Complete Global Saturation is Imminent

And now we continue today's look into the Resident Evil movie franchise with a review of the latest film, Resident Evil: Afterlife. Once again I will point out this post will contain spoilers. I'm gonna cover this pretty in depth and do a recap while pointing out the problems I had with this film. It's a recap/review in one! Lets go!

Right off the bat I will say I had certain expectations of this movie. Not high expectations because quite frankly I never have high expectations for movies made from comic or video game properties. However when I read that Afterlife would be heavily influenced by the great 2009 title, Resident Evil 5 I started to think that this might have some level of potential to surprise me. And so I went into this film with some level of enthusiasm. I would be greatly disappointed by a disjointed attempt to merge two vastly different worlds together into one with little to no explanation for anything.

The movie opens with a wide shot over Tokyo which is where the movie's villain, Albert Wesker has set up shop since the last movie. Cue your regular recap of the zombie outbreak caused by the release of the T-Virus and Alice's voice over covering the mass hysteria and lack of survivors. Once again we are introduced to an Umbrella stronghold where Wesker is confronted by Alice and her clone army. The best thing to happen to this franchise happens when they finally de-power Alice. Following a scuffle between Wesker and Alice, the plane they're on crashes. Moments later Alice crawls out of the wreckage but Wesker is nowhere to be found.

The Executioner in his full glory

From here she goes in search of Claire Redfield and the others from the previous movie . She travels to Alaska via plane to find this infection free outpost named Arcadia but finds only one person on the island, Claire. Unfortunately it turns out that Claire has been brainwashed by some device that is attached to her chest. Upon it's removal she experiences some memory loss, leaving our two heroines in an uneasy alliance as they take a plane and travel back to civilization to look for more survivors. The two travel to Los Angeles where they find a rag-tag group of un-infected people taking shelter in a prison. They manage to precariously land their plane on the roof and introduce themselves to this new group. It is here that we learn that Arcadia wasn't actually a place in Alaska but a tanker off shore that was housing survivors. The ship can be seen off the coast line from the prison rooftop but no contact had been made for days. So our group bands together in an attempt to escape their prison as the zombie hordes close in. This of course only happens due to the effective force of The Executioner. 

So our group reluctantly lets out this mysterious prisoner, named Chris, only to discover that he's Claire's brother amidst the chaos. Claire is still suffering from memory loss so there's little time for a family reunion. Chris helps the few survivors left form an escape plan and they make it to the surface via a sewer tunnel, and by they I mean Alice, Chris, and Claire. Together they make it to the shore and take one of the lifeboats from the Arcadia back to the ship and board it. As they investigate the seemingly quiet tanker they discover what else but an Umbrella logo. And inside they find thousands of survivors, all outfitted with devices on their chests to control them. Claire and Chris set about rescuing the survivors as Alice goes deeper into the tanker. Naturally this leads to the final confrontation of the film.

Shawn Roberts as Albert Wesker

Low and behold our villain, Albert Wesker, has returned after being absent since the opening ten minutes of the film. He's very quick to highlight the fact that he is also new and improved as the powers he had taken from Alice are now his. However there is a flaw in his plan as he needs Alice's DNA to stabilize the virus within himself. Chris and Claire finally arrive on the scene as Alice is dealing with Wesker's pet hounds. The two of them are eventually overpowered and are only saved by the intervention of Alice who lays waste to our dear villain. Still we're left with a cliff-hanger ending as our heroes and survivors are soon swarmed by hundreds of Umbrella planes. And we fade to black. Clearly we're in store for yet another sequel. Actually I think Milla has already gone on record saying that there are plans for it. However there were so many problems with this movie that it seems like another movie is needed just to explain everything. 

And here's where the review kicks in. Like I said above, this movie has a lot of problems and they begin after the initial ten minutes of the movie. First off there's Alice herself. I like Milla Jovovich, I really do but her character is a bit of a odd issue with these movies. The best thing to happen to this franchise happens when they finally de-power Alice. If you read my post recapping the first three movies, with each installment it seemed Alice gained some new fantastic ability to battle the forces of Umbrella. It made the movie terrible unbalanced when the heroine is far more powerful than the people she's fighting against. It made even less sense that the company she was fighting against were the ones that kept giving her these abilities! 

The next problem is when Alice finally met up with Claire in Alaska in the field of planes. It's here that Afterlife's potential begins to break down. See, the device implanted on Claire's chest came from Resident Evil 5 where it was a vital plot point in the game. Here it's a means to an end, almost specifically used to create a sense of tension between the characters that never really makes sense. Even so, in Resident Evil 5 the device does not cause memory loss. Completely just a twist tossed in for seemingly no reason. The same can be said for the introduction of the Executioner. If you're asking yourself, "What the hell is the Executioner?" then you're asking the right question. Allow me to clarify; the Executioner is a monster from Resident Evil 5 that was created by the evil organization, Tricell, via experimentation and mutation. All of that is explained in the game. 

However in Resident Evil: Afterlife this big, hulking monster shows up out of nowhere without any sort of explanation whatsoever and after it has been dispatched it's never even mentioned again. Not even referenced. But I digress or else I'll forget to mention that locked in the prison that was another game character brought to life on film in the form of Chris Redfield, played by Wentworth Miller. You might notice I kinda name dropped Wentworth Miller. Only for the reason that the other survivors are throwaways for cool deaths in the movie. One of which introduced us to the new zombies with their tentacle like mandibles. These came from the highly successful Resident Evil 4 for the Gamecube. Again, there was no explanation for the introduction of new zombies. They're just there and the viewer is supposed to accept it. At least in Extinction there was a reason for the more rabid zombies that were able to run around at high speeds, savagely ripping people apart. 

Finally we get to just a glaring example of uninspired film making. The fight sequence between Wesker and the Redfields has the unfortunate case of being both cool and horrendous at the same time. The fight is a shot for shot remake of a fight that Capcom created in Resident Evil 5 between Wesker and Chris Redfield (and Redfield's in game partner) in the climactic chapter of the game. It's sort of cool to see the sequence replicated in live action but therein lays the problem. Instead of coming up with a really cool fight scene to show off Wesker's new abilities, they just copied what Capcom did a year ago. I'll include video so you can see for yourself. First up is the clip of Wesker versus Chris Redfield and his partner from Resident Evil 5.

And here is the shot for shot remake in Resident Evil: Afterlife.

Claire, Chris, and Alice get ready for the final showdown.

Now I know Paul Anderson was really inspired by Resident Evil 5 and he wanted to pay homage to it in a way. That's great and I love that he wanted to stay close to the source material. However all of these ideas seem as if they were shoe-horned into the movie. The Executioner, the new zombies, the magic chest spider charm; all of these things were introduced in this film without much thought. It was more like he was saying, "Look it's like the game!" and that was it. In the end though it didn't make any sense since all of it just came out of nowhere. Everything just happens without motivation or explanation and in that sense the movie just doesn't work. Maybe it's time we leave the game franchises along and stop trying to translate an interactive medium to one where you sit and watch. You can never replicate that experience on film. In the end it just comes off as being cheesy to the mainstream audience and the fanboy audience gets into an uproar about the misuse of the property. Like a friend of mine said recently, Hollywood needs to lay off the intellectual properties taken from other mediums and concentrate on being original instead. Let the games industry stick to what they know best and the movie industry do the same. Intermingling has only led to terrible films that aren't good for the fans or the studios that make them.