Movie Review-Resident Evil: Afterlife

Resident Evil: Afterlife is the fourth movie in a series based off a video game. Did anyone really expect it to be any good?The film’s plot picks up just after Resident Evil: Extinction with Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her army of clones assaulting the Tokyo headquarters of Umbrella Corp., a corporation of evil genetic engineers who unleashed a zombie apocalypse virus three movies ago. Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), the main target of the attack escapes and purges the facility, killing everything but the real Alice, who escaped in Wesker’s helicopter.Wesker then injects her with a virus that neutralizes her superhuman powers, but the chopper crashes and both escape. After a large timeskip, Alice is somehow back in the continental United States and has a bi-plane with seemingly endless fuel, which she uses to search for the infection-free promised land Arcadia.

From here on, it’s essentially the same movie as Resident Evil: Extinction. Alice rides up and down the desert/polluted landscape on/in a motorcycle/bi-plane, finds survivors, fights zombies, fights a lieutenant, fights more zombies, fights a boss and finishes with a cliffhanger.

The all-encompassing badness of Resident Evil: Afterlife doesn’t even begin to be reflected by its inherited plot. This movie is unimaginably predictable. Are there zombies in the dark murky water? Will the snobbish member betray the group? Is the massive, deserted cargo ship actually not deserted at all? Yes, that all happens. The audience can tell this is all going to happen within the first half hour of the film.

But what of its visual effects, the main draw of the series? The terribleness of this film resides even here. Everything is in slow-motion. The second act would have lasted at most half as long in real-time as it does on the screen. The effect is supposed to be cool, but really it’s just annoying.

This film seems like it was written to be a video game. The dialogue is terrible and kept to a minimum in favor of action sequences. Enemies follow a structure common to video games. The audience is left feeling like a kid brother whose sibling won’t hand over the controller.

There is potential for another sequel, but hopefully that won’t happen.

These movies are all just awful.