If you happen to have a hankering for some monster-filled madness, then boy do I have some great news for you. There are two different auteur-helmed creature features that will be in theaters nationwide this weekend, in the form of Na Hong-jin’s Hope and Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil. Beyond the base-level similarities, though, of them both featuring monstrous creatures wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting population, Hope and Resident Evil actually have a good bit more in common than you might think. In this way, seeing the two films play back-to-back was kind of surreal and an experience I strongly recommend.
So what exactly do I mean? Well, both Hope and Resident Evil open in incredibly similar ways; they drop the audience in with the story’s protagonist, who is just a normal dude going about his daily routine until something goes awry. That could be an effective summarization of a lot of different films, for sure, but what makes Hope and Resident Evil stand out is the way in which they utilize this run-of-the-mill routine to enable a gradual crescendo of suspense and dread.
Hope revolves around bumbling police chief Ko Bum-seok (as played by Hwang Jung-min) and follows him in real-time as he returns home to Hope Harbor after adhering to a disturbance elsewhere, only to find increasing signs of distress and destruction in the wake of some monstrous creature. Resident Evil revolves around medical courier Brian (as played by Austin Abrams), who is assigned to deliver a package to Raccoon City, and chronicles him stumbling headfirst into a trail of mutation and infection in real-time. Both of these central characters are not exactly traditional action heroes; they are just dudes who are grossly out of their depth at the start of the film and have to spend the runtime attempting to rise to meet these challenges, with varying degrees of success.
Beyond these formal and structural similarities, Hope and Resident Evil are also just two of the most thrilling and high-octane science-fiction horror action picture mash-ups I have seen in years. The ways in which the films blend classical genre influences (both films bear notably strong impressions from the likes of Ridley Scott’s Alien) with innovative and invigorating camerawork are also notable. Not to mention that they are each unexpectedly hysterical at times, with both films mining humor amidst the horror and destruction to startlingly effective results.
If we’re being honest, you probably don’t have to stick around for all three hours of Hope. There’s a pretty clear demarcation point around the hour mark, that also happens to be where the film’s quality begins to dip a bit, so if you’re looking to spend less than five hours at the theater total (completely understandable) you could always line it up so you can watch that first hour of Hope and then all ninety minutes of Resident Evil. That’s a double-dose of propulsive, non-stop horror-action-comedy that will be difficult to replicate again anytime soon, so check it out.
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