With Zach Cregger's Resident Evil having been in theaters for several weeks now, audiences have gotten the chance to be endeared to the protagonist of the film, Austin Abrams’ Bryan, several times over.
There are so many things to love about Bryan, from his status as a normal “not a guns guy" to his affable nature to this pitch-perfect calibration as an off-kilter audience surrogate. In a franchise that has historically been full of well-trained badasses who dispense of monsters without breaking a sweat and know the perfect one-liner to drop right after, Bryan is a dude who bumbles his way through every encounter and seems to barely survive by the skin of his teeth.
One of the central moments of the movie for this character comes just before the third act, when Bryan is at his lowest and allows himself a moment to believe his entire journey has been for naught. After fighting his way through waves of different monsters and mutations, he makes it to Raccoon City General, where he’s supposed to be delivering the final ingredient for the cure for the T-Virus. However, upon arriving, he can find no way to get in and simply collapses in the parking garage. It’s the character at his most vulnerable, and it's punctuated by him seeing a decal on the back window of a nearby SUV with a family of stick figures, which inspires him to record a voice memo (he has no service) for his significant other, Michelle. In a recent appearance on The Big Picture podcast, Zach Cregger detailed the hidden significance of this moment in surprising fashion.
For all the turmoil and buffoonery that Bryan has to suffer through across the runtime of Resident Evil, there is a bit of a deeper layer to it all, for those inclined to give the film such a reading. The movie quite literally starts with Bryan, a medical courier, picking up this package for Raccoon City General while on a phone call with his partner Michelle, in which she tells him that she thinks she is pregnant. His response is non-committal at best and outright detrimental at worst. In many ways, the events that proceed from this point on in the film can be metaphorically seen as him facing his own internal obstacles and hindrances, preventing him from accepting his role as a new father.
This is further supported by the increasingly paternal relationship he fosters with the medical package itself, a bag that he haphazardly swings over his shoulder at the start of the film (much to the dismay of the professionals in the room) but is coddling and buckling into cars with seatbelts by the film’s end.
Not only is this a viable reading of the film, but it’s also, apparently, an intended one. In a recent appearance on The Big Picture podcast, Cregger was reticent to dig too deeply into the themes of Resident Evil, as he described feeling extremely remorseful for having spelled things out a bit too clearly in interviews following the release of Barbarian. However, he did go on to reveal to the host that the stick figure decal family that Bryan sees in this critical moment of the movie is actually meant to represent each of the different people he’s had to kill since the start of the film, dog and all. In this way, throughout his journey, Bryan is quite literally killing the idea of the traditional nuclear family.
This speaks to the fact that for as fun and wild of a ride as Cregger’s Resident Evil is, it is also very much made by the same dude who made Weapons and layered in all kinds of meaning into every decision. So even something as seemingly ancillary as a stick figure decal can have far deeper meaning that opens up a whole new perspective on the film.
Resident Evil is playing now in theaters.
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