Welcome to Ludus! Tonight’s film, Makato Kamiya’s Resident Evil: Degeneration, exists as what we might term hybridized media. Resident Evil has been a successful survival horror video game franchise since 1996, comprised of eight video games produced for three different generations of console systems. Resident Evil has also been a successful film trilogy, starring Milla Jovovich, helmed by high concept schlock artists Rob Cohen and Paul WS Anderson. Interestingly, when researching Degeneration, entering Resident Evil into Wikipedia took me initially to a page about the “multimedia franchise,” not distinguishing between film and digital game.
We might, I think, understand tonight’s film as occupying a similar position as the franchise does as a whole. Degeneration can certainly be understood as a film, as it has an unchanging narrative structure and doesn’t allow for viewer interaction on a diegetic level, and it has bravura effects sequences that effectively contend with the violent spectacles on display in the Resident Evil movies. However, Degeneration’s computer-generated nature clearly distinguishes it from the live-action film trilogy, making it seem more like an overblown cut scene from one of the video games than a Hollywood-produced film text. Indeed, Degeneration, being computer generated, resurrects characters exactly as they appear in the video games, notable here in the appearance of Leon Kennedy, who is visually indistinguishable from his presence as interactive agent in Resident Evil 4. And though it certainly isn’t a video game, I contend that Degeneration encourages a form of playful recognition from fans of the game series, encouraging them to identify narrative elements not only from the game’s story, but also from the game’s play itself – for example, characters seem limited in their potential movements, the careful targeting of zombies’ heads is valorized, and the spaces in which the action sequences unfold are visualized in advance, much as different stages are frequently mapped prior to gun battles during video game play.
Degeneration, as such, raises some interesting questions for both the study of films and the study of video games, and the moments when the two mediums intertwine. What counts as adaptation, when franchises are multi-modal in design? What elements of play exist when we encounter a film text that draws its influences from other media, specifically video games? Does “survival horror” simply become “horror” when we remove the possibility for interaction? While I don’t propose that Resident Evil: Degeneration actually answers any of these questions, it at the very least gets the blood stirring in that general direction. Thank you for coming!