Schrödinger’s Cinema

I don’t think I could ever survive as one of those social media film pundits who make a living dropping smooth-brained hot takes on movies they haven’t seen. As someone who has spent the last 20 years mostly paying their bills by watching and writing about cinema and pop culture in general, when I imagine viewing art through some narrow, horny-for-clicks, soundbite-built lens of pop cynicism, it sounds overwhelmingly depressing. The exact same film trends that people roll their eyes at in 2026 are identical to the ones people claimed heralded the death of cinema back in the 1980s.

Look at the new “Resident Evil” movie. It’s the latest reboot in a 22-year-old film franchise based on a 30-year-old survival horror video game series. From 2002 to 2017, we (endured/enjoyed) six “Resident Evil” movies starring Milla Jovovich, from three different directors, all operating with wildly varying levels of skill and talent. Were those movies objectively good? Not really. Do I love them anyway? Mostly! They’re big, dumb and mind-numbingly ridiculous, but Jovovich’s near-feral zombie-killer vibes carried the series even when the filmmaking and visual effects collapsed into nonsensical blurs.

In 2021, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” was an attempted reboot that mashed the first two video games into something incomprehensible, leading to critical and financial failure, but was somehow still the most faithful attempt at replicating the games cinematically.

Following that, Netflix dropped a live-action “Resident Evil” series so beholden to game lore that it was impenetrable for the average Netflix viewer. It was canceled after eight episodes to absolute silence.

Now we have Zach Cregger’s 2026 reboot. Cregger — the horror maestro behind “Barbarian” and “Weapons” — brilliantly refuses to hunt that sweet nostalgia dollar by tying his film back into the Jovovich era or pandering to the gamers with a slavishly faithful photocopy of one of the games. Instead, he did something fairly radical for a video game adaptation: he crafted a breathtakingly intense and exhilarating horror film that captures the actual feeling of playing a “Resident Evil” game.

The best survival horror video games are so intense (and beloved) because they put you in the mind and body of a normal person who has to run, shoot and hide their way out of a living nightmare. Cregger brilliantly captures this feeling by casting Austin Abrams as Bryan, an affable medical courier/regular guy who’s tasked with delivering a mysterious, last-minute package to Raccoon General Hospital in Raccoon City, Colorado, the setting for several games in the series. After his performance as the chaotic crackhead James in “Weapons,” Abrams arrives here fully formed as a movie star. We’re subjectively tethered to Bryan from the opening frame and we’re pulled along with him as he tries to survive the worst day of his life surrounded by monsters, zombies and too many unnamed horrors to mention.

At a lean, razor-sharp 95 minutes, the film is a relentless haunted rollercoaster and the scariest and most expertly crafted “Resident Evil” movie by a wide margin, and easily one of the finest video game movies of all time (admittedly not a high bar to clear). Creggar co-writes and directs a movie that somehow feels quintessentially his, but still also lovingly recreates the feeling of playing “Resident Evil” at 2 am and getting scared so hard you throw your controller across the room.

Cregger isn’t copying and pasting the plot, characters and set-pieces of the games; instead, he throws the viewer directly into this world while telling his own story in the familiar setting. There are lovingly curated easter eggs for nerds like me, but you don’t need to know a single thing about the franchise to have a great time at the movies.

Since the movie is breaking all kinds of financial records, I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s swooning over this immediate classic. But because it was a reboot that wasn’t fetishizing the iconography of previous games or movies, the critical community spent months decrying the film as “Resident Evil” in name only and saying that Cregger was just exploiting the IP to make a few extra million at the box office.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Hollywood does this all the time — hell, they did it with the 2021 “Resident Evil”— but pre-emptively writing off a reboot or a sequel (or any movie in general, really) takes the artists spending months of their lives building the project for granted. Nobody sets out to make a miserable failure of a movie. Some generational pieces of pop culture sound like horrible ideas on paper — many movies that, on paper, sound like horrible ideas — just look at “Barbie” and “The Lego Movie.”

If we banned reboots and remakes, we wouldn’t have John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” Brendan Fraser’s “The Mummy,” the American version of “The Office,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the new era of “Doctor Who,” or the Christopher Nolan “Batman” trilogy. The list can go on.

And yes, there are plenty of nauseatingly awful cash grabs (I’m looking at you, 2015’s “Fantastic Four” and Tim Burton’s 2001 “Planet of the Apes”), but declaring that something is bad before experiencing the thing itself is a Sisyphean exercise in futility.

I would never say something as basic as “we all need to put more positivity into the world,” but that’s not necessarily a bad idea either. Sometimes, it’s OK to be corny, just as sometimes it’s OK to be a reboot or remake.

Not all movies are created equal, but let’s look at it like Schrödinger’s Cat, but with movies. Schrödinger’s Cinema: The movie might be alive, or it might be dead, but until it’s out of the box and we actually see it, it’s both and neither. It’s just an ephemeral idea without form or content. Save the cynicism for politics, not art. You’ll find more joy in the mystery if you do.

“Resident Evil”
Dir. Zach Cregger
Grade: A-
Now Playing at Regal Old Mill, Sisters Movie House, Madras Cinema 5