Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

This review contains spoilers.Resident Evil: Afterlife is the sequel to 2007's Resident Evil: Extinction. Resident Evil: Afterlife is the fourth installment of the Resident Evil franchise and is a follow-up to Resident Evil: Extinction. Alice discovers the laboratory containing clones and she is now in-control of her new powers. Alice begins with an attack on Albert Wesker's Umbrella Corporation headquarters.Like the past two movies, Resident Evil: Extinction and Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the story makes excuses to have its action sequences. The movie also backpedals on its own continuity by removing its own plot developments. Resident Evil: Afterlife removes all of the Alice clones and her superpowers after an enthralling opening sequence. The clone and superpower arc is now irrelevant after the opening sequence.This is not the only story mishap and the story tries to re-use elements from previous movies. Alice finds a group of survivors in a tower. She leads these survivors into a place that is promising sanctuary called Arcadia. This is obviously a lie as everything is owned by The Umbrella Corporation somehow. Even after a zombie apocalypse and bio-weapons roam the world, the Umbrella Corporation is able to still construct new buildings and ships. They are also able to maintain a loyal workforce that does not care about the atrocities they commit.Even the ending sequence of arriving at Arcadia and dealing with Albert Wesker is laughable. The movie is hoping that the would care but they do not. It is hard to care about the story when the movie opens by removing events from the previous movies.Besides the story, the rest of the movie is solid. The action sequences are still fun to watch. Although Alice does not have much character it is still fun to see the stunts that she does. The action scenes are competently shot and edited. The strangeness of some of the scenes however stem from the three dimensional requirement. It felt that because the movie had 3D in mind, some scenes were shot differently and I could tell immediately that these scenes felt different.Fans of the video game may not enjoy this movie if they are expecting a movie based on the video game series. Like Resident Evil: Extinction, this movie uses the same visual style of the monsters and nothing else.Overall, Resident Evil: Afterlife can be a fun action movie to watch. It does not need prior knowledge of the series because of the poor writing.

Resident Evil: Afterlife was a stark and precipitous drop off from its predecessors. Besides being one long rock video with bad CGI, the acting was poor as well as the plot. Not to mention that at times I didn't know if I was watching Resident Evil, Tremors, Silent Hill or The Matrix. Let me say this: I get that slow motion and stop motion makes an action sequence cool but chill out a bit willya. It was way overdone like a child playing with his newest toy. Take out half the slow motion scenes and the movie is ten minutes shorter.Speaking of the action scenes: there's action and then there's "come on, get real." I'm all for bending the laws of physics at times for an exciting movie but my brain has a certain point in which it refuses to ignore the blatant impossibilities. More than once I found myself rolling my eyes at the otherworldly stunts. Just tell me they're in the Matrix so I can mentally accept what I'm seeing. The extreme action and the paradoxically calm faces that accompanied it were too much to bear.There is yet another exception I have with this movie. It's not fair but my idea of zombies has been largely defined by The Walking Dead and George Romero. Resident Evil is a totally different production, I know, and furthermore it's based upon a video game which probably has a totally different set of rules for its hordes of mobile carcasses. For all I know, the undead beings in Resident Evil aren't even zombies; they may be another creation entirely. But, since they look like zombies and behave like zombies I'm holding them to the zombie rules. So, with that, I have certain expectations that were thoroughly defied in this movie. I found these zombies to be fast, strong, slightly cognitive and able to be silent when needing the element of surprise. Look, that is not my vision of a zombie and it's simply not fair. Part of the reason zombies are slow, dumb and weak is that 1.) they're dead and all higher brain functions have ceased and 2.) there are millions of them!! They already have a significant advantage in that they can only be killed with head shots (which is tough enough as it is) then you make their numbers multitudinous which is a recipe for invincibility as a species. There's no need after that to also make them strong, fast, sneaky and somewhat smart. The remaining humans have no chance!Overall this movie just lacked intelligence and originality. They really went the mindless action movie route while liberally borrowing thematic and cinematic ideas from so many other known movies. The bottom line is they didn't even try and that's the saddest part.

After the Amazing Resident Evil: Extinction we get Resident Evil: After Life which in my opinion is a mess the last 2 sequels were written and produced by Paul W.S Anderson but were directed by different people so maybe that's why i enjoyed them so much this one tho is indeed directed by Anderson who directed the first one and aww my god stop with the 3D the only 3D movie i have seen on the big screen and i enjoyed it was TransFormers 3: Dark of the Moon in here the cgi and 3D is awful and what's wrong with this whole slow motion it worked on the previous film because it was once in a time in the whole movie in here it happens every 2 seconds and also is it just me or does this film copies Matrix way too much? also red eyes which means Terminator and ugly faces with big mouths probably or definitely Predator. I know that i'm talking about the bad stuff and i seem like i hated the movie but honestly i didn't Claire and Alice are the only 2 characters i liked from this movie mostly and i thought Chris and Luther were OK characters also the girl from the 3rd one returns and we also have Valentine in a post credit scene. In the end Resident Evil 4 is a big, loud mess that needs to be involved into something better let's say a better sequel? I hope Resident Evil 5 is better than i remember it. I give After Life a B- and also a 7 out of 10 it's a disappointing entry on the famous Franchise.

Paul W.S. Anderson, we know him, we love him, we worship him. He is the eye behind Death Race,Alien Vs. Predator and Pandorum. He is the human entity responsible for the Resident Evil franchise. Part one was great, and part 3 was the supremely painted masterpiece. And dudes, let's just admit it, we love, love love Milla Jovovich. And if we are honest with ourselves, this is why we compulsively pay 12.50 at the theater whenever another crappy Resident Evil chop-shop sequel comes out. We love her buns, her rack, her model-like features, her deep sexy confidence and her barely restrained libido. I speak the truth, and this truth was well known by the producers and even Milla herself. Moving forward with this truth we are now in a position to criticize the most recent addition, which is truly an atrocious aberration of movie making. Just stick with parts 1 and 3, which I give ten stars easily.