Kojima Praises Resident Evil Movie's PS1-Era Terror

Hideo Kojima does not spend praise carelessly, which is precisely why it is worth pausing on the fact that he spent some of it, unprompted, on Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie. He admits he went in without much appetite for the thing, and came out comparing it, specifically and approvingly, to the night he first booted up the original Resident Evil on a PlayStation in 1996.

"Right from the opening, it hits you with music reminiscent of The Thing," Kojima said, according to GameSpot. "From there, it's a relentless barrage of classic horror techniques, terrifying situations, and jump scares that never lets up until the very end." He went further, describing the film less as an adaptation of any particular Resident Evil plot than as a transmission of the sensation of playing one: "I was just like Bryan in this movie. I kept getting game over after game over, shouting F*** over and over again." That is a review, from a director who built a career on treating games as cinema, declaring that Cregger built a cinema that behaves like a game. One does not get that compliment from Kojima by accident.

It is also, pointedly, the exact response Cregger says he was chasing, and the one that put him at odds with a segment of hardcore fans who wanted a faithful retelling of one specific game rather than an original story merely wearing the franchise's skin. The numbers suggest the gamble paid regardless: the film has cleared $320 million worldwide, including a $40.7 million debut in China, and has overtaken 2016's The Final Chapter and its $312 million to become the highest-grossing Resident Evil movie ever made. Cregger, for his part, says he has ideas for a sequel but is moving on to an original project, The Flood, next, which tells you something about where his interest actually lives.

There is a smaller, stranger detail tucked into Kojima's outing: while at the theater, he picked up physical reading materials for Tom Cruise's divisive Digger, a film he has not reviewed yet and that the internet is still arguing about. We will hear from him on that eventually, on his own schedule, which is how these things go.

What lingers, though, is the shape of the nostalgia itself. Kojima's benchmark for terror remains a gray plastic console from 1996, the one that taught a generation what game over actually felt like, and he is currently pouring his next two projects, OD and Physint, into Xbox instead. A man can praise the console that built his fear and still hand his future to the platform that has spent two decades promising it would someday build something comparable. One of those relationships has already paid off.