Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil film ‘takes place alongside the events of Resident Evil 2’ without actually engaging any of the characters

We just got our first look at the upcoming Resident Evil movie which is being directed by Zach Cregger yesterday, and despite looking surprisingly good fans seem to be wondering how exactly it fits into the canon of the games.

“My rule for this movie was to try and make a movie that felt like my experience of playing the games, that could live in the world of Resident Evil,” Cregger says in an IGN trailer breakdown. “This movie takes place alongside the events of Resident Evil 2, I like to think that everything going on inside the police station could be going on in this world; it’s just another dude, on another mission on the other side of town.”

A crucial piece of information, though, is that Cregger isn’t incorporating any of the videogame protagonists, so while Leon is doing his thing in the police station his path won’t intersect with the film’s protagonist, Bryan: “It’s an alternate storyline that takes place on the periphery of the hero’s storyline, so it’s a story that could be happening without necessarily breaking the universe of the story the games are telling.”

We’re seeing a very opposite experience of Raccoon City’s fall through the eyes of Bryan. “It’s like if I were thrust into a Resident Evil video game,” Cregger says in an IGN interview. “I’d be totally unequipped. I’m not good with guns. I’m totally out of shape. It would just be me panicking from one situation to another.

“I think it’s just fun to be following someone with no combat experience whatsoever as they’re walking through hell with a machine gun.”

Instead of trying to create a carbon copy of the games this film will be honouring Resident Evil in a different way: “What’s important to me, that I’m honouring from the games, is the narrative structure and following one character from point A to point B, and the concern with resource management, ammunition conservation. We start with a pistol, we graduate to a shotgun, we graduate to an MP5, and things are just getting progressively more intense, and we’re encountering weirder and weirder monsters.”

Throughout the trailer you can see Bryan searching for ammunition, stumble across an exact replica of the green herb from Resident Evil 4, and at one point even try to grab some keys off a corpse, although that doesn’t go too well. “On of the other things that’s in this movie that comes from the games is the need for keys and padlocks being barriers,” Cregger explains.

But one of the best ways in which Cregger looks to take inspiration from the games is in how the film is shot: “What was really fun for me was to try and shoot this visually the way these games are told. I shoot in on a wide lens in an over-the-shoulder for most of the movie, so it feels like the way you play a game where we’re kind of perched on his shoulder, and as he turns a corner, we turn a corner with him. So I’m using video game visual language. First of all, it’s very inherently cinematic, but it also makes things scarier.”

One way in which it will deviate is the bombing of Raccoon City, that won’t happen, at least not in this film: “I know that Raccoon City gets nuked and I’m a little fuzzy on the timeline of when the nuke drops versus the day Leon sets foot in the police station—that nuking doesn’t happen in this movie. This exists like day one in Raccoon City.”

That could still line up, though. Resident Evil 2 takes place over a single chaotic night but seeing as the bomb is dropped roughly a day after Leon and Claire escape it wouldn’t mess with the canon to not see a mushroom cloud at the end of this film.

If I’m honest, though, I’m not that concerned with this being a faithful adaptation, I’d rather it just be a great movie. This is the most excitement and hope I’ve ever felt for a Resident Evil film, and I really do believe Cregger when he says that this movie is “a love letter to the games, that I fully, fully obsessively love”.