Resident Evil: Afterlife

Written by Jonathan Jacobs

Resident Evil 4 is Darwinism in 3D. Darwin was right, only the fittest survive. Thank goodness Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter are in peak physical shape! Not since Enron and Haliburton has there been a corporate entity as perfidious as the Umbrella Corporation. It proved to be a masterstroke to include Ali Larter in the fourth installment of the video game series turned film franchise. Having two leading ladies kicking tukas this close to Rosh Hashanah is surely a blessing in disguise.

The best part of Resident Evil: Afterlife is its attention to the series’ history. While Alice (Jovovich) and the Umbrella Corporation have been the bricks and mortar of the four movies, bringing back characters from the past offers a brilliant tie in to entice fans of the original Resident Evil. Chris (Wentworth Miller) and Claire Redfield (Larter) return to join Alice in a nick of time. She has a new lease on life provided by her Umbrella counterpart Albert (Shawn Roberts). After dozens of T-Virus and satellite enhanced Claire clones invade the subterranean branch of the Tokyo Umbrella facility, only Albert is able to escape. In the process he detonates the entire compound and in the process all of the Claire weapons. Once onboard a massive and fully-armored helicopter-airplane hybrid, Albert is seemingly home free…until Alice appears furtively and points a gun at his skull. In the blink of an eye he pounds a syringe into her jugular containing a new serum designed to neutralize her special abilities. Essentially he turns her into a normal person once again. She is once again the original Alice. Alice escapes believing Albert has plummeted to a fiery death.

Our heroine spends months searching for any survivors. The plant looks empty but pristine and preserved. A broadcast recording takes her to Alaska where her old friend Claire (the original) emerges. Unfortunately Claire has been ephemerally brain-blocked (her memories are inaccessible). Gradually traces of past memories return. The two leading ladies venture for Hollywood for a fly-by. They discover millions of mindless zombies waiting to sate their cravings. Cannibalism in the year 3012 is so the new veganism. Noticing survivors on the rooftop of an abandoned prison, Alice and Claire miraculously and perhaps ill-advisedly land their two passenger propeller plane on top. It is there the story really begins.

In addition to meeting the able-bodied but diverse group of survivors, we discover Claire’s brother Chris is alive and being held captive. We also find out that the Acadia referred to in the broadcast about shelter, food and infection-free safety is a massive ship off the coast of California and not a town in Alaska. The namesake is just a coincidence. In the prison fortress the newly invigorated group decides to escape to the ship by any means necessary. This is where the action becomes intense.

Afterlife was shot utilizing James Cameron’s state of the art 3D camera technology. The stabs, piercings, bullet wounds, blood spurts and Matrix-esque bullet dodgings are simply incredible. Many of the scenes are futuristic and graphically ingenious. There are so many images to marvel at and countless action sequences to absorb our attention it proved difficult for me to isolate any one component or scene to focus on for this review. Larter and Jovovich make a great team. While it is not within my right to reveal which characters live or die I will say that Resident Evil 5 is in the works and it will be another three dimensional bonanza!

One final word; I love the employment of dogs from the first Resident Evil with a new twist, they have the Reaper virus from Blade 2! Poor doggies. They made me happy I decided against adopting a golden retriever/Rotweiler combo. It might have eaten the mailman and that is a federal offense (though no more so than not showing a full Jovovich shower scene)! In the words of the great Looney Toons, “that’s all folks!”