Movie Review: Resident Evil - Afterlife

Resident Evil: Afterlife [2010]

[Disclaimer: these reviews were written in 2019 alongside a batch of the first three movies reviews, but I decided not to publish them in 2020 due to reasons, and these were pushed... way back]

So after reviewing the original three movies in the Resident Evil movies, we sort of begin the... 'sequel trilogy'? Can we even call it a sequel trilogy when Extinction ended with what's essentially a cliffhanger? The 'second phase' might work better, I suppose. And... and there's a significant feel of trying to retool what was poorly received in the first three (well, the second and the third) movies, and it's pretty interesting. I do really like this attempt at trying to steer the franchise in a completely different direction after the 'but why' ending of Extinction, but the movie doesn't just want us to forget all about it and tries to at least resolve the hanging plot threads. 

So after the cool showcase of the zombie outbreak in Japan (completely unnecessary but very cool) we wrap up the storyline from Extinction, with a pretty fun and gratuitously over-the-top action sequence featuring katanas, secret bases, clones, psychic Jedi blasts, rappelling down a couple dozen floors and Milla Jovovich in leather spy suits. Honestly, this opening sequence of the psychic Alice clones doing hilariously over-the-top action sequences as they murder random Umbrella goons is just pretty fun to watch. It's really what I tune into these movies, the Underworld and the Transformers series of the world for. 

The movie also hammers home and sets up Albert Wesker (recasted into Shawn Roberts) and I do really like the clam, implacable Matrix-copy vibe they were going on for Wesker here. He genuinely feels sinister, and his establishing character moment of shooting one of his goons dead for daring to speak up against flooding half the base with nerve gas is pretty basic 'look at the villain he's so evil' trope, but it's effective. Then despite all his bluster Wesker buggers off on an escape vehicle, using a giant explosion bomb that looks like it came straight out of Gundam or something to blow up what remains of Tokyo. This, by the way, gets rid of the Alice clones, which... thank god for that. I've said how ridiculous and out-of-place it feels even in this franchise, and I do like that at least the movie gave us around ten to fifteen minutes of high-octane over-the-top action scenes with these psychic superspies so we at least get a cool action scene out of them. 

Wesker and Alice 'Prime' fight on top of the plane-copter, and in a very obvious way for the story to, again, re-align itself, Wesker injects Alice with the cure to the T-Virus, wiping out not only the virus but her story-breaking psychic powers, reducing her to a 'normal' human. A normal human with plot armour, but at least we don't have to spend the whole movie and the next couple of movies going 'if she has psychic Jedi powers why doesn't she just do X'. And, y'know, as ridiculous as Resident Evil can get it's no place for a psychic-powered superhuman protagonist. 

Then the plane crashes into a mountain (hilariously, because Wesker forgot to put on autopilot) and Alice stumbles away from the crash. And... and we get a montage of Alice wandering around for six months and obtaining an airplane through one way or another, flying off to Alaska to search for Claire Redfield's group from the previous movie that went off to go to the sanctuary of Arcadia. Again, I like that they're basically cherry-picking what worked in the previous movie and what didn't -- it's not a perfect science, but it's something. Alice gets attacked by Claire Redfield, who's apparently gone crazy, amnesiac (groan) and also mind-controlled by a robot spider. Honestly the amnesia thing really adds nothing to the story other than delaying the Chris/Claire Redfield reunion... but then we don't get much out of the reunion anyway so I'm not sure why they bothered. Since Alice and Claire become fast buddies while on the place to fly from Alaska to L.A., I'm not sure why they really bothered with the amnesia thing anyway. 

Los Angeles in ruins looks pretty great, by the way -- again, it's CGI, and it's decade-old CGI, but I do feel like they do a much better job showcasing the ruins of Tokyo and L.A. and made them so much more interesting backdrops for the movie than 'generic American desert wasteland' in the previous one. After flying around a prison (Walking Dead much) and engineering a landing, Alice and Claire meet up with a group of survivors in the prison. There are a bunch of them, but they are rapid-fire introduced to us and it's clear which ones are meant to be important. Main resistance leader man Luther West is the badass black dude that was an ex-sports-star and is both badass but nice to our two female leads. There's the asshole movie producer Bennett, a couple characters that are attached tangentially to him (his mousy intern and an angry actress), a bunch of extra faces... and a prisoner locked in a high-security cell, one Chris Redfield. Chris's story and the general vibe that Wentworth Miller gives does exude a 'bad boy' attitude that could easily go either way. It really is kind of obvious the movie wants us to root with Chris and that he's not secretly an evil murderer, but it's a decent set-up. 

