Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010): Alice Loses Her Powers and Finds a Prison

I didn’t love Resident Evil Afterlife, and I’d put it somewhere between a 3 and a 3.5. It isn’t a bad film, and there’s plenty in here that I enjoyed, but it isn’t up there with the first one or the two that came after it. It was shot in 3D and built to show it off, and that gimmick just didn’t work for me. Things keep flying at the camera all the way through, and once I’d noticed it I couldn’t stop noticing it, which is a strange thing to say about a zombie film where the zombies should be the thing you’re watching. I went in wanting to like it, too, because I’ve enjoyed this series more than most people seem to.

It opens in Tokyo in the rain, on a busy crossing, as the first infected person bites the first passerby and the whole thing starts, and for a couple of minutes it’s genuinely creepy. Then it jumps forward to the main event, a squad of Alice clones storming Umbrella’s underground headquarters beneath the city, which is the payoff for the clones we saw at the end of the last film. It’s a fun idea and it looks great, lots of slow motion, lots of black leather, guards going down in every direction. But it’s also where the 3D starts showing off, and the film never really stops after that. There’s slow motion on nearly every fight, shell casings tumbling toward you, blades coming out of the screen, and I kept thinking about the glasses on my face rather than about Alice.

Alice is human again

The bigger problem for me is what they do with Alice. We spent three movies building her into a superhero, mind tricks and all, and then Wesker gets her on his aircraft as he escapes and injects her with a serum that strips her powers out, and that’s that. She’s human again, quickly and easily. After everything that came before it felt like a bit of a copout to me. The story had painted itself into a corner with how powerful she’d become, and pressing a reset button was the way out, and I get why they did it, but I’d have liked to see them deal with it in a way that felt earned.

And the odd thing is the film doesn’t do much with it afterwards either. She’s still running up walls and taking on crowds of the dead on her own, so losing her powers barely changes how she fights once the action starts again. If she’s going to be human I want to feel that she’s vulnerable, that a fight she’d have walked through two films ago is now a real problem. That never quite happens. The powers were the whole reason the last two films looked the way they did, so taking them away should have been a bigger deal than it was. Instead the plane goes down, she walks away from the wreck, and we’re off to Alaska.

There’s a nice touch in that stretch, though. Alice keeps a video diary as she flies up the coast looking for Arcadia, the safe place everybody was heading for last time, and it’s about the quietest this series has ever been. Just her, a small plane, empty country below and nobody answering the radio. I liked that more than I expected to. It’s short, and then she lands on a beach covered in abandoned planes and finds out what’s actually waiting there.

Arcadia, a prison and Chris Redfield

All she finds in Alaska is Claire Redfield, who has no memory and a mechanical scarab clamped to her chest. Alice pulls it off, and the two of them fly south looking for anybody still alive. They land on the roof of a prison in Los Angeles that’s surrounded by thousands of the dead, and inside is a small group of survivors led by an ex-basketball player called Luther. In one of the cells is Chris Redfield, Claire’s brother and the lead of the games, who finally turns up four films in, swearing he’s a soldier while nobody quite believes him. From the roof they can see that Arcadia isn’t a place at all. It’s a ship anchored off the coast, broadcasting for survivors, and it’s sitting right there in the water.

The prison is the closest the series gets to the old feel of being stuck somewhere with a few people and something terrible outside, and I liked that part. The dead dig under the walls, and eventually a giant hooded monster with an enormous axe smashes through the gate, which comes straight out of the games. The survivors have to get out through the sewers to reach the ship, and not all of them make it, and one of them, a slimy film producer, grabs the plane and leaves everybody else behind. Things flying at the camera stay a big part of how all of this is shot, and for me that was more distracting than exciting. A siege like this works best when it’s cramped and dark and a bit claustrophobic, and every time something came spinning out of the screen it pulled me back out of that.

The baddies still work

What I’ll give it is that the villains are still a good match for the games, which I liked. The Executioner looks like he’s walked straight out of one, sack over his head and that axe dragging along behind him, and the fight in the flooded shower block, with Alice and Claire against him in slow motion, is one of the better ones in the film. He doesn’t say a word, he just keeps coming, which is exactly how he should be. The zombies have had an upgrade too. Some of them open their mouths up into a split mess of tentacles, which is gross in the best way and another nod to the newer games. It’s the kind of thing a fan spots straight away, and it made me feel like the film actually cared where it came from.

Wesker turns up in his sunglasses and black coat as the new face of Umbrella, and by the end he’s half monster and fast enough to dodge bullets. Alice, Claire and Chris take him on together in a fight on the ship that’s clearly modelled on the games, Chris and Claire side by side for once, and that’s a piece I enjoyed even with the gimmick working against it. Some of the other fights are fun in their own right as well. When the survivors reach the ship they find that Arcadia is a trap and Umbrella keeps people on board as test subjects, and they free the prisoners, including K-Mart from the third film, before it all goes wrong. That bit moves quickly, maybe too quickly, but I wasn’t bored.

Where it lands for me

The film ends the way this series seems to end every time. Umbrella gunships appear on the horizon, led by Jill Valentine, who’s been missing since the second film and now has a scarab of her own stuck to her chest, and it stops on a to be continued. I’ve more or less stopped expecting these films to finish a story, so it didn’t bother me as much as it might have. But it does mean the whole thing feels like a bridge to the next one rather than something that stands up on its own, and that’s part of why it sits lower for me than the first three. A cliffhanger is fine when the film before it has already given me a full meal, and this one felt a bit like a starter.

I keep coming back to the 3D because it really does shape the whole film. Fights are staged so that something can come at you, scenes hang in slow motion so you can admire the depth, and a lot of the time that’s at the expense of the tension that made the earlier films work for me. Maybe it looks better to somebody who loves 3D more than I do, and I know plenty of people went just for that. For me it got in the way far more than it added, and when the story is already treading water, the last thing it needs is another reason for me to look at the effects instead of the people.

Rating: 3 to 3.5 out of 5. It wasn’t my favourite of the series, but if you’re a fan you’ll still want to see it, and I’m glad I did.