Every few years since 2002, the makers of the Resident Evil films decide to put out another one. No one was asking for them but they showed up at at our multiplexes anyway and you know what? They all made money. Oh, not Avatar money but enough to make the producers think it's a good idea to make another one and so they do. The smartest people involved in these projects are the people who decide to release these movies in late summer/early fall so they're not going head to head against, you know, real movies. Also, theses movies have zombies in them which, for some reason, is a license to print money in the movie world. You'd think this sub-genre of the movie industry would have run out of steam years ago since they all have basically the same plot but nope, the hits keep on coming.
Milla Jojovich somehow found time in her schedule to do Resident Evil: Afterlife and that's great because if she didn't, they would have had to cast one of the literally millions of women who would have happily taken her place and that would be bad for some reason. The movie opens with her character, Alice, and her numerous super powered clones invading a fortress run by the last vestiges of the people who caused all this, the Umbrella Corporation. Some research done after I got home showed that this is pretty much where the last movie ended.
I'd like to take this opportunity to address the producers of Resident Evil. I can't speak for the rest of the world but I spent the first twenty minutes saying, "Huh?" over and over again. Why does she have super powers? Where did the clones come from? How did she track them down? Civilization has collapsed so it's not like she could just Google it. This was all pretty much covered in the last three movies but, honestly, I barely remember those. The amount of my brain budgeted for remembering complex modern mythologies is pretty much filled up with Star Wars, Star Trek, Lost and Doctor Who. If you all think I'm making space for your dumb little zombie flicks, think again. Oh, the hell with it. You don't care. You already have my money and you know you'll probably get my money in 2-3 years when the next chapter in this lame saga comes out. I may as well finish my review so I can end this misery.
Anyway, Alice meets up with a very boring, one-dimensional villain named Wesker (Shawn Roberts) who also has super powers and has pretty much the entire planet wired to explode whenever he pushed a button. He's a super villain which means things like blowing up and dying only slow him down until the next movie when he comes back even stronger. After that encounter, Alice goes looking for some sort of safe haven called Arcadia which doesn't seem to exist except it does but not really and I'd better stop now cause that whole thing just gets dumber. She meets up with Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), a character that IMDB swears was in the last movie so who am I to argue? Claire and Alice fly from Alaska to Los Angeles in a plane that never seems to need fuel looking for Arcadia. Along the way, they pretty much trip over a group of refugees holed up in a prison surrounded by zombies that just happens to include Claire's brother Chris (Wentworth Miller). So yeah, the plot makes sense. Also, up until this point, I'd pretty much forgotten there were supposed to be zombies in this movie. Really, it's cute the way the producers expect me to remember these things.
Basically, Resident Evil: Afterlife is every other Resident Evil movie except this one is in 3D which means we get a lot of bullshit shots of things being tossed at the camera. At one point, Wesker even throws his sunglasses as if they were some sort of deadly weapon. If, unlike me, you managed to retain significant amounts of the other three movies in your memory and you liked what you saw, go see it. If not, go see it anyway. I was unable to avoid it and see no reason why you should be any different.
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