Online, the general fan approval for video game adaptations has been high, which is a big difference from the “adaptation curse” that seemingly plagued (haha, get it?) the industry in the early 2000’s. With the trailer for a new movie in the Resident Evil universe, the initial hype was soaring. Many people who weren’t very knowledgeable about the franchise knew the director, Zack Cregger, and his horror hits “Barbarian”and “Weapons”. Those who were fans of the Resident Evil name were excited for another movie that promised a survival horror similar to the games.

As a casual fan of the franchise, I loved the movie. It’s about a medical courier named Bryan Hodukavich who has to survive a sudden outbreak of monsters. It was such a slow burn, and the way it introduced us to these monsters while Brian is actively learning about them was super engaging and even funny at times.

The actor who played the main character, Austin Abrams, did a fantastic job. His comedic timing was perfect and allowed the viewer to laugh between all the horrifying, gory, and unimaginable monsters popping up on screen. There was a moment I laughed out loud in the theater, and I am definitely more of a quick exhale through the nose kind of viewer.

There were several scenes in the movie that subtly referenced the franchise and how people play games. The main character had to keep track of his ammo only to miss half his shots. At one point, he went around a car over and over again to avoid a monster, the same way a player might. Several set pieces were referencing the different games directly, and it all felt organic and fun.

I would recommend this movie to lovers of the franchise, people who enjoy horror games or horror movies. If you have an interest in gore being juxtaposed with humor, this is also the movie for you!

And with that being said…

I have something I need to get off my chest.

I want to give one last warning that the spoiler content below is directly about the ending!

After I witnessed the ending in the theater, I was shocked. Bryan, our main character, got bitten halfway through the film. It turns out what he had been carrying with him in his medical courier bag the whole time was the last part needed for Umbrella Corp to create a cure.

Obviously, this instills hope in the viewer that the main character could be cured. Only…that doesn’t happen.

Instead, he begins to morph into one of the monsters we fought, and the scientists ultimately do not give him the cure. We watch as he loses all of his humanity and murders the scientists, accidentally losing the cure in the process.

It’s jarring, painful, and currently controversial online. As I left the theater, I felt a little disappointed until I processed it.

To start, the ending breaks a huge genre convention. Typically, for a main character to be killed off in horror, they would have to do something objectively wrong somewhere in the film. This helps the viewer reason with their death. Like: Ugh, I’m sad they died, but they did do that one thing. 

Bryan objectively only tried to do good. He tried to help every single person he came across, and even when things looked doomed and potentially could have turned around, he didn’t, because he thought he was carrying something on his person that was meant to save someone’s life. He was funny and relatable…

And he still turned into a mutant.

His partner, who was pregnant, will never find out what happened to him, and he will never get to meet the child that he had found out about that night.

When the viewer finds out he’s carrying the cure after he got bit, naturally, hope begins to develop that everything will somehow be okay. And when it’s not, it’s confusing. It can make a viewer angry, like everything they just watched was for nothing. I think that’s where a lot of the disapproval stems from.

Now that I have thought more about the ending, I truly think it’s the only way the movie could have ended. In the Resident Evil lore, no cure was created during the outbreak, and Raccoon City ultimately gets bombed to fight off the infection from spreading.

Bryan was also an ordinary person, unlike Leon or any other recognizable character from the franchise. (Bryan could not do four backflips away from any major boss like those people can!) He had no specialized training and was only trying to do good. And in a world where monsters are mutated by a company because of corporate greed, of course the everyday man is going to suffer the consequences of it!

Part of his character arc was about change and transformation. He just found out his partner is pregnant, and his initial reaction is neutral, but in a nuanced way that clearly showed parenthood scared him. They don’t say it outright, but I don’t think he could afford a child necessarily. His outfit seemed worn, and he was driving on bald tires in a snowstorm. After he gets bit (by a child he was trying to help), he leaves a voice message on his phone to his partner, talking about how he was a coward, hated his immediate response to finding out about the baby, and how he knew she was going to be a great mother.

So in that way, he did transform into a father, the same way he transformed into a monster. The movie denies him full character growth for something uglier. Before he reaches the scientists, he has to walk through a maternity ward and face tiny infected infants mutated into monsters. Throughout the whole journey, he was constantly reminded of the pregnancy, and I think the way they subverted that change was really interesting and fit well within the world of Resident Evil.