Review: Resident Evil Afterlife

Posted by Cory Movies - Reviews

Resident Evil Afterlife starts out with an excruciatingly long scene of a close up of some random woman’s legs in the middle of a crowded Japanese street where she eventually attacks a random guy walking past her.  As this is going on you have the studios involved show their name five different ways and Paul W.S. Anderson wants you to know he was involved in the making of this movie.  So from the first few minutes of the movie you know you’re in for a treat, an extremely terrible treat.  I’d like to point out at this point that I skipped seeing it in 3D, which I’m happy I did since paying an extra 2-3 dollars for this crap fest would have made me quite sad.  So I can’t say how “awesome” the 3D was, but I can tell you that I knew exactly when stuff was supposed to be flying in my face and could tell how gimmicky it would be.  This Movie Suffers three fold, terrible acting, terrible directing, and terrible writing.  So I’ll start off with the first part, terrible writing. Also, I’m gonna be breaking down most of the story, so if you’re not a fan of spoilers I recommend not reading ahead, but I recommend you do if you were somewhat interested in seeing this so that you can save your money.

So the story, it is terribly boring as it only had four main location.  You had the opening scene where multiple Alice’s assault an Umbrella Facility directly underneath the before mentioned attack in the middle of the street during opening credits.  Which while is supposed to be awesome action, is just clunky choreography and laughably terrible CG (which will be a repeating theme throughout the movie).  So you have shooting shooting shooting, random explosions, confronts Wesker who is fleeing in a helicopter, he injects her with a cure in a sense making her lose her powers and becoming human once again. In this process he stops flying the helicopter and flies straight into a mountain, she survives even though powerless, now it cuts to three months later.  Now Alice got herself a plane that can fly and fly and gas never becomes an issue, must have been a pretty swell plane.  She’s on the hunt for Arcadia in Alaska, a city free of infection that has food and shelter that is talked about in a random radio message on a loop.  She gets to where it’s supposed to be, nothing in there, runs in to Claire, she has a mind control bot on her that wiped her mind so she attacks Alice.  They fight, Alice removes said bot and keeps Claire tied up for safety sake, end scene.  Now there’s a slew of holes in the plot, such as Clair would have been on this random beach (IN ALASKA) with nothing but a t-shirt for at least three months at a minimum and no talk about how she managed to survive.  Another thing that really bothered me with this whole scene, Claire shows up covered in dirt from head to toe, then in the next scene, we’re back in the plane as Alice heads South along the West Coast and Claire is completely clean and is even dolled up with makeup.

Now we’re in LA, she sees people on a prison and manages to land on the roof and this is where the bulk of the movie takes place. We meet people that are held up in the prison, you have the sports star, asshole producer, actress, and a few others that you know will become fodder. Then of course there’s still a prisoner in a super maximum security cell in the basement all by himself, oh who could this man be? He goes by Chris making a point to never state his last name. Dialogue throughout is pretty pointless, mostly in passing pleasantries, nothing of real substance. Turns out the people at the Prison heard the radio broadcast about Arcadia and they were shooting flares to catch the people of Arcadia’s attention. Now this perplexes Alice as we’re in Los Angeles and Alaska is a good bit away from here, only to realize OF COURSE, Arcadia is a freighter ship! So time progresses, they need to get to the ship but oh no, the prison is surrounded by zombies and there’s a big fellow out there with a giant freaking hammer-axe thing. The Prisoner Chris says he knows a way out and that he’s not a criminal and that he was put in there after the prison emptied, time passes one guy says he hears things in the wall and sure enough, zombies find a way in. With the perimeter breached they had to leave, so they let Chris out so he can break down his escape plan. At this moment, Chris sees Claire to notice, “Hey, that’s my sister!”, but Claire’s memory is still messed up from the mind control bot thing. So she doesn’t recognize him but hey, the Redfields are back together. So with Chris out they begin on exiting the prison.

