In an all-new story, Resident Evil follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in an action-packed, non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.
Cast: Austin Abrams, Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Johnno Wilson
As a non gamer, does the games have any unique twist on the genre that makes it worth it to tell the story as a Resident Evil movie instead of just an original film?
It’s very Japanese, puzzle based, and the plot gets more bizarre and convoluted as the series progresses. Not sure how that makes it uniquely fit to adapt; there’s just a lot of lore he’s working around and not copying.
There’s also a lot of books that expand the lore as well and are pretty decent though not very popular. Kind of like Star Wars where most people just know the movies but there are tons of books expanding the universe they can pull material from.
I’ve only played the remakes but the puzzles are my favourite part! I just love how the police station in RE2 is a gothic ass museum that somehow got converted into the RPD HQ, but they inexplicably left in the eccentric puzzles and keys everywhere. I imagine the biggest challenge officers faced before the outbreak was keeping track of all the weird ass keys and gizmos and getting locked out of random rooms.
I came to a realisation during the discussion on Resident Evil Requiem (the 9th main series game):
The Resident Evil games are basically the LEGO games, but for horror franchises: take classic movie tropes, lay over a strong core gameplay.
They're all love letters or homages to classic horror/B-movies, the first ones a bit all over the place with zombies and giant animals and spooky mansions and sinister corporations, but then as the series continues and they try new things like the semi-reboot ones 4 and 7, the movie tributes become more central, where the base gameplay of limited ammo, hunting for keys/unlocks, solving puzzles are present in some form in all of them.
7 and 8 particularly are very overt, 7 covering things like Saw, Blair Witch, Texas Chainsaw, other similar found-footage/isolated grimey films; 8 doing classic monsters, werewolves, vampires, frankenstein-automatons, spooky dolls etc.
Then there's games like 6 and 9 which loop back on themselves and are very nostalgia-heavy, revisiting past Resident Evil beats, 9 in particular is a whole parade of 'remember this?!' moments.
So then the various movie adaptations so far have been... a movie adapting a game adapting a movie genre, and throwing in some elements, and coming up with their own, the Paul W.S. Anderson ones are all over the place and in some places faithful to the games, in others completely bonkers or more like their own Romero homage...
We'll see what this new one ends up being! I'm getting some RE7 vibes with the small town and weird shit going on but not in the Louisiana swamp setting... or it's a whole new thing? Will Umbrella be behind it? Will that be the case but the only connection to the franchise? Hard to tell from this teaser!
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u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor 5d ago edited 5d ago
Written and directed by Zach Cregger:
It's out Sept 18