Contains spoilers.
Now I've
unapologetically given this series a lot of slack. In fact I'd go one further
and say that I've been positively enthusiastic about the previous three
entries, acknowledging their place in the zombie story and praising
Director/Writer Paul W. S. Anderson's lavish reliance on larger than life
effects and often over stylised production. Often lambasted by the zombie crowd
for being too shallow and Hollywood, I've personally found them, as long as you
don't take it seriously, fun, dramatic and flicks you want to whoop at, and
throw your pop corn in the air to.
The Resident Evil
series has always acknowledged its video game roots with daft boss fights and
ridiculous zombie-hybrid mutations, but at heart it's still been unashamedly
about zombies. Whether it was the tight claustrophobic first entry, the escape
from the city survival second, or post-apocalyptic expansive mad-max third, the
main protagonist, albeit increasingly less now I think about it, has always
really been our gnarly flesh eating friends. Here we are with the fourth effort
and all this seems to have been forgotten. It's thirty minutes till we even see
a zombie and fifty before our first encounter and even this is one of the
evolved Las Plagas parasite, video game ones. In fact other than the roof top
fight and escape I don't think our straightforward, no nonsense undead really
make an appearance, other than as background noise. Instead Alice (Milla
Jovovich), Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) and brother Chris (Wentworth Miller)
are generally pitted against the faceless uniform soldiers of the Umbrella Corp
and their boss Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts). In many respects these soldiers
have replaced the role of the zombies for Afterlife as mindless do as they're
told automaton cannon fodder. The problem is they neither as interesting or as
good at providing tension.The whole first sequence which should be a cinematic
tour de force as Alice and her army of clones storms the Tokyo umbrella
research base ends up dare I say, feeling a little flat and that's the problem
that follows the film through to the finale.
There isn't much
plot, then again there never really is. Alice, brings the fight to Wesker then
goes looking for the Alaskan paradise mentioned at the end of Extinction.
Unable to find it she bumps into some survivors holed up in a Los Angeles
prison, discovers the real location of Arcadia (the haven), lets all the
non-main characters die and gets into a few boss fights. Oh, and on the way she
loses her superhuman jedi powers, yet still manages to survive a nasty plane
crash unscathed. It's all a little tame and empty and that wouldn't normally
really matter too much, I mean I enjoyed the last three. The problem as
we've said is that it seems to be missing something...
Let's look at the zombies; though
there's not a lot to say. The actual zombies are as we've seen in previous
instalments; they're fast, hungry and driven by instinct, and they like to hang
out in as large a group as possible. What we see far more of in Afterlife
though is the majini game enemies, who if I recall my Resident Evil game
knowledge are humans with their minds and bodies parasitically controlled. In
the games I'm pretty sure the parasite only appears once their host is shot in
the head (up till then the host is alive). Those on display here look more dead
to begin with, so perhaps they're some new zombie-mutations Anderson made up;
still it's all pretty daft stuff and I'm beyond thinking think too much about it at this stage.
The other big zombie Anderson decided to bring to the party is the Executioner
Majini who's straight out the game. Whilst all this pays great homage to the
games I'm not quite sure this far into a film series that's already gone
significantly off on its own it all quite works and comes across as a little
implausible and silly. As I've said I've always taken the boss fights and
fantasy of the films with a grain of salt and treated them as something to
smile through after an hour or so of great zombie fighting and tension.
Afterlife seems to be big daft boss fight after big daft boss fight without any
of great zombie story stuff and it misses it. Ok, there's fifteen minutes or so, in the prison
where it all seems to start working again but it's all over before it really
begins with Anderson preferring to move on to something bigger and more
ambitious at the first opportunity. As for the big finale against Wesker, Anderson manages to reach even new
heights of absurdity, even for Resident Evil, takings things off the scale,
giving him vampire like speed and agility and filming a sequence that would feel
right at home in The Matrix. It's all too much.
Definitely the
weakest in the series, Afterlife is the perfect example of style over
substance. Anderson seems to have lost the essence of what makes a good
Resident Evil film crafting a series of high intensity highly scripted action
sequences and forgetting to include much narrative or any of the zombie
survival story I like. It's not all bad and Afterlife is still big and
bold like its predecessors with expansive panning shots, crazy-scale numbers of
zombies on screen and great choreography, and you can't help but be impressed at times.
It's just all too shallow and derivative though and never really captures the feelings of tension or excitement we've seen before. Disappointing, 5/10.
Steven@WTD.
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