The first part of the plan is to make his way to the armory the military set up to fight against the infection they also brought in a armored transporter but that’s locked behind a big door so most of the fodder works on torching through the door (and a torch comes out of nowhere). Then it’s back to the armory but it would seem it’s at the lowest level and with no electricity, the pump to keep water out of the lower levels down had been off so they had to go down two floors that were flooded. So you have Alice and Chris are about to go, when the actress states she was a swim champ, so she goes with and as soon as they reach the right floor that acts like an under water cave, she gets zombied and a horde comes after Alice and Chris. They make their way to the armory, collect some guns, exit through the duct work. Cuts back to the outside and the big guy has pretty much knocked down the front gate and all hell is breaking loose. Turns out the transporter and its engine are not one, so that plan went bust and it was retreat back into the prison. Back up plan is to follow the original zombie breach that happens to be in the shower floor leading to the sewer system. I should also mention that during all this asshole producer kills one of the guys and flees to the plane, steals it, and makes his way to Arcadia. So back to the showers, Chris and sports guy jump in when BAM, giant infected guy, that is never really explained as to why he’s there or what exactly he’s supposed to be, just a giant zombie with an equally large weapon. He knocks out Alice and battle ensues with Claire, she shoots him in the head, no effect, Alice regains conscious and shoots him in the head with a shotgun exploding his head. Now remember, Alice is powerless and by this point should have dies two to three times, but hey, she’s the main character. Then it’s off to the sewer system where they meet little resistant, make it to the coast and find a boat quite easily. Now it’s to the mysterious Arcadia.

We enter the ship, no one is there, the crew is gone but the ship is fine, yet the log states there’s still civilians on board. So they search the ship and DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUN, you guessed it, it’s operated by Umbrella. So Arcadia was always a trap, those devious bastards! Now it’ time to rescue those on board and Alice moves on to find out the only one guarding the ship is Wesker and two guard dogs. The Redfield duo shows up and decide to take on Wesker while Alice deals with the pups, the hideously mutated pups. This plays out like the final battle in Resident Evil 5, he teleports all over the place never really attacking making it a pretty boring battle, while Alice shoots one dog in the face and kicks a rather large piece of glass at the other which seemed like she had her powers, but nope, still powerless. So Weskter traps the Redfield’s, goes after Alice, and she shoots him in the face with her trusted shotgun. She rescues the Redfield’s and Wesker who of course didn’t die flees, he activates the ships self destruct, but that tricky little scamp Alice put the bomb on his helicopter, so he blows up. Here I’d like to point out the hanger had like five helicopters, yet she picked the one he ended up taking, lucky guess I suppose. Now you’d think this is the end, but noooooo.

Everyone is on the deck of the ship, incoming a massive fleet of helicopters, and now we roll credits. I try to leave as quick as possible and then, what’s this, an extra scene after like 30 seconds of credits? What ever could this scene be? Why it’s Jill, wearing pretty much her exact outfit during the Wesker battle in Resident Evil 5 with the mind control bug on her chest leading said fleet. She tells her men to prepare themselves for the fight of their life. Even though at this point, Alice is powerless and they’ve used up most of their ammo dealing with zombies at the prison and during the Wesker battle. Now they do have numbers in the civilians they rescued, but going against armored troops I don’t think it would be much of a battle, but we don’t know! This is the cliffhanger they left it for the next movie, which would probably be a pretty quick movie, beginning credits roll, everyone dies in maybe a 5 minutes battle, end credits. So that’s the story, I’ll be fast about the latter two issues with the movie, directing and acting.

This movie took slow motion and bullet time to another level, and by another level I mean using it for an entire movie. For the the 3D aspect, I’m sure some of it would be neat, but by the end it looses all neat factor to being just boring. Plus it didn’t help that during many of these slow motion scenes the actors would have some of dumbest looks on their faces (which ties into that bad acting part as well). For whatever reason Alice makes a “video blog” to show the non existed population of the world her story as she goes along her travels. This plays in no way into the actual story, just kind of drags out the movie which is already pretty short. As for acting, no one is really able to show emotion, when Chris notices Claire, there’s an attempt at emotion that falls completely flat. Wesker is completely monotone and is just flat out bad. There’s really no high spot for acting or directing worth noting, it was all terrible. One thing this series has done well is make every movie that follows worse than the prior, which the fact they left it off for an other movie makes me cringe at the prospect of how terrible that’s going to be. The franchise is dead as far as movies go, it gets slight props the fact they brought it just a tinge back to the actual video game series with having RE5 elements, but that by no means made up for every terrible aspect of this movie.

(1/5)