That's right: star power, bitches!

[elschmo]

I watched Resident Evil: Afterlife with Sis #2 and seanachais last weekend. Oh, and I saw this in 2D; I'm not too crazy about 3D.

1. I had a marathon the day before, and ... dude, since when was Extinction boring as fuck? (Original review.) I had to resort to doing other stuff in the meantime - like tending to my zoo on Tap Zoo - to keep me entertained. I mean, okay, yes, the thing with the crows still delighted me, because of how big a step it was from the previous movies in terms of providing a narrative set-up. Other than that ... ugh. Alice was too perfect, which made her such a boring character to watch. Then the plot kicked in, like, what, a little too late for it to be engaging, and even so, half of the background to what happened - to people like Jill and Angela, for instance - were in the novelisation instead. There was one part that stuck out to me for all the wrong reasons, which was when Carlos asks Alice why she had to leave, and she just says, "I'm dangerous around people." ... BUT WHY, DAMMIT. That would be what I'd demand if I didn't read the novelisation. It's like people who've never read HP, but have watched the movies, which - er, aren't too good at explaining things, and so, are wondering what half the stuff on-screen is referring to most of the time. This is Resident Evil. I don't want to have that kind of experience with Resident Evil, man.
   
   
2. So I'm thinking, I want to do a Project Rewrite: Resident Evil: Extinction, like I wanted to with Apocalypse. Extinction is a bigger mess than Apocalypse, I'm afraid. No fucking clones, no fucking desert, no fucking water drought. (It's not like it even mattered in the long run - at the end of Extinction, it was fucking raining in Tokyo. Yup, it was retconned in the same film in which it was brought up. Brilliant!)
   
   
3. Though ... for all its fuck-ups, and no matter how bad people say this series is, I'll still love it for ever. One criterion for a movie that I like is whether I can watch it a lot of times and not grow bored of it, which is what the first two have accomplished. Extinction ... see above. Now, the point of me rambling about Extinction is that I'm impressed with Afterlife, but we'll see how that pans out in the future. I mean, I loved Extinction when it came out, but after the marathon, I don't think I can stomach it again.
   
   
4. On to the review proper! ... OMG, the timeline in this series, what the fuck. This, as the caption tells us in the opening sequence, takes place "four years later" after the events of Extinction, which is supposed to take place "five years" after Apocalypse. It was nine years between three movies (and five days between the first and the second ...). In those nine years, the world became a desert wasteland, but recovered, even though the situation wasn't conducive to that. Okay, never mind. (Hear that? That's the sound of my teeth gnashing at the ridiculousness of that idea.) Then when Alice finds Claire, she tells her, "We met eighteen months ago in the Nevada desert."
   
   
   
   ... What is this, I CAN'T EVEN.
   
   
5. WESKER MUST INGEST YOU, GUYS.
   
   
6. Shawn Roberts's acting is so bad, but Wesker's bad-ass-ness makes up for it. I mean, he neutralised Alice's powers - that's more than enough to redeem him, right?
   
   
7. That said, I cheered when Wesker made Alice human again. One more reason to cheer: there is not one speech where someone tells Alice that she's fucking awesome, and it is for that that the Umbrella Corporation needs her. There was Wesker telling her that she was the only one to bond with the virus (and hence, he must INGEST her), but it's nothing like Cain's "YOU ARE MAGNIFICENT!" and Isaacs's "YOU ARE SO SPECIAL!" speeches. Good grief.
   
   
8. In an interview that I read, Milla was upset that Alice's powers were taken away, but Paul told her, "Look, it can't be pupil dilation [which is what happens when Alice uses her powers] all the time - where would we go from there?" Trufax, Paul. The telepathy - though it brought us that scene in which she causes internal bleeding in a guard - is such a cop-out for someone who's so frickin' strong to begin with. There's no risk involved with Alice. Caught in a bind? Dilate pupils! Look, ma, no hands! Besides, one of the reasons I took a liking to Alice in the first film is that she was still very much vulnerable. It also helped that she gained her bad-ass-ness in a gradual manner, which, hey, equates to character growth in a sense. Then the next two movies came along, and now she's super-strong all the time, and as such, super-boring. Given the events in the first fifteen minutes of Afterlife, the sting of that is lessened somewhat, and Alice is a lot more fun to watch now, because she can't frickin' dilate her pupils when the Axeman swings his axe at her and Claire - she is as much at danger as Claire is, and that's what makes the audience take to a character.
   
