trashrat25

For a fan film, I found the set to be strikingly accurate to the game. Feels like a faithful narrative adaptation of Resident Evil 7, but like Cregger’s adaptation, does not engage with the procedures, processes, and systems that video games make us aware of.

I have only played RE2 and I started playing RE7: Biohazard after watching Zach Cregger's Resident Evil adaptation. When I think of my experience with the Resident Evil games, and what I would expect out of a faithful adaptation, I think of claustrophobic hallways that I must navigate over and over in order to understand the procedures, algorithms, and loops of gameplay. To play the game means to interact with the code of the game. This film has made me curious as to the extent to which the affordances of film as a medium can make viewers aware of procedure, and how film attempts to bridge the "participation" and "expression" gaps when adapting video games into cinema. While this film is at times hilarious and touches on the experience of being thrown into the world of a horror game and the terror of the speed of societal collapse amid crisis, it does not coherently adapt the procedural rhetorics behind the Resident Evil franchise. Cregger’s Resident Evil cannot grant the player agency to experience the video game algorithm themselves, and instead relies on providing an experience of the gameplay using the first-person shooter camera angle, ladder navigation puzzles, an overplayed trope of shooting padlocks, rummaging for bullets in drawers, and reading building maps. Cregger certainly uses the signature RE hallways, corridors, roads, and tunnels, but this film is frustratingly open and vertical. RE does not frequently allow players to embrace gameplay vertically, but this film does so through the barn, the alley with falling infected, the elevator shaft, and the skybridge. The environment, space, and NPCs of the games are what induce the player's movement and conducts players into performing specific actions, moving through space, or interacting with said environment. The space of the same recurring hallways are what makes the Resident Evil games a potent allegory of societies of informatic control (as I believe video games often are). Unfortunately, Cregger’s Resident Evil fails to fully appreciate the gameplay loops and claustrophobic spaces (a kind of backrooms aesthetic) that accentuates the horror of the experience of the games. When Gilles Deleuze describes societies of control, he uses the example of highways, which both open a space for navigation and also enclose and control drivers, which is why I find Resident Evil’s hallways to be an apt allegory for the control that informatic societies rely on. “In making high-ways, for example, you don’t enclose people but instead multiply the means of control. l am not saying that this is the highway’s exclusive purpose, but that people can drive ìnfinitely and ‘freely’ without being at all confined yet while still being perfectly controlled. This is our future.” (“Having an Idea in Cinema” lecture by Gilles Deleuze, May 1987). I originally read the ending as a sort of play on the “humans are the real monsters” trope that occurs in zombie films, with the protagonist being absorbed by the monster and maintaining some of his own memory and consciousness. However, after some thought on the way the antagonist hunting the protagonist is a wired being who modulates themselves according to its needs, I think this tentacled, mutating monster is again representative of our wired, interconnected world. Within digital or algorithmic space, video games are constantly aware of the player's position, mirroring the modern surveillance apparatus. While video games make us fearfully aware of the algorithms of informatic control society, this film adaptation instead sublimates such an algorithmic awareness into the form of a growing, wired monster who we can only assume has spread quickly through the world after the final title card.

Jason’s mom is underrated. She went on a spree and then pulled up on the last victim wearing a crisp sweater like nothing happened

Fine wine