Zach Cregger's "I was naive" comment and the way we talk about fidelity in adaptations

Zach Cregger recently said that he had been "naive" about the reaction to his Resident Evil. He seems to have assumed that fans of the games, being fans like himself, would be interested in a survival-horror movie set in Raccoon City even if it wasn't another retelling of Leon, Claire or Jill's story. The trailers suggest that assumption was wrong. A lot of film fans liked what they saw, while a noticeable part of the game audience reacted to the changed chronology, characters and events by saying that this simply wasn't the Resident Evil adaptation they had wanted.

I haven't seen the film, so I'm not trying to judge whether Cregger's Resident Evil is good. I'm more interested in the language around the disagreement. In a lot of Anglophone film discussion, asking whether an adaptation is faithful to its source is treated as a fairly unsophisticated fan concern. The implication is often that people asking for fidelity simply want to see something they already know, while changing the source demonstrates interpretation, authorship or imagination.

I don't find that opposition very useful. Fidelity is obviously neither necessary nor sufficient for a good adaptation. Kubrick's The Shining is an easy example of the first point, while plenty of excellent close adaptations settle the second. But it doesn't follow that fidelity has no aesthetic value. Part of the problem is that we use "fidelity" to describe several different things and then talk about them as though they were the same.

# What adaptation theory was actually arguing against

There are good historical reasons why fidelity criticism fell out of favor. George Bluestone's Novels into Film emphasized the basic differences between novels and films. Robert Stam's "Beyond Fidelity" criticized the moral language traditionally used around adaptations, where changes to a source were described as betrayal, violation or infidelity. Later adaptation studies increasingly treated adaptation as transformation and as a creative work in its own right.

That was a necessary correction. A film cannot simply be a novel in another form, and treating every alteration as a failure gives the source automatic priority before the discussion has even begun. But the academic argument was more complicated than the version that often appears in ordinary film discussion. Stam himself acknowledged that complaints about infidelity can point to a real problem: an adaptation may have failed to capture narrative, thematic or aesthetic qualities that mattered in the source. The point wasn't that resemblance to the source was bad. It was that fidelity could not be the only criterion.

Sometimes the popular version seems to have inverted the older mistake. Older fidelity criticism could treat "faithful" as automatically good. Now we sometimes treat "faithful" as unimaginative and "different" as inherently more ambitious. Neither tells us much about whether the adaptation actually works.

# There is more than one kind of fidelity

The limits of literal fidelity are easiest to see with novels. Interior monologue, tense, free indirect discourse and hundreds of pages of narrative obviously cannot just be moved into a two-hour film unchanged. But being faithful does not have to mean reproducing every scene or every line.

The Lord of the Rings is usually described as a faithful adaptation even though it rewrites Faramir, expands Arwen and removes the Scouring of the Shire. Villeneuve's Dune films also make substantial changes to structure and character, especially Chani, but are still widely regarded as serious attempts to engage with Herbert's work. When people call these adaptations faithful, they are clearly talking about something other than literal correspondence.

One kind of fidelity is what I would call surface fidelity: keeping plot events, dialogue, visual designs, chronology and characters relatively close to the source. Another is interpretive fidelity: trying to preserve a defensible understanding of what the source considers important. That might include its tone, moral emphasis, character relationships, central conflicts or the role particular characters play in the work.

I don't think a work has one objective "essence" that can be recovered perfectly. People can disagree radically about what Watchmen, Dune or The Shining means, and interpretive fidelity is still an interpretation. But that doesn't make the idea useless. We already argue all the time that some readings of a work are better supported than others.

This also explains why an adaptation can reproduce costumes, dialogue and even individual images very closely and still be accused of missing the point. Snyder's Watchmen is probably the most obvious example. Whatever your opinion of the film, the usual criticism is not that it failed to reproduce enough of the comic visually. The criticism is that faithfully reproducing the images did not necessarily reproduce the comic's attitude toward those images. The opposite can happen too. An adaptation can change events quite dramatically while still being seen as preserving something more important about the source.

Games introduce another possibility, which I think is especially relevant to Cregger: experiential fidelity. Cregger is trying to reproduce aspects of the experience of playing Resident Evil. You begin relatively powerless, worry about ammunition, find better weapons over time and move through a hostile environment while your resources diminish. He is changing characters and continuity while trying to preserve the survival-horror rhythm of the games.

Some fans are asking for something else. They want fidelity to Raccoon City's established history, characters and chronology. So both sides are actually making claims about fidelity. They disagree about what the film should be faithful to. That seems closer to the actual disagreement than saying that the fans want fidelity while the filmmaker wants freedom.

# Why this matters more in the IP era