In the Resident Evil movies, if somebody gets bitten by a zombie, they die, and turn into a zombie. In the Resident Evil games, if the player gets bitten by a zombie, they lose some health, health they can recover by eating (?) a green herb. In the film, you shoot a zombie in the head, it dies straight away. In the game—provided it’s one of the games where aiming your gun at a specific part of a target’s body is actually something that you can do, and that’s not all the Resident Evil games, not by a long shot—shooting a zombie in the head will cause a larger reduction in the zombie’s health points than shooting it in, say, its chest, but it won’t die straight away. The videogame is a fantasy land sufficient that even the fantastical rules of fantastical movies with fantastical monsters do not—seemingly cannot—apply. The concept of a Resident Evil game where you can be killed by a single zombie bite may not be considered adequately likely to result in ‘fun,’ in the way that Resident Evil, and the videogame, are supposed to be fun. If you could kill the zombies by shooting them once in the head, that may produce mechanics and gameplay that are not amply challenging, and it’s a truth universally acknowledged that videogames are supposed to be challenging. On the contrary, if you were watching a Resident Evil movie, and the characters could survive zombie bites by eating herbs, and the zombies only died after three, or four, or five gunshots in their heads, you’d feel like the movie was stupid. It wouldn’t make sense.
This might be why so many videogame movies are bad. They inevitably fall into a gulf between the language of games and the language of films: too cartoonish and dramatically and thematically thin to function as convincing motion pictures, but too rules-based and reality-bound, and hamstrung by filmic principles of verisimilitude, to seriously capture the source material. Only a certain percentage of the videogame can survive contact with the medium of the movie—the core of Resident Evil is its gameplay, and the core of its gameplay is, quite often, exploring and re-exploring the same eight or ten rooms of a building to find objects and do puzzles. The character spends the overwhelming majority of their time alone, not talking to anybody. While it’s not impossible to imagine a film that tries to adapt this experience, more readily filmic are Resident Evil’s cutscenes; ‘the story.’
In reverse, since the videogame, as an object, is ultimately designed around and propelled by the interaction and input of the player, it becomes sort of formally besides the point to base a movie-to-game adaption on the parts of the film that don’t readily invite or form a context for those inputs and interactions. Choosing what a character might think or say or feel is not as substantively or dynamically ‘interactive’ as shooting a gun, swinging a sword, driving a fast car. Electronic Arts’ The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is just all the battles from the film. Goldeneye on the N64 is one long gunfight. And again, while it’s not impossible to imagine a videogame that tries to adapt these movies more comprehensively, complete with all the dialogue and characterisation, more immediately videogamic are the movies’ shootouts and sword battles; ‘the action.’
No matter how ill-fated (they’re all terrible), Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil movies are at least an attempt to bridge the linguistic gap between movies and games. A succession of action sequences, his Resident Evil films also ‘look like’ games, complete with computer-generated monsters and backgrounds. The rapid pace of the editing—cut cut cut cut cut—mimics the energy of a typical videogame: shoot reload inventory run+. He even does this thing where at the start of every film, or before big set pieces, you get a kind of ‘loading screen’ with a map and some data and the characters explaining for the benefit of the audience the context of what’s about to happen. Like here. If Anderson deserves any kind of critical revision, it’s because, more than a lot of other videogame-franchise movie directors, he’s tried to accept into his filmmaking a certain videogame-ism. He’s not totally squashing the visual language (or at least, the spirit, rhythm, or formal essence) of games to make space for the conventions of movies, at least, not every time.
The problem, however, is that while Anderson’s Resident Evil movies preserve, and are true to, some of the formal character of videogames, it is the formal character of videogames generally; a stereotype of videogames; videogames in a sense that’s simultaneously bastardised and also a banal, Platonic ideal. That formal character is not the formal character of Resident Evil specifically. The videogameness that Anderson incorporates into his films is a type of videogameness that is often not present or is only barely present in Resident Evil. Either that, or it’s only present in some Resident Evil games, and not the ones that are most commonly associated with—and remembered and loved for defining—the series’ style. Anderson’s films might be good videogame films, in the sense that they make an effort to hybridise filmic and crude-videogamic visual language. But they are not good Resident Evil videogame films.
Assessed against this criteria—is it a good videogame film? How about a good Resident Evil videogame film?—Welcome to Raccoon City, directed by Johannes Roberts, has less merit than any of Anderson’s efforts. Though it has the characters, setting, and some of the plot of Resident Evil, apart from key elements of the production design (Claire wears the same jacket from RE2 Remake, Leon has floppy hair, the RPD building is an amalgamation of the RPD building from the original Resident Evil 2, Outbreak File 2, and the remake), Welcome to Raccoon City doesn’t emulate the visual language of the games. There’s a (dreadful) scene in the 2005 Doom movie, where we cut to the perspective of Karl Urban’s hero, and watch through his eyes while he shoots the monsters, in mimicry of the FPS game. Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill copies the upside-down, twisting pan shot from the beginning of the first game, when James runs into the alleyway with the empty wheelchair. Barring maybe one moment, when the truck driver hits the zombie on the road to Raccoon City, and the image of her wrapped around the front of his cab is lifted, one-to-one, from RE2 Remake, there’s no attempt by Roberts to replicate the visual style of the games. If you weren’t already familiar with the world of Resident Evil, and nobody told you, you could probably watch it without realising it’s based on a videogame. And in fact, the film is at its best when it’s not trying to recreate the games, and when it’s playing fast and loose with the subject matter.
