The critical and commercial success of last summer’s suburban horror epic “Weapons” gave its talented writer-director, Zach Cregger, a proverbial blank cheque. He’s since cashed it with an adaptation of the internationally popular survival-horror video game “Resident Evil,” slated to open Sept. 18.
The trailer for “Resident Evil” is moody, creepy and grotesque, with star Austin Abrams scurrying through a postapocalyptic landscape strewn with corpses and infested by predatory freaks (one of whom resembles a refugee from House Harkonnen on Arrakis). The movie looks pretty good.
What it doesn’t look like — at least not exactly — is any of “Resident Evil”’s other, multiple multimedia incarnations, including Paul W.S. Anderson’s geometrically precise, geek-chic film versions, featuring the indestructible Milla Jovovich. The lack of certain key bits of iconography — i.e. any references to the villainous Umbrella Corporation, the series’ Big Bad — has spawned a deluge of online skepticism from hardcore fans and casuals alike. “I just saw the new ‘Resident Evil’ trailer and I’m slightly annoyed,” reads one typical Reddit comment.
Slight annoyance is one thing. An angry mob of gamers converging online is more hazardous than a horde of zombies. Renovating intellectual property is tricky, and the biggest box-office hits of recent times suggest the benefits of fidelity as far as video game movies go. (Incoming: “Mortal Kombat II,” which opens this weekend.)
Last year’s “A Minecraft Movie” has grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide by dutifully reproducing the popular world-building game brick for brick. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is currently on track to make even more by the end of summer. Leaving aside that both of these are more family-friendly than “Resident Evil,” the common denominator between them still matters: it’s their willingness to give the faithful exactly what they want.
Meanwhile, Cregger has confessed to worrying that his target demographic is set to “crucify” him for fiddling with franchise lore. He also admitted that he’s rarely happy when Hollywood messes with one of his favourite video games. “I’m like, ‘Don’t ruin this for me,’” Cregger told the New York Times.
The potentially ruinous relationship between video games and movies has been a talking point for several decades now. The conversation has gotten more complex in sync with the expanding technological and philosophical dimensions of its subject. In 2012, critic Roger Ebert risked an internet crucifixion of his own by suggesting that video games were stranded on the far side of the uncanny valley, as far as art was concerned. He proclaimed that no matter how “cinematic” their styles and storytelling might become, games would never qualify as art.
Ebert’s edict was righteous, but anxious around the edges: it echoed the sense, embedded since the early 1980s, that video games represented an existential threat to the film industry, and not just in economic terms.
The early cycle of arcade- and cartridge-based entertainments swiftly captured the hearts and minds and eyeballs of an entire generation, rewiring their attention spans and esthetic receptors in the process. Here was a new and participatory form of spectacle with a set of built-in, precision-tuned dopamine dispensers.
Movies were a passion, but video games were an addiction. It’s telling that the first blockbusters to address the phenomena bristled with ambivalence. In 1982’s “Tron,” a software whiz gets absorbed into a virtual world designed to kill him; in 1983’s “Superman III,” the villain uses an Atari-like configuration to fire missiles at the Man of Steel. The critiques could be subtle as well: in 1987’s “The Princess Bride,” the convalescent grade-schooler played by Fred Savage is weaned off of his Nintendo by a grandparent wielding a dusty old storybook.
Two years after “The Princess Bride,” Savage returned as the star of a movie with a considerably different attitude about video games: “The Wizard,” conceived by Universal Studios head Tom Pollock as a latchkey-kid update of Ken Russell and the Who’s “Tommy,” with pinball swapped out for Super Mario Bros. 3. The conjoined crassness and cynicism of “The Wizard” is truly something to behold: it remains the gold standard (if that’s the term) for shameless product placement. In his 1993 book “Game Over,” about the rise and international impact of Nintendo as a cultural force, David Sheff called “The Wizard” “less a piece of art than a one-hundred-minute advertisement for Nintendo that millions of families paid to see.”
At least they paid to see it. In 1993, the ambitious, ill-starred live-action film “Super Mario Bros.” — starring Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo and Dennis Hopper, all doing their best to plumb the depths — flopped hard enough to briefly curb Hollywood’s appetite for such projects altogether. That film felt stranded in a no man’s land between fealty and condescension. The ’90s video game movies that did hit, like the gory, colourful, unpretentious “Mortal Kombat,” met their material on its own side-scrolling terms.
Enter “The Matrix,” a thematic update of “Tron” that, while not actually a video game adaptation, leveraged virtual immersion, problem-solving mystery logistics and kinetic exhilaration against a technophobic Y2K backdrop. No American movie before “The Matrix” had a bigger influence on the look, style and tone of video game movies, or, while we’re at it, video games themselves (its “bullet time” effect went on to become standard issue in first-person shooters).
The next paradigm shifter was “Avatar,” which James Cameron explained took many of its cues from video games. During filming, the director used a hand-held “virtual camera” controller that functioned similarly to a video game controller.
This year’s most significant video game film isn’t “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” and it probably won’t be “Resident Evil,” either, even if Cregger knows what he’s doing. That designation has seemingly been locked up by Japanese director Genki Kawamura’s “Exit 8,” which hews so closely to its inspiration — Kotake Create’s lo-fi and wildly popular walking simulator — that it all but collapses the distance between mediums.
The setting is an underground subway station styled as a labyrinthine purgatory. The protagonist is a rider doomed to circle through the mazelike corridors in search of clues leading to an escape hatch. The highest compliment that can be paid to Kawamura’s “Exit 8” is that it feels as if you’re watching a speed run of its source material — a fine example of what it looks like to push formal boundaries and stay within them at the same time.