   
9. Yes, Kmart gets something to do. In fact, all of them do, which makes this one a lot better than the previous two entries. It's no longer Resident Evil: The Alice Show, Where She One-Ups People Who Came from the Games. (Alice blows up the dogs, which Jill failed to do! Alice roasts a bunch of crows, which Carlos failed to do!)
   
   
10. The "twist" that Luther is alive: THANK YOU, Paul W.S. Anderson, for not ruining that like you did with Kaplan (Resident Evil) and the Alice clone (Extinction). It helped that it did give us one of the film's best lines. (See the post's subject.)
    
    
11. I JIZZED IN MY PANTS DURING THE OPENING SEQUENCE (THE CINEMATOGRAPHY, HOLY FUCK), CLAIRE VS. THE EXECUTIONER, AND CLAIRE AND CHRIS VS. WESKER. THE SOUNDTRACK CONTRIBUTED A LOT TO THE JIZZING.
    
    
12. ... Which is strange, because I listened to the soundtrack before I watched the movie, and it almost put me to sleep. But when paired with the respective visuals, IT IS AWESOME.
    
    
13. The Axeman is persistent, damn.
    
    
14. I called it that Wendell would be the first one to die. But nooo, Kim-Yong!
    
    
15. Bennett selling them out like that ... oh, such a standard horror trope. Which I kind of liked, because it was an attempt at spicing up the plot a little.
    
    
16. I am disappoint with Alice's opening narration. I thought she was going to name-drop the other films when she mentioned "apocalypse" (like she did in a trailer for Extinction). Then again ... is this their way of telling us that Extinction doesn't exist in film canon? A girl can dream, right?
    
    
17. So ... does Alice take her clones out for shopping together, or what? Imagine the volume of business she'd be giving to retailers!
    
    
18. Here's another reason the events of Extinction wouldn't make sense: If the world became a desert, and everyone died, then where the fuck would all these gadgets come from? It might make a little more sense, I think, if it had just been the U.S. that was reduced to a desert wasteland in Extinction, instead of the whole world.
    
    
19. I will not make a comment about how Wentworth Miller is stuck in a prison again for all the wrong reasons, and happens to know how to escape.
    
    
20. I will make a comment, though, about how unfounded the group's fears toward Chris are. Yeah, he's a "murderer" ... so? Like that's going to matter in a world now overrun with zombies?
    
    
21. I wanted Chris to slam himself against the glass and go, "GOOD EVENING, ALICE."
    
    
22. I can't wait for the novelisation for this. I'd love to find out what the backstories for the new characters are like. (Like Angel! Poor guy ...)
    
    
23. What's the point of Alice's video log? Get rid of that, and focus on more important things, like character development. I liked that more effort was made to make us get to know the other characters better - like Crystal wanted to be an actress, and Luther was a basketball player, etc.: they weren't just people that'd just end up dead a couple of minutes later. You knew something about them, something about what their lives were like before the shit hit the fan, unlike the people in Extinction, where all we knew of them was what they were at that point in the film. Heck, even we got to find out something about Alice from her previous life that isn't from the novels (that she collects coins)!
    
    
24. The plot in this is better in the sense that you see it out to the end, unlike Extinction's; loose ends are all tied up in the end, more or less.
    
    
25. Oh, Wesker is so alive.
    
    
26. ... The dogs. What.
    
    
27. OMG, JILL. This might be the first time ever that I'm excited for a sequel. (Oh ... wait, no, there was Batman Begins before this.)
    
    
28. Don't get the complaints about the excessive use of slow-motion in Afterlife's action sequences. The other films love slow-motion just as much! (Resident Evil is the next big contender. Case in point: Alice's first encounter with the dogs - complete with jungle music!)
    
    
29. HHHNNNGGG, THE OPENING SEQUENCE: I LOVE IT SO MUCH THAT IT WARRANTS A SECOND MENTION, COMPLETE WITH JIZZING GIF.
    
    
    

Afterlife was decent: there were improvements in characterisation and plot (the latter being in comparison to its predecessor). It's also complemented with an amazing, thumping soundtrack that sets the mood well. And that opening sequence ... hot damn. However, I am still a little hesitant to state where this ranks among the other three movies, seeing as Extinction ended up not being all that good after a repeat viewing.

Rating: 3/5