Movie Review: ‘Resident Evil: Afterlife’ (2010)

Director: Paul WS Anderson

Cast: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller, Shawn Roberts, Boris Kodjoe, Kim Coates

Plot: After tying up the clone plot line in the opening act, Alice takes to the skies in search of the mythical safe zone. Instead, Alice and Claire wind up in a Los Angeles prison amid a zombie siege.

Review: Extinction is the peak of the series, and it’s downhill from here. The opening sequence of Alice (Jovovich) and her clones attacking the Umbrella facility should be a set-piece like no other, but it is a mess. Alice turns an immensely improbable mid-air flip before her clones turn up, and it’s ridiculous that they didn’t have more fun with the idea, like giving them all different outfits from the series. Between the matching outfits and the green screen reflecting only their faces, it feels like a last-minute rush-job effect.

When we get reduced back down to one Alice, we jump forward to her scouring the land for the isolated safe zone known as Arcadia. Still basing her entire plan on a random notebook found in a gas station or something, Alice flies a little propeller plane to Alaska. Don’t expect any nice landscape photography, as we mostly stare at Alice from a foot away while she explains what is happening. The image of a plane graveyard when she finally reaches her goal is a nice one, but it isn’t long before we’re back in the plane and heading back to where we started, now with Claire (Larter) suffering from amnesia brought on by robot-spider mind control. It’s nice to see an action movie with two female leads, but it’s weird that they’ve both got amnesia.

Eventually, we get a new setting and cast of stereotypes, including Basketball Man (with jump power), Sleazy Hollywood Man with Meek Assistant, Naive British Girl, etc. They’re holed up in a supermax prison besieged by the undead. They have also been listening to broadcasts from ‘Arcadia’, revealed to be a container ship off the coast. As a team, they have to make use of a riot vehicle to cross the city and reach the ship. The question to be answered regards a caged man… none other than video game character Chris Redfield (Miller).

What we wind up with is sibling duo Chris and Claire facing off against franchise arch-villain Albert Wesker (Roberts), with all manner of standing-and-shooting and kicks. Eventually, these heroes have to be benched according to the one overriding principle that all Resident Evil movies abide by: no one is cooler than the director/writer/producer’s wife. Eventually, Milla Jovovich has to step in and be the biggest badass. There’s competition in the wings, though, with Jill Valentine making a surprise return with a robot-spider mind-control thingie.

This entry in the series saw the return of series originator and showrunner Anderson, who takes a break from trying to emulate Aliens and pivots to emulating The Matrix. Although he’s the best known and most successful of the three directors involved, I don’t consider him the best. He often turns out a 14-year-old’s idea of a ‘cooler’ version of his influences. I enjoyed this approach in Mortal Kombat, but it hasn’t landed here. The assumption is that he’s nice to work with; consider how often people come back to this series.

At the end of the day, this film does nothing to advance the series or evolve this world. Alice flies to Alaska, and then flies back. She builds an army of clones, and they all get killed in the first act. Without checking the timeline, we wonder if Anderson had just read The Walking Dead and wanted to do the prison arc.

Rating: FOUR out of TEN