Zach Cregger's Resident Evil reboot is coming, and Collider has a suggestion I didn't expect to agree with: go back and watch 2012's Resident Evil: Retribution, the Paul W.S. Anderson entry they're calling the franchise's best.

Per Collider, Retribution is streaming on Netflix. I know, I know. The Anderson films have always been the weird cousins of the franchise, all bullet-time flips and Alice doing increasingly impossible things. But that's kind of the point. Retribution leans all the way into being a video game movie, structure and all. It basically plays like a series of levels, with Alice fighting her way through simulated versions of Raccoon City, Moscow, and Suburbia, each one a different game scenario with its own enemies and rules. I've rewatched it enough times to stand by that description.

Collider's argument is that Retribution understands adaptation better than most movies that try to be faithful, because it adapts the feeling of playing the games instead of just transplanting the plot. The opening credits sequence alone, run in reverse, is one of the more striking things a video game movie has ever done with its camera. Say what you want about Anderson, the man commits to a bit.

The timing is what makes it interesting. Collider frames Retribution as the high-water mark of one whole school of Resident Evil adaptation, the school that says these games are a funhouse of escalating set pieces. The other school says they're about being trapped, low on ammo, and terrified of the next hallway. A grounded survival-horror take like Cregger's lives in that second camp, and I'm curious how far he pushes it.

Both readings are true, by the way. Anyone who's played the originals knows Resident Evil has always been both, a haunted house ride and a desperate inventory-management nightmare. Adapting games well means picking which half of the experience you're actually adapting, because the games hold both at once and a movie has to choose.

I've said before that you can capture a game's soul on screen if you actually try, and it's a debate I run constantly with TJ over Final Fantasy of all things. The Anderson movies do capture something real, just not the horror. They capture the arcade pleasure of it, the power-fantasy loop of mowing down a corridor of zombies and feeling cool doing it. Retribution is the purest version of that, a movie that plays like a demo reel of itself.

So queue it up before the reboot arrives. Watch Alice kick a zombie in the face in zero gravity. Two completely different takes on the same source material can coexist, and the franchise is big enough for both.

If you do revisit it, tell me whether it still feels like actually playing the games. I have a strong suspicion about the answer, and it's not the one Collider picked.