Resident Evil: Afterlife (**½)
Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller, Boris Kodjoe,
Kim Coates, Shawn Roberts
Seen: September 11th 2010
**½
Out of ****
The
4th movie in the Resident Evil series is the 2nd best, but
there is still a gulf between the first movie and the other three. The good
news is that it’s far better than numbers 2 and 3 in the series, which should
come as welcome news to fans of the 1st movie. Umbrella Corporation
still calls the shots, and are still all-powerful and omnipresent – so much so
in fact, that you can’t help but wonder whether they don’t represent something
else. I see them as an overarching (Umbrella) representation of the corporate
engine with no end, changing people into zombies who live to work, who has no
other alternative but to attempt to drag those who really live down with them.
But that’s just me.
The
movie starts with a darkly stylised close-up on a woman’s feet, wearing red
high heels, in the rain, with very moody music playing, and it’s brilliant.
When we reach her face we see she’s the only one standing in a moving crowd,
and when she turns around she attacks the closest passerby, scattering the
crowd. Alice (Jovovich) is still the mean being that she has become in the
earlier movies, the only human to have responded to the dreaded T-Virus like
Umbrella Corporation wanted in the first place. She (and seemingly an army of
her clones) start the movie
attacking Umbrella Corporation’s underground facility in Tokyo. She
continues to destroy the entire thing in a gloriously and eventually overdone
over-the-top shootout ending with her and the robotic Albert Wesker (Roberts)
flying from the facility as it is being destroyed by something akin to a
massive nuclear bomb. On the flight he injects her with something that brings
her back to being only human, but then their plane crashes, and Alice somehow walks
away from the crash.
She
goes on a search for Arcadia, the Utopia transmitting promises of food, shelter
and an infection-free civilisation. En route she finds some intriguing things
indicating that Arcadia might not be exactly what she suspects. She gets
waylaid when she spots survivors on a prison roof, and decides to aid them.
Here the movie becomes Prison Break with zombies, as we are introduced to Chris
Redfield, played by Wentworth Miller, who is the only one who knows the way out
of this prison in their efforts to reach Arcadia – all he’s lacking is the
map-of-the-prison tattoo. The battle gets fierce at times, and when they reach
Arcadia, it simply continues, as Umbrella Corporation somehow reaches
everywhere.
The
movie looks brilliant, with 3D to equal that seen in Avatar (same camera
technology…) and a moodiness that can only be hinted at in this review. The
action scenes are very cool while you watch them, but with a few seconds of
afterwards introspection you realise that they are big airbags, almost nothing
happens in slow motion – making it look cool and feel more urgent than it
actually is. One scene in particular takes about 5 minutes for the following
sequence of events: Clair (Larter) runs across a room from a giant zombie, she
summersaults over him, shoots him in the head, he falls, gets up, throws his
massive axe, and Clair and Alice shoot his head off. It took me less than 20
seconds to type that, why take so long in getting there? Because it looks
cooler. It doesn’t build tension however. The movie is laced with scenes like
this, and while yes, it looks great, it doesn’t communicate urgency at all, the
impact is lost. The acting is good enough for a movie like this, but one sore
thumb stands out above the rest – Shawn Roberts as the evil Albert Wesker is
terrible, from his first lines at the Tokyo facility to his last inside
Arcadia.
Resident
Evil: Afterlife is a good movie, but it relies far too heavily on slow-motion
visuals to carry a very thin plot. If you want to see something cool presented
in good 3D, go see this movie, as it oozes style. Too bad it’s in favour of
just about everything else.
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