Review:
Resident Evil: Afterlife

Saying that a live-action Resident Evil film is bad is like saying that God isn’t real, politicians are all liars and that footballers will sleep with anyone who comes their way – it might be obvious, but a large portion of people will try and disagree with you. This time around, writer-director Paul WS Anderson has outdone himself. Oh yes, Resident Evil: Afterlife isn’t just bad. It’s so abysmal that it manages to transcend ‘bad’ and become hysterical. It’s this year’s New Moon.

After destroying Umbrella’s secret underground base in Nevada and sending her friends on to sanctuary in Arcadia, Alaska, Alice (Milla Jovovich) discovered a huge vault filled with hundreds of clones of herself. Alice and her clones head to Umbrella’s other secret underground in Tokyo where they are all magically killed (except for her) in a battle with Wesker (Shawn Roberts), the last remaining Chairman. Naturally, both the original Alice and Wesker survive and escape, leaving the director’s wife to wander around and look introspective while trying to find other survivors.

Alice manages to track down Claire (Ali Larter) and finds a whole bunch of other survivors holed up in a prison in Los Angeles, surrounded by every single zombie in Hollywood. There she discovers that the message of safety from ‘Arcadia’ is in fact coming from a ship moored off the coast. Unable to spot a trap when she’s staring straight at it, Alice leads the survivors out of their relative safety and gets them all killed.

Where do you begin with a film this bad? We could start with the utter incompetence of writer-director Paul WS Anderson, but that feels like a cheap shot – after all, without his ridiculous screenplay, none of this garbage would be able to entertain us. Let’s start with the slow motion.

There’s so much slow motion in this film that it would be half an hour shorter if it were played at full speed. Writer-director Paul WS Anderson clearly subscribes to the Zack Snyder school of directing, in that if something is slowed down, it must be far cooler than normal. Nope. In order to make action look good in slow motion, it needs to be well-directed at full speed. Essentially what’s on screen is a first year film student thinking that slow motion will make his film look the best. It doesn’t.