His Previous Movie Was the Rare Horror Flick to Win an Oscar. His New One Cracks an Even Less Respected Genre.

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The trouble with video-game movies is that they tend to adapt everything except the game itself. Most adaptations amount to a string of cutscenes, the janky animated interludes that allow you to grab a drink while waiting for a fight to load, or function as free-flowing riffs on characters that were never built to exist in three dimensions. The joyless translation from console to screen has produced some of the worst movies ever made , and no more than a handful that could be called so much as good. But Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil sets itself apart by caring more about what it’s like to play the game than what it would be like to live inside of it.

First order of business: Discard all of the games’ characters and most of their plot. Some fans of the Capcom series have complained that Cregger’s movie doesn’t include figures like Leon Kennedy, a rookie cop who has the bad luck to start work on the night a plague of mutant zombies infests his police station. But as much fun as it can be to see the world through their gun sights, battle-ready fighters can make for dull movie protagonists. A scrawny medical courier with a scruff of not-quite beard, Bryan (Austin Abrams), the hero, so to speak, of Cregger’s movie, looks more like someone you’d find clutching a PlayStation controller than a souped-up submachine gun. Cregger has said that his Resident Evil , which covers the first hours after a potent bioengineered virus escapes from the top-secret labs of the nefarious Umbrella Corporation, takes place alongside the events of the second game in the series, but neither you nor Bryan would ever know it. As far as he’s concerned, he takes a last-minute assignment to deliver a cooler to Racoon City, and the world simply goes nuts.

Cregger throws in plenty of Easter eggs for fans of the games—I heard an appreciative murmur when Bryan opens a door in a creepy, deserted house to find an old-fashioned typewriter sitting on a desk—but what feels most familiar is the way the player-protagonist slowly acclimates himself to his deadly new world. There’s the gradual escalation of weaponry as Bryan finds a pistol and then a shotgun, furiously hunting ammunition and wasting bullets like a noob as he tries to shoot through padlocks rather than hunting for the key—the increasing level of difficulty as the enemies get more monstrous and harder to kill, and the moments when it’s better to sneak around to a side entrance than charge in guns blazing. Unfortunately, Bryan isn’t much of a player. He’s still fiddling with the safety on his pistol as a snarling zombie comes bearing down on him, and when he finally locates a box of shotgun shells, he can’t manage to load them into the barrel without scattering ammo all over the floor. He picks up a few skills along the way, but even when he does manage to take out a creature, the pithiest quip he can come up with is “Stupid fucking monsters.”

Because it’s much scarier to be in a game than it is to play one, Resident Evil tilts heavily toward humor.