Movie Details:
Title - Afterlife
Series – Resident Evil #4
Director – Paul WS Anderson
Release – 2010
Rating – R
Time – 1hr 37min
My Thoughts:
At the end of RE: Extinction, Alice finds a laboratory chock full of clones of herself. Afterlife starts with Alice, apparently alone, attacking the Japanese headquarters of the Umbrella Corporation. It doesn’t take long for us viewers to realize there are a bunch of clones and their goal is the Head of Umbrella, Chairman Wesker. He escapes on a superplane and destroys the headquarters with some sort of super implosion bomb and kills all the Alice’s there. The original Alice is hiding on the plane and attacks Wesker and he injects her with a super-anti-virus serum that takes away all of her super human abilities. They then crash into a mountain (eye roll moment) and Alice walks away, despite being “just regular human” now. The rest of the movie then begins. You can read about in the synopsis if you wish.
The opening to this movie was spectacular in my opinion. It shows the spread of the T-virus in Japan and just shows some Japanese lady standing in the rain while everybody walks by her. The scene ends when someone makes eye contact and she attacks the poor schlub. The music was a heavy tempo and matched the rain atmosphere perfectly.
There is a lot going on on this movie. Japan, then Alaska, then Los Angeles and then a boat in the ocean. Comparing it to the original Resident Evil movie, I found that I liked the claustrophobia and smallness of the first movie over this sprawling and wide open kind of movie. Zombies don’t feel like much of a threat when you have the entirety of Los Angeles to hide in. Of course, the director gets around that by having every single zombie in the city surrounding the one place the survivors are hiding. And the zombies are evolving so they can dig through concrete and are smarter. Oh, and some of them can thrive in a water environment. I really didn’t think about that and if I were you, I wouldn’t either. Or your brain might shutdown from “Doesnotmakeanysensitus”.
In this movie, we get two souped up badguys who are infected with the T-virus. First up is the Axeman and boy is he a bigboy! He reminded me of the Nemesis monster from the second movie, RE:Apocalypse, just bigger and badder.
The second is Chairman Wesker after he infects himself with the T-virus. He looks normal, just like Alice did when she was infected, but just like her, he’s faster, stronger and just “more”. He also has some sort of carnivorous plant thingy inside him that keeps trying to come out of his mouth. It was disgusting, in other words, it was perfect for a Resident Evil movie, hahahaa.
The ending is pitch perfect Resident Evil. Alice and her cohorts have destroyed the badguys, rescued a lot of innocent people and are about to start looking for more innocents to rescue, when all of the sudden, da da dum, Umbrella Corporation literally swoops in at the last second to ruin everything! And that is how the movie ends. Awesome!
The music fit the movie but sadly, the Manson Umbrella Corporation theme song was not part of this. As far as I’m concerned, that piece of music should have been in every movie, tying Umbrella together as the overarching enemy in the movie series. Plus, it is just a wicked cool piece of music. Ahhh well, life is just filled with disappointments ;-)
I don’t know if I enjoyed this movie more because of the previous one or if I just thought this was cool. Whatever the reason, I thoroughly enjoyed this. My only real complaint would be how big and wide open a lot of the movie was and I wasn’t a fan of that.
Stay tuned as Alice’s Adventures in Umbrella Corporation Land continues next month with the penultimate movie in this series.
Synopsis from Grokipedia:
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In Resident Evil: Afterlife, set in a post-apocalyptic world devastated by the T-virus outbreak, Alice leads an assault on the Umbrella Corporation's Tokyo headquarters using an army of her own clones to target CEO Albert Wesker.[4] The clones overrun the facility, but Wesker triggers an explosion that wipes them out, then injects the original Alice with a serum during their aerial escape attempt, stripping her of her superhuman enhancements and leaving her as a normal human.[4] Their aircraft crashes, but Alice survives and begins a solitary journey across the wasteland six months later, tracking a distress signal from a purported safe haven called Arcadia in Alaska, which promises shelter and supplies to any survivors.[4]Alice's search uncovers no living humans until she encounters a mind-controlled Claire Redfield on an abandoned beach; after subduing and freeing her from Umbrella's device, the two fly toward Los Angeles, where they crash-land on the roof of a maximum-security prison besieged by zombies.[4] There, they join survivors led by Luther West, including Angel, Bennett, and others, who reveal Arcadia is actually a cargo tanker ship anchored off the coast that has gone silent.[4] To escape the encroaching undead horde, including a massive axe-wielding mutant dubbed the Executioner, the group frees a imprisoned survivor, Chris Redfield—Claire's brother—who knows a path to the coast via the sewers.[4] Betrayed by Bennett, who kills Angel and steals their plane, Alice, Claire, Chris, Luther, and a few others battle through the tunnels; Luther is trapped in a collapse, presumed lost, while the rest reach the Arcadia, only to discover it as an Umbrella trap filled with experimented-on prisoners, including K-Mart from Alice's past allies, who was captured by Umbrella.[4]Exploring the ship, Alice learns of her cloned origins through Umbrella's records and confronts Wesker, now enhanced beyond control by the T-virus, who seeks to assimilate her as the perfect host to stabilize his cannibalistic urges.[4] Alliances form with Luther, who emerges alive to aid the group, and the survivors—including Alice, Claire, Chris, and K-Mart—engage in climactic battles against Wesker, ultimately impaling the latter and relocating a purge bomb to destroy his escaping helicopter, seemingly ending his threat.[4] However, as Alice broadcasts the Arcadia's location to draw more survivors and repurpose it as a true sanctuary, an Umbrella assault fleet arrives, led by the mind-controlled Jill Valentine, signaling ongoing conflict.
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