Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil premiered this month and took sixty million dollars domestically in its opening weekend, on track to become the most profitable film in the franchise. GQ and Esquire have called it the best video-game adaptation ever made, and Tyler Foggatt’s New Yorker review basically agrees — while arguing that it is, as a Cregger film, a step back from “Barbarian” and “Weapons.”

What the movie gets right, in her reading, is the sensation rather than the plot:

  • Environments shift every few minutes, set pieces escalate, enemies get deadlier — the rhythm of moving from level to level.
  • The hero, Bryan (Austin Abrams), is a “glorified Postmates driver” who is functionally an NPC: the non-player character promoted to protagonist.
  • Minor touches carry the adaptation: he finds a shotgun in one room and must search the rest of the house for shells; he keeps shooting padlocks he will need a key for.
  • His arc is marksmanship. “I’ve only used guns in video games. It’s confusing in real life,” he says — and the true emotional climax is a deep breath, one bullet left, and a good shot.

The franchise context she lays out:

  • Thirty-odd games, most of them good, and live-action adaptations that are nearly all terrible — Paul W. S. Anderson’s films invented a new protagonist, Alice, played by his wife, Milla Jovovich, and drew fan anger for drifting from the source.
  • The series holds the record for most live-action films based on a video-game franchise, with close to zero critical acclaim: Salon called the first “mildly grisly, assaultively noisy and tremendously boring,” and Roger Ebert put it and its sequel on his most-hated list.
  • The structural problem: adapt too loosely and you lose the fans, too faithfully and you lose everyone else. Either way, adaptations lack the thing that makes a game good — playing it.

The most pointed passage is about “Weapons,” her reading of which has not changed: seventeen children, the same number killed at Parkland, vanish at 2:17 A.M., the number of House members who voted in 2022 for an assault-weapons ban that never passed, and a grieving father dreams of an AR imprinted with that time. Cregger has said the film was about how alcoholism destroys a family and that he does not fully understand the dream himself. Foggatt’s reply is flat: she believes the movie is about guns, “regardless of whether that was Cregger’s initial intention” — and she does not blame him for declining the interpretation when he is about to reboot a franchise built on firearms.

This is a review about the auteur frame as much as the film. Foggatt went in as a Cregger fan and enjoyed it less for it. A version of the same movie with psychological depths would have lingered on Bryan’s tearful voice memo instead of cutting away from it — but Bryan is an NPC, and maybe the film is doing us a favor by not letting us get too attached. The reboot works because it is faithful to the pleasure of the game; it disappoints because faithfulness to a game is not why anyone watches a Cregger film.