Review of Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) by Tristan R — 28 Aug 2011

I can't really explain why I'm drawn to this series. It's true I've played the video games on which the movies are based for years, but I don't think that's the reason, as the movies have very little in common with their gaming counterparts (characters, storylines, etc.). I do also enjoy the zombie-horror subgenre, but I can turn to the Romero films, "28 Days Later...," and AMC's "The Walking Dead" for better examples of this. It's truly odd, because I wouldn't categorize any of the "Resident Evil" films as good, and yet I've seen them all. The only thing I can muster is that they can serve as stupid, passable entertainment (though you can do better even in this department).

Even with setting the bar reasonably low, the latest "Resident Evil" movie--entitled "Resident Evil: Afterlife"--is still pretty weak. There are many reasons, but mostly this is because it seems rather...lazy. Oh don't get me wrong, the effects are decent, the set designs are interesting, there's plenty of kinetic action, etc. It's certainly a well-made movie. But in terms of the story, well...it's pretty lacking, even for a "Resident Evil" movie. Apart from an opening sequence and the closing scene(s), it doesn't really expand upon the story that was established in the first film. The middle section, which is really the meat of the film, is basically just "Dawn of the Dead," what with a group of survivors holed up in a fortified location with a throng of the undead trying to get in. Been there, done that.

When we last saw Alice (Milla Jovovich), the protagonist of the series, she was preparing to mount an assault on the evil Umbrella Corporation with the help of her numerous clones (yeah, I know). And during the aforementioned opening sequence, she does just that. This is a pretty cool scene, I must admit, as the Alices lay siege to a massive underground laboratory that seems to stretch on forever. They descend from wires, run up the walls, toss grenades, and wreak all sorts of havoc until the place is completely wiped out. And then...and then, well, Alice goes to search for her friends, the other survivors from the past film, and while en route, ends up in a Los Angeles prison, where a few citizens have holed up to escape from the zombie apocalypse out in the streets. Now they must find a way out.

This whole prison thing feels like a detour from the main storyline of the series. It's as if writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson knew how he wanted to continue the franchise and even wrote the beginning and end of this movie to do so, but didn't know what to include in the middle. He didn't know how to get from Point A to Point B, so he just gave up and threw in an irrelevant "Dawn of the Dead" rehash to kill running time until he could get back to the series' storyline at the end of the film. Unlike the previous films, Umbrella is barely present at all in "Resident Evil: Afterlife.".

Am I making too much of this? I don't think so. If I was, I'd be commenting on the fact that the zombies with the three-part jaws shouldn't actually be in this movie, as they are not products of Umbrella's T-Virus, but rather originated from variations of the Las Plagas parasites (as seen in the video games "Resident Evil 4" and "5"). In fact, they're not even really zombies at all seeing as they're actually not dead...or undead, whatever. Same thing goes for the big Axe Man.

So you see, there really is a lot more I could complain about (and I haven't even touched on the cliched characters and bad dialogue), so I think my qualms with the lazy screenwriting is actually letting the film off pretty easy. Let's look at it this way: the filmmakers didn't put all that much effort into the story of their movie, so I won't put much into voicing my complaints of their movie. Laziness begets laziness. I'm sure they're crushed.