We Saw 30 Minutes of Resident Evil. Consider Us Convinced

Amy did not want to see Resident Evil, and when I say she didn’t want to see it, I don’t mean she was on the fence. After Barbarian and Weapons, she had sworn off seeing another Zach Cregger movie in theaters. Her reasoning was simple: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

It wasn’t just that she didn’t like either movie. Both had been marketed so effectively that we went into them genuinely excited, only to walk away disappointed. For Amy, that made the letdown even worse because she felt like the carpet had been pulled out from under her. Movies she thought were going to be exciting and fun ended up boring her, and she wasn’t getting fooled a third time.

When the first Resident Evil teaser arrived, I showed it to her and eventually asked her to guess who was directing it. She paused before saying, “Please tell me it’s not the Weapons guy.”

When I confirmed that it was, her response was immediate: “FUCK NO.”

So, yes. Resident Evil had some work to do.

The Trailers Started to Chip Away at Her

To Amy’s credit, she didn’t think the first teaser looked bad. She thought it looked okay, although not particularly scary, but she’d already said she wasn’t seeing Cregger’s next movie in a theater and was determined to be a woman of her word.

I was more optimistic. As a fan of the Resident Evil games, I liked that Cregger appeared to be leaning into survival horror. The footage looked like someone trying to survive inside the world of a Resident Evil game rather than simply borrowing its monsters and iconography. I was cautiously optimistic, emphasis on cautiously, because we’d been convinced by Cregger’s marketing before.

The full trailer moved me further. We got more of the story and, more importantly for me, more connections to the actual experience of playing Resident Evil. Even Amy admitted it didn’t look bad. She still wasn’t sold, but we’d progressed from “FUCK NO” to maybe we could make a deal. She even suggested that perhaps she needed to play one of the games first so she’d be more invested.

Then we got invited to see approximately the first 30 minutes of the movie as part of the first ever live Reddit AMA with Cregger. Audiences in Dallas, Los Angeles and New York watched the footage before joining the live discussion, and Amy was less than thrilled about driving two hours to watch 30 minutes of a movie she still wasn’t convinced she wanted to see. I reminded her we were getting the Q&A too, which helped a little.

Then the footage started.

Austin Abrams Is Exactly What This Story Needs

One of the first things we both responded to was Austin Abrams. His character feels like a normal person suddenly thrust into a situation he is spectacularly unequipped to handle, and Abrams plays that fish out of water quality extremely well. The movie gives us just enough backstory to care about him and understand why getting home matters without stopping everything for a lengthy explanation. There’s also some humor and levity in his performance, but importantly, it never makes the danger feel silly.

In some ways, it reminded us of Exit 8. We’re following someone who doesn’t understand what’s happening any better than we do, and that vulnerability makes it much easier to put yourself in his position.

During the AMA, Cregger explained that Resident Evil 7 was a major reference for exactly that reason, with an everyday person being thrown into a nightmare and forced to figure it out. For the movie’s larger structure, he pointed to Resident Evil 4 and its scope of moving from one dangerous situation to another and simply having to survive. Having just watched the footage, both influences made immediate sense.

This Doesn’t Just Reference Resident Evil. It Moves Like Resident Evil.

This is where the footage really won me over. After an encounter on an icy road goes very badly, Abrams’ character finds himself trying to survive something he doesn’t understand with a weapon he barely knows how to use. The way Cregger shoots the sequence is what made it work for me because the camera often stays with Abrams’ perspective, allowing us to discover the danger when he does instead of giving us information he doesn’t have.

Cregger talked specifically about that approach during the AMA, explaining that his visual language is built as much from video games as it is from movies. He even called out a moment we’d just watched in which Abrams approaches a barn, looks upward, and the camera goes low and tilts up with him. We see it when he sees it.

Cregger also explained that he generally doesn’t like cutting to close ups of an actor’s face while building tension because the scary thing isn’t the character’s reaction, it’s what the character is looking at. That philosophy is all over these first 30 minutes. Abrams is underprepared, scared and unsure of what he’s doing, so when he survives an encounter, it feels less like watching an action hero dispatch a monster and more like barely scraping through a section of a survival horror game.

From there, he makes his way toward a nearby house, and the Resident Evil DNA becomes even more obvious. He’s searching for a weapon, looking for ammunition and exploring an unfamiliar environment. There’s even a typewriter.