The revelation that Arcadia is actually not a place in Alaska but a giant tanker ship is actually a relatively sensible one, and a ship actually makes sense to be a haven from the zombies on land and stuff. It gives our heroes on the prison besieged by a gigantic horde of zombies a goal. After a break-in when some brand-new zombies with mutated mouths (LAS PLAGAS!) arrive and kill the pervert survivor, the group decide to free Chris Redfield and start to gather weapons. 

This sequence is pretty tense and honestly very fun, even if it's pretty obvious anyone without the names 'Alice' or 'Redfield' is doomed to die. Bennett stabs Angel and steals the plane to fly off to Arcadia on his own; Crystal gets killed by watery zombies; Yong is killed by the glorious arrival of this movie's 'miniboss', the Executioner Majini from Resident Evil 5. There's no goddamn explanation just as to why there's a giant, towering zombie man with a burlap sack on his head holding an impractically large hammer-axe, but hey, he sure exists! 

And you know what? Just like the Umbrella assault earlier in the movie, the action scene here is ridiculous, over-the-top, impractical, yet just a delight to watch. Kudos goes to Alice's awesome bungee jump away from the top of the building while setting the roof to blow, as well as everything involving those clearly-impractical-in-real-life-but-it's-cool-shut-up coin buckshot shotguns. And, of course, the boss fight against the Majini, which has Alice and Claire team up to fight the behemoth. Again, while the main protagonist of these movies (and the ones to deal the 'final blow' to both Majini and Wesker later on) is still Alice, there's a concerted effort in making the 'canon' characters from the game look like badasses themselves so they don't flounder around and just exist to gape at Alice like Jill Valentine in Apocalypse. It's a pretty cool mid-movie fight for sure!

And then after Luther gets written out by surprise tunnel collapse and zombies pulling him (he gets better, at least), we get just Alice and the Redfields buggering off to Arcadia... and, of course, Umbrella is behind everything because Umbrella. Claire's memory sort of return, and they figure out that the boat and is creepily iPod-smooth internal architecture is a way for Umbrella to trap and capture test subjects. They release all the prisoners, of course, including last movie's K-Mart (who doesn't really do anything but hey she's alive). But the presence of a trail of blood and the lack of Umbrella personnel means that something is wrong...

And Albert Wesker is here, sitting on his throne, looking smug as ever. Bennett (who is... an intelligent zombie or something? Or just haggard?) is also working for Wesker, as are two zombie dogs. Wesker's Zombie dogs have their front halves split open into two jaws in the style of the Plaga, and it's gross and awesome in the same breath. Wesker monologues a bit, where he's fighting the T-virus for control after the extreme state that the T-virus has to bring him back from, and Wesker wants to devour Alice's DNA because she had bonded with the T-virus perfectly before. It's sort of the 'Alice is special' bit from the previous movie, but without all the 'you have clones though' plot head-scratcher that Extinction had. 

And then we have a final battle sequence, including some fun slow-motion stuff. The zombie dogs are neat, and I absolutely love just how ridiculous Wesker is when he tosses his sunglasses and we get a dedicated slow-motion effect before Wesker uses his super-human Flash-speed to fight the Redfields. Wesker is at least pretty cool, and the zombie dogs are neat, although I did feel like this action scene felt a lot less entertaining than the over-the-top Majini or Tokyo battles. Still, it's fun, and we get K-Mart showing up to help bash Bennett in the face. Again, Alice gets to be the main protagonist here, succeeding where the Redfields failed (and got themselves stuck in glass tubes for their trouble) and they riddle Wesker and the hideous spiky, tentacly mouth-part he's got inside him. 

The good guys lock Wesker's corpse and Bennett in the room, but then Wesker survives, eats Bennett, and Wesker breaks out off-screen and escapes on a helicopter, ready to blow Arcadia up... but surprise, the bomb is on Wesker's helicopter! The movie plays this out like it's this awesome Batman gambit on Alice's team's part, but I felt like they definitely could've foreshadowed this better. Also, Luther survives. Also also, Wesker survives. Also also also, just as the movie is about to end in a positive note with Alice and the Redfields taking over Arcadia as how it was intended to... a giant squadron of Umbrella jet-copters arrive, led by a mind-controlled Jill Valentine! These movies will never not have a cliffhanger!

