Title: Resident Evil: Afterlife
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes
Genre: Horror, Action
This is the fourth instalment of the Resident Evil movie series and it starts off where the third instalment ended. The world is infected by a super virus which turns all infected humans into undead. Alice (Milla Jovovich) is one of the survivors of this apocalypse. She desperately searched for Arcadia… a place where there’s safety and is free from infection. This movie is loosely based on the Resident Evil game series.
This is the first decent film that I have watched since I started movie going two months ago. I have not watched any of the first three movies before so I had no idea what happened in the beginning of the movie. Despite that, my familiarity with the Resident Evil universe through the game series quickly caught me up to date to the developments. This film is only loosely based on the Resident Evil game series as the main character in the game is Chris Redfield, Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine while in this movie, Alice is the lead cast. Maybe Alice is a character in other version of the Resident Evil game series (e.g. Wii, PSP, GC, etc.)... I played only those on the PC and PS.
Anyhow, I think that Milla Jovovich, as a superhuman hard-ass chick I is pretty good… although losing her powers in the beginning should have resulted in her dead in the plane crash. As for the newcomer in the series, Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller), I think he’s pretty good as Chris Redfiled, although his screen time is really limited... would have like to have him having a bigger impact in the story development. In this film, his involvement doesn’t really change the story much. But I still really like his soulful eyes as in Prison Break, so I might be biased :P. And then, there’s a third character, which I presume exists in the previous series as well... Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) Chris’s little sister. I think she is by far the weakest character in the film... not that she’s very bad... just relatively the weakest one. It is quite obvious she is forcing emotions on her face which resulted in a very unnatural look.
As for the actions, they are pretty awesome... although those who watched the film previous instalment might find it to be the same bland thing if it’s the same. There’s one weak point though. I think the director uses too much slow motion in his action scenes. Slow motion actions are awesome when employed correctly. However, in this film... these slow motion scenes seemed like even longer than the normal motion action scenes (I feel only, I didn’t time them, okay). I think it would have been better if he could cut down on these slow motion scenes. On another point, I love the hammer/axe wielding executioner... he really is similiar to the one portrayed in RE5 of the game. And due to that, I think that he overshadows Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who is the film’s main antagonist. The final fighting scene between Wesker and Alice/Chirs/Claire is a little bit anti-climatic... not much ooohs and ahhhs scenes.
Anyhow, I believe that after watching this film, it made me want to watch the first three instalment of the film as well. I hope that they do make a fifth instalment as the director said that he would include Leon Kennedy in the fifth film, which I hope has a bigger role to play than Chris in this film... it would be nice to put Leon and Chris together... although it might result in having too much characters in the film and it might cause underdeveloped characters.
Observation: How did Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), one of the survivors, survive being attack by a group of undead in the deep dark tunnel remains a real mystery.
Bottomline: A nicely depicted film which is based on a game... much, much better effort than the likes of Tekken and King of Fighters. This film shows that you do not need to strictly follow the game in order to be successful as it is sometimes impossible to cram all info from a game into a film.
Bamboo Ranking: 4.0 / 5.0
