Look, we might be living through the era of Fallout and The Last of Us proving that videogame adaptations are no longer guaranteed failures, but I'm a child of the era that made those successes feel so unlikely. Forgive me if I'm a little leery every time a franchise I really like gets announced for a movie version – I've been burned too many times.
I'm a huge fan of the Resident Evil games, and my ears have been pricked a few times in recent months by rumours that test screenings of the upcoming film by Zach Cregger have been going down brilliantly. Cregger's a rising star in Hollywood, not least because of last year's Weapons, which managed to score an acting Oscar, a vanishingly rare boast for a horror movie.
Now his version of Resident Evil has both a release date and its first trailer, which has been long-awaited.
The trailer lays out a movie that looks like it'll adapt the games in a really interesting way – namely, it doesn't seem to be taking any one of their plots as a direct source. Rather, it's seemingly aiming to recreate the feeling of the games, with a long protagonist who undergoes a nearly never-ending gamut of horrifying experiences in his attempt to escape the undead.
We see him, played by Austin Abrams, as he stumbles into an empty house in search of help after a potential car accident. He can't get hold of anyone, though, and it's clearly not going to take long for zombies to start turning up. There are no hints of cheesy Umbrella Corp references, though, and the scary designs we get glimpses of aren't from the games.
We see one huge zombie in a sewer looking surprisingly docile, along with some sort of rat king-esque thing coming out of a doorway. Then, just as the trailer ends, some more typical human-shaped zombies start chucking themselves off roofs – nasty stuff. All the while, our hero will be trying to accomplish tasks like "get some car keys off a body without dying" and "find a first aid kit", which are more tonally familiar to gamers.
I'm really optimistic that this could be a hit, and a showcase of how we could adapt games more interestingly by taking inspiration from their tones rather than hewing to their every plot point. The movie will come out on 18 September in the US, so we'll get a sense of its qualities closer to the time.