Overall? Overall it's... it's an interesting movie. It's still kind of messy in places, and I honestly would've rather had a movie where Alice and her allies are hunting down Wesker instead of the vague 'okay, we sort of don't know what to do now, I guess just survive' sequence in the middle. But then the prison scene and the idea of a location besieged by zombies is admittedly kind of cool and something different compared to the other Resident Evil movies. The story really does help push Umbrella and Wesker into the forefront as far as villains go, and they're not afraid to embrace other kinds of bio-engineered ridiculousness like the Majini or the Plagas, and definitely those dogs. It's not a great movie by any means, but definitely an entertaining one with some pretty great action scenes. 

Random Notes:

• This was the first Resident Evil movie I watch in the movies and despite the recap at the beginning (and not knowing what the heck is going on) I feel like the movie actually still works as long as you pay attention to the recap. I suppose that's the good part of having a very prominent 'Alice is the Main Character tm' deal going on.
• Speaking of watching this in the cinemas, this was released at around the time when everyone and their mother tried to really promote movies in 3D. It's been more than a decade, so I couldn't tell you if this was good or not. 
• The Las Plagas (well, this specific flower-mouth appearance, anyway) and Majini were from Resident Evil 5, which was at the point one of the most current Resident Evil game. I think the intention (and it's certainly stated in things like fan wikis and stuff) was that the specific Plagas zombie and the Majini that knew to tunnel into the building's bathroom were sent by Wesker, but the movie's really lousy at showing that to us. 
• The zombie dogs that split apart in the middle are based on the Adjule from Resident Evil 5.
• OKAY THOUGH BUT DID THEY HAVE TO MAKE THE T-VIRUS BE SHAPED LIKE ACTUAL T'S. NO SERIOUSLY THAT'S LOW-KEY SO GOD DAMN FUNNY
• Oh hey, speaking of Umbrella monetizing something completely different... in addition to the cloning stuff that they are revealed to have perfected in the previous movie, this one shows that they have access to mind-control crystal spider robots. Gee, either one of these would be so much better to monetize instead of a goddamn zombie plague, don't you think, Wesker? 
• The movie doesn't point it out, but there are clearly plants in the world, so I'm just going to say that Alice's monologue about how the T-Virus 'kills' the planet in the third movie is all bullshit. 
• The movie isn't even trying to keep Wesker's survival ambiguous, there's that bit with a dude in a parachute in the background in the scene where Luther survived. 
• It's a small thing, but the opening theme as the camera slowly pans down on Tokyo and the J-Pop girl is very, very neat. That single track sort of jumps out to me. 
• There's a mid-credits sequence with Jill Valentine in her badass purple super-spy suit. And, of course, the weird mind-control spider in her cleavage, something that at least the showmakers have the excuse of copying right from the video games. 
• The coin-shotguns are absolutely corny and is one of those obvious 'this will look good on 3D' thing. It's also a very obvious 'this is so goofy-ass stupid but it'll be cool' moments, and you know what? I ain't complaining. 
• It's par the course for the franchise, but if either Alice Prime or Wesker knew to shut up and actually do what they were there to do in the beginning fight on the Umbrella jet-copter, the movie would've ended so much earlier. Speaking of idiocy, the fact that Wesker forgot to pilot the plane is hilarious. 
• Let's talk about Umbrella's absolutely bizarre contingency bomb, huh? It somehow expands outwards in this swirling energy sphere straight out of anime... and then collapses back on itself. Is it like a gravity bomb or something? And the one in Tokyo's Umbrella base is big enough to consume the whole city, but the one on the Arcadia only consumed Wesker's ship mid-flight? Huh. 
• I don't call it an ass-pull that Wesker flew off in the one helicopter that they've moved the bomb into; in addition to Alice knowing Wesker's modus operandi, that one ship was the only one whose ramp was opened and cleared for takeoff, with the implication that our heroes set it up that way. 
• Speaking of which... if Alice Prime knew that Wesker was going to escape and blew up the base... very cold of her to leave all of her clones to die like that, huh. 
• Captain Cold is Chris Redfield! Also, just like the CW shows, apparently Afterlife can't resist throwing in a Prison Break joke either.