Resident Evil Afterlife
Fourth movie in the series and Paul W.S. Andersons return as director. Also, kind of an odd one. Where Extinction was the movie to establish a new status quo, raise the stakes and increase the pace, Afterlife takes it slowly. Where Extinction had a subplot of Alice developing telekinetic power, Afterlife strips those away after its action packed prologue in a hilariously video gamey fashion and settles into what is probably the most slow paced Resident Evil movie yet, having both the most impressive, but in return least frequent big action sequences in the series so far.
After a breathtaking assault on an Umbrella facility in Tokyo as its big opening, and Alice's first personal confrontation with Albert Wesker who'd be this movies main villain, Afterlife has Alice tracking down the signal of a alleged safe haven named Arcadia. A journey leading her first to Alaska, where she finds a brainwashed Claire Redfield, and later to a prison in Los Angeles, besieged by undead hordes and occupied by survivors trying to make a break for Arcadia themselves, which, it turns out, is a ship just slightly off the coast.
Anderson's return as a director also marks a return of one of his personal trademarks, a fairly contained, mostly indoors, setting. Extinction's Mad Max inspired road movie sensibilities make way for a movie that's set mainly in the corridors of a prison facility. After expanding the series scope for two movies, Anderson now narrows it down again. Afterlife is the story of a fortress under siege and its occupants desperate attempts to reach a promise of freedom.
Afterlife does a lot of interesting things, stylistically. Being the first movie in the series shot in 3D it takes, moreso than most other 3D action movies, a very dioramic approach to many of its action sequences, adding to its newfound dimensionality some of the most striking use of bullet time outside of a Wachowski movie. Anderson expands on the ideas and iconography of the previous movies in some ways, more apparent than ever is the contrast between the run down post apocalyptic landscapes outside and the sterile, white apples store interiors of Umbrella's facilities. The use of sattelite imagery to signify an all seeing eye in the sky that remains, even after the collapse of civilization. And, of course, the idea of "building a new human", through mind control, or cloning, or simply false promises.
Albert Wesker serves, in this movie, as the "human face" of the umbrella corporation which, by accident or by design, tends to be fairly interchangeable. His portrayal in this movie takes a lot of inspiration from his portrayal in the then recent Resident Evil 5, ironically enough a period in the series history where it also started to embrace the indulgences of Hollywood action cinema that Resident Evil 6 would eventually collapse under. The movie builds him up as kind of a foil to Alice, but his connection to the games is by and large the main factor seperating him from the middle aged technocrats that have come to represent Umbrella in the other movies.
Afterlife is a slower and overall less eventful movie than Extinction. I can't, in good conscience, call it an improvement on it. Rather than expanding on what the previous movies have set up, Anderson uses his return as a director to tighten up what those have established and emphasize their intent. It's where the RE series really starts to lean into ideas that invoke a less verbose, and less encyclopedic version of what the Metal Gear games, or indeed some of the more paranoid strokes of the actual Resi games were doing. Depicting a world haunted by the spectre of corporate greed well after its collapse.
It doesn't have the forward momentum of something like Extinction and once again I have to point out that, had I watched this as a standalone without the sequel already waiting, I might have been underwhelmed. Afterlife has about one very well done action sequence at its beginning, middle and end that all play out very impressively, but as a whole it's very much connective tissue, more concerned with clarifying the series direction that moving it forward.
