The new Resident Evil trailer is extremely exciting for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it is the latest attempt to deliver an actual quality film in the long line of adaptations from this series. The original movies starring Milla Jovovich and the recent Welcome to Raccoon City attempt have been critically panned, and even fans of the games didn’t enjoy them.
It’s exciting, but apparently, not to everyone. Fans seem pretty unhappy that this trailer from Zach Cregger doesn’t feel like Resident Evil. There’s no Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong, or other major aspects of the franchise, which has led to some complaints. Those complaints, simply put, are ridiculous. This conversation continues to come up with every single adaptation, and it gets worse every time.
Resident Evil Fans are the Latest Gamers to Lose it Over an Adaptation
In general, there are two ways to do an adaptation. One is to strive to be as faithful to the source material as possible within the confines of the medium. A TV show can’t implement gameplay, for example. A movie can’t always utilize the inner monologue of a character in a book, for another.
The other is to take the source material and make your own story. These are, after all, artists who want to tell stories. Using the setting or a plot from something else can often just be a vehicle for the story you want to tell. There are two results when this is the case, and they’re both good.
Mickey 17, for example, is mostly faithful to the original book, but Bong Joon Ho took elements of the story and magnified them for his own take. It’s accurate to Edward Ashton’s plot, but it is thematically Bong Joon Ho’s ideals and his story. The other example is to make your own plot with characters, settings, and themes from the original source.
The Resident Evil movie seems to be going with the latter option. Zach Cregger is telling his own story within the series. It’s just like what Fallout did. That show took the settings, themes, and a few side characters from the stories in the games and did something original. It was better for it. Time will tell if Cregger’s Resident Evil will be better for it, but I’m willing to bet it will be.
Whenever people, be it gamers or book lovers, have something they love adapted, they want it to be a one-to-one copy. Project Hail Mary was widely beloved as an adaptation, but I still saw people nitpicking and complaining about the tiniest things. The response should always be that if someone wants a perfect copy of their favorite game, book, or comic, then they should go consume that media. An adaptation is not going to be the same. It can’t and shouldn’t be.
RE fans seem disappointed that Cregger isn’t tackling the plot of Resident Evil 4 or Requiem, or one of the other games. Cregger himself said that he wants to avoid redundancy with his new story. It’s also true that he wouldn’t be able to tell the story as well the second time because it’s already been done. So out of respect for the audience and the source material, he’s going in a different direction. He doesn’t want to “step on the toes of canon.”
How to Do It Right
Fallout probably needs to be the blueprint. In Season 1, it told the story of new characters and new vaults within the universe of the games. Timeline-wise, it’s set after the five games take place. That allows it to exist alongside instead of being compared to the originals.
It was a huge success, and the narrative direction and lack of a direct adaptation are why. No one can complain that it’s a cheap copy of Fallout 3 because it doesn’t even attempt to be that. No one will be able to complain about Resident Evil being a cheap attempt at telling the story of Resident Evil Village because it’s not attempting to be that.
It’s a cheap but successful formula to jingle the keys in front of an audience like that. Zach Cregger could’ve had Leon Kennedy, Lady Dimitrescu, Ada Wong, Grace Ashcroft, and whatever else he wanted in the movie, and it would’ve attracted a wider audience. He probably could’ve made $1 billion that way. Just look at The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
That movie traded any attempt at storytelling to fill the runtime with Easter eggs and references. It’s extremely successful, but it’s a bad movie. Cregger, who is quickly becoming a fantastic horror storyteller, is trading the financial success to make a better movie. It maintains his artistic integrity, and it’s very commendable in this era of blockbuster movies.
Gamers seem to have it in their heads that they are owed an adaptation that directly transcribes their favorite games. And they blame Hollywood for not respecting them as viewers when the adaptations aren’t that. Ironically, it’s the opposite. Cregger respects Resident Evil players too much to do a poor job at bringing the game they love to life, so he’s instead adding a new story to the pantheon.
This is how it should be. This is not to say that future adaptations can’t adapt stories directly from games. The Last of Us Season 1 was highly successful in doing just that. When done right, it’s great. It just isn’t often done right. And when the opposite approach is taken, things usually turn out better.
Conclusion
This conversation comes up every time there’s a video game adaptation. Resident Evil fans aren’t the first ones to complain en masse about an adaptation not being exactly what they want (book lovers have been doing this for eternity). They won’t be the last ones, either. Sadly, no one can ever be content with this sort of thing. But when Zach Cregger’s original tale within the RE universe is great, don’t say you weren’t warned.
