Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller, Kim Coates, Shawn Roberts
Runtime: 97 mins.
2010
Resident Evil: Afterlife is Paul W.S. Anderson's triumphant return to the director's chair after a two film hiatus. It sucks. Anything from Apocalypse or Extinction that one could vaguely construe as a step up for the franchise has been stricken from the record. Instead we have a narrative that doesn't progress so much as it meanders, and a cast that seems suitably bored with the wheel-spinning.
Attempts at reconstructing the plot strike me as fruitless, but we'll give it a go nonetheless. The film opens with Alice leading an army of Alices deep into an Umbrella base of operations in order to try to stamp out Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), high-ranking Umbrella member and author of much of Alice's pain. In a bombastic firefight that conveniently kills off all of Alice's clones but not Alice, she defeats Wesker only to have him escape. From there, having a bit of time on her hands, she decides to venture up to Alaska where her companions from Extinction supposedly went to find a safe haven known as Arcadia. When she gets there she finds nothing in particular, except her old friend Claire (Ali Larter) who attacks her for no reason, and also can't remember why she's there. Afterwards they wander down to... was it New York?... because of another signal. They find more survivors on the roof of a prison surrounded by zombies, so Alice lands her plane on the roof. Then they tiddlywink around for a while and argue about stuff. Also, it turns out Arcadia is a ship that is in the nearby harbor. They eventually make it over there but it's a trap, and they have to fight Wesker again in a finale that is overlit to all hell.
This is like Resident Evil's version of a road trip movie. The first half is inconceivably dull. Anderson gives Alice nothing to do but drone on in her video diary, explaining and re-explaining why she's flying where she's flying in monologues that would embarrass a fifth grade thespian. Not to mention that Afterlife has a serious problem with the core tenet of drama: cause and effect. Typically one wants to string together plot elements with either a "therefore" or a "but," yet Afterlife is a perpetual string of "and then"s. Alice does this, and then she does this, and then she goes here, and then this happens. It's like watching somebody's vacation photo slideshow.
This ties in with what is perhaps Afterlife's most irksome quality, which is that nothing seems to matter. Every key plot element is introduced and promptly forgotten. At the beginning of the film, sneaky Wesker injects Alice with a serum that takes away her powers. But then she still spends the movie doing all the superhuman stuff she normally does. Claire is clearly set up to be under some sort of sleeper agent brainwashing mojo, but then is just a good guy for the rest of the film. There's a whole debate about whether to release this hyper dangerous prisoner Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller), but when they finally do he's just happy to be on their side, and we never find out what he did in the first place. It's like Anderson wrote the movie in increments by waking up every day and writing down the dream he had. I mean, there's a major character whose death line is, "Who the hell are you?" simply because he hasn't met the character who kills him. They just haven't been introduced. It's the least cathartic way to kill a villain imaginable.
I guess you could argue that part of the charm of the Resident Evil series is that it seems to issue from the mind of a demented three-year-old, and I'm somewhat sympathetic to that point of view. I'm into some of the insane non sequiturs, like when an enormous monster with an oversized executioner's axe just shows up and starts knocking on the prison gate. But when the whole movie plays like a bland fever dream, it grows tiring. It doesn't help that the worldbuilding is worse, the production design is worse, and despite all the traveling Alice does, most of the film is still restricted to a series of drab enclosed environments. It's all hallways with Anderson.
Even the action is worse, though Jovovich is still Jovovich, and we can at least hang our hats on that. On that note, in researching Resident Evil: Afterlife, I came upon the information that Milla Jovovich and director Paul W.S. Anderson got married in 2009 after a lengthy on-again-off-again relationship. Learning this was somewhat dispiriting to me; I actually quite like Jovovich and feel that she could certainly do better (indeed, has done better in the past--her previous marriage was to Luc Besson). But you know, love works in mysterious ways I guess, and they are still together. In fact they creepily thanked me for being a fan in a video clip before my screening of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. There's something charming about a guy who thinks his wife is just the hottest most badass person in the world such that he builds an entire overlong action franchise around objectifying her and showcasing her badassery. Or maybe there's something disturbing about that. I don't quite know which.
1 / 5 BLOBS
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