Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.
Here we go again. When you have a touch of the ‘tism, there are things beyond your control that guide at least some of your actions. In my case, it’s a necessity of being complete on things, which is one of the reasons (honestly, probably the reason) that I watch movies based on curated lists. The They Shoot Zombies list has a sublist of, not surprisingly, zombie movies, most of which I have seen, but it felt like another fun list to pursue, and here we are. It’s why I’ve been watching Resident Evil movies against my better judgment, and why I’m now getting through the fourth one, Resident Evil: Afterlife. For this installment, Paul W.S. Anderson has returned to the director’s chair, not that it’s going to make that much of a difference.
It won’t be surprising to hear that Resident Evil: Afterlife has the exact same problem as its two predecessors. Picking up from the previous film, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her clones attack the main Umbrella Corporation facility in Tokyo, wiping out everyone aside from the chairman, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who has injected himself with the T-virus. The original Alice has stowed away on Wesker’s escape craft, but naturally he’s going to continue to survive, and in this case, he’s going to inject Alice with an anti-virus that removes all of her supernatural abilities. This doesn’t seem to remove her ability to survive their plane crashing into a mountain, an accident from which she walks away essentially unscathed.
From here, we jump six months into the future, and Alice is flying to Alaska, looking for Arcadia, the place in the previous film that was allegedly free from infection. Where did she get the plane? Where did she get the fuel? Why did it take six months? Fuck off. What she finds when she lands there is a feral Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), who has a device attached to her that gives her amnesia. Why? Fuck off.
Anyway, Alice and Claire head to Los Angeles, where they find a group of survivors living in a prison and surrounded by the undead. What they learn is that Arcadia is not a place, but a ship, and it’s parked out in the harbor. The one hope they seem to have is Chris (Wentworth Miller), who is still imprisoned because no one believes that he was not a former prisoner but actually an elite soldier. Of course he’s an elite soldier, and we’re going to find out that he’s also Claire’s brother, because of course he is.
Anyway, it all becomes a race against time as those holding out in the prison discover that the undead have started to find a way in through the sewers. We’re also going to be treated to the arrival of a gigantic undead monster that starts hammering on the gates of the prison. Why? Well, because this creature is clearly something from the games and it needed to be incorporated somehow for fan service. Except that apparently it’s not from the games. It’s just a giant undead creature because fuck you, that’s why.
Beyond this, the prison is going to be stocked with survivors who are really just there to be cannon fodder to alert us to new and different ways that the undead are going to try to kill our heroes. Our one possible exception to this is Luther (Boris Kodjoe), who seems to be the leader of the prison, as well as potentially Bennett (Kim Coates), who seems to think he’s in charge because he was once a film producer.
Anyway, there’s lots and lots of chaos and eventually the giant Axeman is going to get into the prison and we’re going to have some battles that would kill the average person but barely slow Alice down despite the fact that she’s lost all of her special abilities. This is just standard fare for this kind of movie, after all. You don’t worry about people being beaten to a pulp, because in the film world, these things don’t matter and Alice (and to a lesser extent, Claire and Chris) is going to be covered in plot armor.
At least in theory, there are ways to make a good movie from a video or computer game. There are ways to do this and still have some level of fan service that will keep the person who played the games happy without alienating the average viewer. The Resident Evil films have not discovered how to do this yet, and I don’t think Paul W.S. Anderson is the guy to do it.
Resident Evil: Afterlife is a bit better than the previous film, but honestly, that’s not saying a great deal. Fortunately for me, this is the last of these movies that appear on any list, so I can stop watching them now.
Why to watch Resident Evil: Afterlife: It’s marginally better than the previous film.
Why not to watch: “Marginally better” doesn’t mean much when what it’s better than is pretty terrible.
I would rather take this franchise over anything from Michael Bay and Shawn Levy.
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