Review: Resident Evil: Afterlife

Today, I went to the Scars of Mirrodin release, and I did fairly well. I want to write a significantly long blog post about how awesome it went, and how much I really like this set, but I've not been home for over 17 hours now, it's almost 4am, and I haven't even started writing yet, so that one's going to wait for tomorrow. Instead, I'm going to give a brief review of something else I did today.

Resident Evil 3D (or 4, if you're counting): Afterlife.

Alright, so, first off, disclaimer time. There will be some mild spoilers, especially of the previous movies. I'll try to stay away from any of the big stuff, and things you wouldn't be able to glean in the first five minutes of this movie, but previous installments are fair game. Also worth noting is that I greatly enjoyed Resident Evil 1 and 2, but liked 3 slightly worse.

Resident Evil: Afterlife was a pretty standard action adventure movie that suffers from the singular problem that it is an action-adventure movie in a survival horror genre. Other than that, I basically have no complains (other than some sloppy writing at some points.) If you've loved the series so far, I would suggest that you see this. If you faltered on number three like I did, I might suggest you give this one a pass (especially if you're thinking about the 3D version. Those things are pricey!)

Without going into too much detail and ruining the movie, suffice to say that the events of the third movie, especially the ending, lead to a rather explosive beginning to this installment. Unfortunately, as is usually the case when you give the main character the abilities of a demi-god and the ability to clone herself, the writers ended up in a corner where they couldn't quite escape from without deus-ex-ing her powers away somehow. She gets 'depowered' a good bit, but still manages to be utterly ridiculous for the rest of the movie.

The negative to this is that, because the main character is handling a whole mess of things that are dozens of times scarier than a zombie, that zombies are turning into almost strawman villains in Resident Evil. A horde of zombies is an obstacle – no longer the critical problem of the movie – and while we can see that there are bigger problems, Resident Evil doesn't seem to want to be about those. It seems to want to be about running from zombies and escaping from them, but always ends up with a bunch of boss-fights and mindless slaying of thousands of the undead.

Personally, I remember, back in the Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil (the first game) that you needed to run from the first zombie, because if you didn't, you never had enough bullets to do the next room after that. That's terrifying, that you're always that close to death.

At this point, it might be a little bit too late to save the Resident Evil movie franchise. There is absolutely nothing that I can think of off the top of my head that makes the zombies scary again except for a flat-out prequel, or a reboot with a new point-of-view character.

Final Opinion: Did you see the first two? If not, go see them. They're worth your time. If you saw and enjoyed the third movie, go see the fourth. If you haven't, or didn't like the third, give this one a pass, and don't feel like you missed much.