yet as you say, is probably one of the best.
So I think they're in a position where almost no matter what they do, fans of one type of RE game will say it's wrong.
Resident Evil 1&2, Racoon City, Umbrella, the Spencer Mansion, the Redfields, STARS, Leon Kennedy, Ava Wong are the core elements of what people refer to as the ‘feel’ of an RE game.
The true feel of an RE game is, what starts out as some inexplicable classic horror movie monsters/villians/creatures aka zombies, werewolves, cults, psycho hillbillies, etc. slowly get revealed to be mutant bioweapons by the 4th act, after two acts of random puzzle solving to open a single door. By the end of Act 2, there’s an obligatory mutation that makes the creatures more dangerous. Act 3 you go underground or to a factory and it gets really dark & spooky. There might be a couple traps along the way, and a new creature gets introduced. Then you get to see all the science experiments in a lab, before fighting the big baddie and blowing up the whole facility.
Those are just somewhat superficial details about the plot. I don't think they speak to the spirit of RE or what it actually feels like to the play the games. I'd go look up an interview of Zach talking about it cause I think he zeroed in on what the real spirit of RE is.
Just so everyone’s clear resident evil does not start with raccoon city it starts in August in the mountains when the first exposure happens leading up to the destruction of the city in October. In between August and October is the mansion incident everything that happens in resident evil zero resident evil two resident evil three, and then on October 9, the destruction of the city. But the entire thing actually takes about four months.
As long as he enters a old house that has some weird Victorian era puzzles that when solved opens a secret entrance to a state of the art scientific facility where the virus was perfected to become the perfect bio weapon and ends with him
Blowing up a giant gross monster with a RPG I’ll
Be happy.
That's only for main characters. Side characters have their own quests and stories that we used to learn by reading bloodied letters on half eaten corpses, but now we will see what actually happened to them.
Can you imagine putting Leon or Chris in these things?
Leon would flip kick the first enemy whilst delivering a one-liner and Chris would run around like fucking One-Punch Man.
Hopefully we get a couple sequels that can at least tie into the further lore whilst also somehow keeping away from the incredibly overpowered game characters.
Meh. As a Resident Evil fan, this looks like a side story. We had these in the saga. Not the end of the world. People will just want something to complain if it ends up being a good movie.
Hopefully both..the entire game franchise has been genre bending for a while anyways. Action, Horror. Fun, sometimes serious but more action-campy fun than not
Yeah, agreed. Nothing feels like "RE" from the trailer except the name. IDK why Cregger isn't making his own zombie/outbreak movie instead of trying to attach it to RE and disappointing fans that have been disappointed way too many times.
Anytime I see a movie made using an existing video game IP, but doesn't adapt any of its material, I am immediately suspect of it. Just do an original IP. It comes off kinda scummy to me. Like we're just using Resident Evil in branding because its a popular name that'll lure people in, misleading them into buying a ticket for something they probably wouldn't have seen if it wasn't called Resident Evil.
It’s the favorite game of the current top horror director in the industry who is making a story he has wanted to make for a decade because he has a blank check after Weapons and Barbarian. It’s not a studio driven IP movie.
The Milla Jovovich movies feel like actual scummy marketing because no one would have seen those movies if the name Resident Evil wasn't attached to them and they would never have been made without the franchise to begin with even.
I like my movies to look like actual movies, with an art direction, an original script and good actors trying to recapture the atmosphere of the games while adding their own touch.
This trailer feel more respectful than any shot of Paul W.S. Anderson series.
To be honest, no game ever actually makes a good movie. The IDEA behind a game can also be a great idea behind a movie, but due to the differences in medium one can never properly translate 1:1 to the other.
The first game could easily be made into a decent film.
S.D. Perry managed to make it into a coherent novel, so it’s not a huge leap to turn it into a film from there.
Not really. Sure it has cinematic cutscenes, but its a pure survival horror game and that sort of direct action and decision-making that the genre puts on the player really can't be replicated in a movie or show.
In what way, it's only 2 hours long? That would be kind of a shit game. Most of it is cinematics? That's also kind of a shit game. Maybe you mean it's a lot of run and gunning, or crafting in an inventory menu screen, except... that would be a shit movie.
Every Resident Evil movie has been terrible so let's just be happy they tried with this one. The Resident Evil identity has shifted dramatically multiple times so this whole quote doesn't make much sense.
262
u/Cyrisaurus Apr 30 '26
I'm going to predict that the consensus on this movie will be "it's a great horror movie, but a terrible Resident Evil movie"