For fans of the games, these aren’t particularly subtle references, but they didn’t feel like empty fan service either because they’re incorporated into a sequence that already functions like Resident Evil. Then there’s the dog. I’m not going to explain that one, but I’ll just say it got me.

Cregger Isn’t Trying to Retell the Games

Something else Cregger said during the AMA made me more confident about the approach because he’s clearly played these games. He referenced entries throughout the series during the discussion, including Resident Evil Village, but while he acknowledged the more fantastical elements of that game, he deliberately wanted his movie to remain more grounded. As he explained it, the T virus gives him more than enough to work with without needing to push into those elements.

More importantly, he isn’t trying to replace Leon, Jill, Chris, Claire or the stories fans already love. Cregger essentially explained that he’d rather tell a new story about someone else living inside this universe than attempt to retell a story the games have already told extremely well.

He also understands the skepticism. Cregger admitted that when trailers for the original Resident Evil movies arrived, his own reaction as a fan was essentially, “That’s not my Resident Evil,” and he never watched them. Now he’s the guy asking Resident Evil fans to trust his version, so he knows exactly what that feels like. His goal, he said, was pretty straightforward: make the Resident Evil movie he would want to watch.

Based on these 30 minutes, I understand what he means.

Then Resident Evil TURNED Amy

The biggest surprise of the footage wasn’t that I liked it. It was Amy. She jumped at least five times during roughly 30 minutes, and I’ll admit Cregger got me a few times too, but one sequence in the house absolutely destroyed her. Abrams has finally found ammunition while a phone is ringing and an answering machine is playing. Outside, another threat is rapidly approaching the house, so there are multiple things competing for his attention and ours as the tension continues to build.

And then Cregger pulls the trigger and Amy LOST IT.

She screamed, her head went down and her feet started kicking, and she essentially stayed that way until the scene was over. When she finally came back up, she was spent, breathing heavily and needing a couple of minutes to recover.

Not long afterward, the footage ended, and she was sitting beside me saying, “Oh my God.” So I asked the only question that mattered: “Okay, now what do you think?” There was a pause before, under a tired, defeated breath, she finally relented “Okay.”

She was convinced.

This Wasn’t a Franchise Handed to the Hot New Horror Director

One of my favorite revelations from the AMA had nothing to do with what we saw onscreen. Cregger said he wrote Resident Evil before Weapons was even close to starting production, and at the time, as he put it, he had “no juice.” He didn’t think there was any chance the studio would let him direct a Resident Evil movie, so he simply wrote it. Once he finished the script, however, he realized he really wanted to direct it.

I think that’s an important distinction because, from the outside, it would be very easy to look at this project as a studio taking a major horror franchise and handing it to the hot director behind Barbarian and Weapons. That’s not how this started.

Cregger was invested in making his version of Resident Evil before directing it was even a realistic option for him. Combine that with how comfortably he talked about the games during the AMA, and this didn’t feel like someone who had been handed valuable IP and then done his homework. It felt like a fan who had already spent a lot of time thinking about what his Resident Evil movie should be.

Consider Us Convinced

Let’s be very clear: we’ve only seen approximately 30 minutes of Resident Evil, and 30 great minutes don’t guarantee a great movie. We haven’t seen how the story develops, where Cregger ultimately takes these characters or whether the movie can maintain what worked so well in this opening stretch, so this isn’t a review. It’s a change of expectations.

I walked into the screening cautiously optimistic and walked out genuinely excited to see the rest. Amy walked in not particularly happy about driving two hours to see 30 minutes of a movie she had repeatedly said she wasn’t going to watch, and she walked out wanting to see the rest. That’s a pretty dramatic turnaround.

What we saw was intense, funny without becoming silly, filled with genuine tension and, most importantly for me, connected to the experience of actually playing Resident Evil. Not because Cregger threw a typewriter into the background or recreated recognizable imagery, but because he seems to understand the feeling those games create: explore, discover, find something useful, realize you’re still woefully underprepared and survive anyway.

Cregger said he wanted to make the Resident Evil movie he wanted to watch. After Barbarian and Weapons, Amy was adamant she wasn’t going to watch it.

It took him about 30 minutes to change her mind.

WATCH OUR OUT OF THE THEATER REACTION

Source: Zach Cregger, live Reddit AMA.