Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) Review

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) Review

 

Believe it or not, I was actually excited about this movie when it came out. The trailer showed some cool moments and it was released on my birthday during the height of the RealD 3D explosion. I missed it in theaters, which was a bummer, but one good thing about movies shot in 3D nowadays is they don’t look like complete garbage on home video in 2D. With the old anaglyph 3D movies from the 80’s, 90’s, and early 2000’s, if you didn’t see them in theaters in the crappy red-and-green/blue third dimension it wasn’t even worth watching them on home video because the quality was so poor (in 2D and in 3D) and the gimmicks were so obnoxious. I got Resident Evil: Afterlife on Blu-ray (the first one I saw/owned in high-def) and was eager to see what was in store next for Alice. It had such a good set up with the end of Extinction, and Paul W.S. Anderson was back writing and directing this time. What could go wrong?

We get a different kind of opening from the repeatedly-used close-up of Alice's eye with the Umbrella Corp. logo in her iris. Instead, it’s a boring fade-in to pre-apocalyptic Tokyo. The music is intensely bass-boosted. It’s a bit detestable and repetitive, but not overly so…at first. The rain hitting the opening titles is a nice touch, but it’s all shot in slow motion. Better get used to that overuse of slow-mo, too… A zombie woman attacks a guy on a busy crosswalk, then we zoom out and get the obligatory Alice voiceover. It sounds rushed and dull and she gives the same old recap. We zoom back in to the underground facility glimpsed in Extinction and meet the new villain: Albert Wesker, who is instantly terrible. The actor tries so hard to deliver his dialogue in an evil way that it makes him sound like a cartoon character.

Alice and her clones ambush the facility, and we get what we were promised at the end of Extinction. Alice flies in wearing a skintight black outfit, dual-wielding samurai swords, she completely defies gravity along with every other law of physics, and murders a bunch of soldiers. It feels like a scene out of Ultraviolet, which is the movie I previously mentioned made me a fan of Jovovich. The pacing is crazy to start: 10 minutes in and there’s already so much action and blood and bullets and slow motion, and it’s kind of awesome how ridiculous it all is. There’s a shot of two Alice’s jumping backwards through a window while shooting that looks absolutely terrible, with obvious use of green screen. The effects throughout are wildly inconsistent and usually more ambitious than they are able to pull off, but visually it’s still better than the first and second movies.

Wesker peaces out from the facility and the Alice clones fail to stop him. They also fail to survive; Wesker blows up the facility, killing all the clones, but the original Alice stows away on the aircraft he flies away in and puts a gun to his head. She somehow doesn’t manage to shoot him before he stabs her with a needle that takes away her powers. According to him, he is what she used to be but better. This whole scene is pathetic and makes me cringe. Wait a second—oops, silly Wesker forgot he was flying an aircraft! It crashes in a devastating fiery wreck, but somehow they both walk away unharmed. It is amazingly dumb. Even without her super powers we now know nothing is going to be able to kill Alice.  

After an abrupt and jarring transition to six month later, Alice arrives at the Alaska refuge teased in the previous movie. Surprise: no one is there. Where do we go from here, story-wise? Even Alice isn’t sure. Then we find out Claire Redfield is still around, and she has a weird mechanical bug thing attached to her chest that makes her evil, but Alice gets it off and catches her up on everything she’s missed/forgotten. Claire doesn’t remember anything, just like how Alice didn’t remember anything at the start of the first movie. Ali Larter wasn’t super charismatic to begin with in Extinction, but it seems that bug sucked any possible charisma out of her, because Claire has gone from uninteresting to super uninteresting.

They fly a little plane down the west coast of North America and crash land on the roof of a prison in Los Angeles. Suddenly I hate this premise. They threw away so much potential for something exciting and put us right back where we’ve been so many times before in other (much better) zombie movies. So now we have to go through the whole rigmarole of meeting a new group of survivors who are annoying and going to be dead by the end. Great. And what happened to the whole world being a desert, you may be asking? Alaska has plenty of water and greenery and L.A. looks like a boring old post-apocalyptic cityscape. Paul W.S. Anderson either forgot his own continuity or just didn’t care. Note about the characters: you would think by this point in the post-apocalypse people would look pretty unkempt, but most of them have nicer hair and cleaner clothes than in any of the previous movies.

The new characters give Alice some new info: Arcadia isn’t an infection-free town in Alaska, it's a giant cargo ship, and it’s now off the coast of L.A. Alice instantly figures it's the real deal. After everything the Umbrella Corp. has been up to so far, do you think it might be a trick? Oh no, couldn’t possibly be a trick! Their new mission: get to that ship. These survivors just so happen to have Claire’s brother Chris in a cage in the basement. What a massive coincidence! It’s a bit of stunt casting having him played by Wentworth Miller, who most people know from the TV show Prison Break. The prison is surrounded by zombies, but there are no interesting moments with them in this movie. Now we have new mutated zombies with toothy mouths that can dig tunnels. Oh yeah, way scarier. It reminds me of the flower petal mouth of the Demogorgon from Stranger Things.

I find Afterlife a lot less re-watchable from beginning to end compared to the previous three movies. I know where it’s going so the Alaska part drags and the scenes in the prison are tedious, but the cheesy action is still there at least. Alice and Claire get into a fight with a big monster man wielding a massive hammer who shows up at the prison gate and slowly bashes his way in. He has a cool design and is one of the few parts I find entertaining, but only because it's the kind of schlock I've come to enjoy the most in this series. The whole fight looks and sounds like a music video. The scenes of shooting down zombies, though, feel repetitive and unexciting, and the overuse of slow motion actually gets comical after a while. They even use shockwave effects around the bullets like The Matrix (how fitting since Wesker is dressed like Neo in the final battle).

Alice, Claire, and Chris are the only ones who get to the ship, where they find K-Mart (Yeah, remember that super memorable character from Extinction who had like one line about being found in a K-Mart? She’s back!), as well as other survivors in a sterile white experimentation facility. They free K-Mart and end up participating in a fight with Wesker and two zombie dogs with Demogorgon mouths. It is the most ridiculous final battle so far, full of terrible cgi, way too much slow motion, no rules regarding physics or logic, and laughable dialogue. Wesker must be a character from the games because he literally behaves like a video game final boss during this finale.

Resident Evil: Afterlife has some of the dumbest moments so far, and rushes through its potentially fun premise in the first twenty minutes just to get to a far more tedious and unexciting one. It also has an uninteresting set up for the next movie, but overall this one is more laughably bad at more points than the original or Apocalypse, though I can't help but feel disappointed after the well-balanced fun of Extinction.