Resident Evil Requiem’s director, Koshi Nakanishi, once said that putting Leon Kennedy in a horror game simply wouldn’t work because “he wouldn’t jump at something like a bucket falling. No one wants to see Leon scared by everything”. And he was right, I couldn’t have felt safer with Leon in Requiem. Grace on the other hand, we were decidedly less safe in her hands.
But that didn’t mean I enjoyed my time with her any less. While Leon’s segments in Requiem were pure unbridled feel-good action, Grace found herself in one exhilaratingly stressful situation after another, not unlike another Resident Evil protagonist who rocked up this year. I’m of course talking about Bryan Hodukavich from Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie.
One of my favourite parts of the Resident Evil film was just how ordinary Bryan was, it not only made it infinitely scarier (especially the first part) but I felt empathy for this poor delivery driver in a way that I probably wouldn’t for a trained bioweapon killing machine.
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I hadn’t actually thought about how alike Grace and Bryan are in this way, not until Grace’s actress Angela Sant’Albano pointed it out herself during an interview with Radio Times Gaming.
“I thought the film was amazing,” Sant’Albano says. “I’m a big Zach Cregger fan, I loved Weapons. I think what he’s done is really brilliant and also, you know, their lead character is not Grace, but he is sort of an everyday person put in this extraordinary circumstance and I just think that really translates well to audiences. They want to feel like it could be them. So I’m a big fan of [Cregger] and always have been, and a big fan of the film.”
It’s certainly hard to be a fan of the games and not love Cregger’s Resident Evil adaptation. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a better videogame adaptation, perhaps Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, but it’s a close call. The only thing that would make Cregger’s adaptation better in my books is if we somehow got to see Bryan cross paths with one of the videogame protagonists, but sadly that simply isn’t possible—for many reasons.
