Zach Cregger's Resident Evil - Trailer Reaction

TL;DR

The Resident Evil teaser looks decent as generic horror but fails to fix Hollywood's 25-year inability to properly adapt the games.

Key Points

• 1.Cregger's film is deliberately non-canon. He confirmed it's set during the Resident Evil 2 outbreak in Raccoon City but follows a new character on a self-contained side story, using no game characters or plot.
• 2.The reviewer sees this as avoidance, not innovation. Hollywood has failed to crack Resident Evil for 25 years — through the Milla Jovovich films, Welcome to Raccoon City, and Netflix's series — and Cregger sidesteps the problem rather than solving it.
• 3.As a standalone horror film, the teaser has merit. The atmosphere of tension and dread works, and the lone protagonist echoes survival horror isolation, though a single-character story makes dramatic tension difficult when the lead clearly can't die.
• 4.Several continuity questions undermine the trailer's setup. The film is set during Raccoon City's September outbreak, yet the trailer shows snow, near-empty streets, and no visible zombie horde despite the city having hundreds of thousands of residents.