Though the characterization differs somewhat from game to game, era to era, Capcom’s Raccoon City is most commonly presented as a modern conurbation, home to around 100,000 people. In Roberts’ movie, it’s something more like Pripyat, built specifically to house employees of the Umbrella Corporation, and sliding into destitution now that the company has upped sticks. Not many people live in Raccoon City anymore. All the shops, services, and utilities are ultimately Umbrella-run. This is different to the games, but, perversely, makes the plot of the games feel like it makes more sense. In Resident Evil 2, the gun shop owner Robert Kendo explains that, somehow, he didn’t notice anything was wrong until the “entire city was infested with zombies.” In a metropolis with 100,000 people, that seems like a contrivance. In Roberts’ version of Raccoon City, it feels possible.
Not that realism and believability matter that much++. But the Welcome to Raccoon City version of Raccoon City is a metaphor for the successes and struggles of the film as a whole. When it largely ignores, or only very generally adapts, the material of the games, Welcome to Raccoon City is at its best. During the first act, although the characters and settings are from the games, the film develops its own versions of them—its own Jill Valentine, own Brian Irons, own Chris, own Claire, own Raccoon City. For the most part, when the film adapts the videogame, it takes the excesses and extravagances of the videogame and tones them down. Irons, for example, is just kind of a mean boss—not the pseudo Norman Bates murderer/rapist/taxidermist of Resident Evil 2. The Spencer mansion has zombies, but it doesn’t have puzzles and booby traps. William Birkin and Wesker are more ‘rounded.’ We see Birkin at home with Annette and Sherry, and Wesker is more of a reluctant dragalong in Umbrella’s arch scheme than its smirking mastermind—he doesn’t even wear the sunglasses, until a mid-credits scene that presumptuously teases a sequel. In more judgemental terms, Anderson’s films drag the language of movies down to meet the subject matter of the games. Roberts’ film pulls the subject matter of the games up, so that it won’t be decapitated by a lower tolerance for suspension of disbelief. It might be something as simple as the camera. When we’re watching real footage of real actors, we automatically expect a greater degree of reality, and reject as puerile, trashy, and low-quality what we might accept if it were done in a videogame graphics engine, where what we’re seeing is inherently already ‘unreal’+++ and therefore more agreeable as such. Maybe this is why the Capcom-made Resident Evil CGI movies—Degeneration, Damnation, Vendetta, Death Island—are the easiest to watch. Maybe the subject matter, aesthetic, and entire language and nature of videogames is esoteric to the point that it cannot be adapted into (some) other forms without fundamentally compromising, or subjugating, either the source material or the quality standards of the other form.
Because when Welcome to Raccoon City, in its second act, starts to follow the source material of Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 more closely (STARS investigating the mansion, zombies besieging the police station), the film also begins to come apart. The rock-solid characterisation from the opening 30 minutes is forgotten. The often sharp dialogue and chemistry between some of the cast—Irons’ chewing out the STARS Alpha team is a good scene, likewise Ben Bertolucci’s video message to Claire, and the introductory meet cute at the diner—is all sidelined for disjointed, unconvincing action, which, as well as overwhelming the better elements of the script, also exposes the limits in Welcome to Raccoon City’s budget—as much as I like the film’s characterisation of a semi ghost town, post-industrial wasteland Raccoon City, I’m also certain it’s a concession to low money, which is also why Leon spends most of the film sat down behind a desk and shoots precisely one (1) zombie.
While games and movies may seem like close formal cousins (admittedly the relationship is lopsided—games steal from movies more than movies from games), in basically every single case, not just Resident Evil, but Assassin’s Creed, Doom, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Hitman, Max Payne, Far Cry, Prince of Persia, Borderlands, Five Nights At Freddy’s, Silent Hill—seemingly only a very slim percentage of games’ substance, matter and composition is fit for adaptation. Either you lose a lot from the games, or you compromise on some of the fundamentals of filmmaking. Even if we pretend that your average movie and your average game have some kind of comparable artistic value, one just doesn’t convert into the other. If there are no good videogame films, it’s because—even ignoring mechanics and gameplay and interactivity—the subject matter and aesthetics and narratives of games are not good material for filmic interpretation.
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+ Or maybe the short attention span that videogames often appeal to and engender, the short shot length the equivalent of hit markers, pop-ups, score meters, and the other audio and visual tricks that give players constant positive feedback.
++ CinemaSins is to film criticism what bovine spongiform encephalopathy is to British beef. It should be removed from the surface web, and hereby viewed only by freaks on the Tor browser.
+++ …Engine 5
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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Twitter handle is @esmithwriter.