Should I Watch..? 'Resident Evil: Afterlife' (2010)

Resident Evil: Afterlife is an action horror film released in 2010 and is the fourth entry in the Resident Evil series. Written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, the film directly follows the events of Resident Evil: Extinction and features Alice on the trail of both the Umbrella Corporation, whose zombie plague has wiped out humanity on Earth, and the supposed safe haven of Arcadia hidden in remote Alaska. The film stars Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Kim Coates, Shawn Roberts and Wentworth Miller. The film incorporates elements from a number of games in the series including Resident Evil 5 and was filmed with the same 3D technology that James Cameron used for Avatar. The film became the most successful in the series so far with global takings just over $300 million but critics were largely unimpressed, praising the visuals but panning the film's lack of story and unoriginality. The film would have followed a couple of years later with the fifth film, Resident Evil: Retribution.

After the events of the previous film, an army of Alice clones make their way to Tokyo for an all-out assault on the headquarters of the villainous Umbrella Corporation whose T-virus was unwittingly unleashed on the world four years earlier. With humanity all but wiped out and turned into mindless zombies, Alice's quest for revenge leads to a bloody battle at Umbrella's vast underground complex where Umbrella CEO Albert Wesker just about escapes on board a private aircraft but unknown to him, the real Alice is there waiting for him. However, Wesker injects her with antibodies that combat her resistance to the T-virus and stripping her of her superhuman abilities. As Wesker is about to kill her, his plane crashes and Alice manages to escape.

Six months later and Alice is flying to Alaska on the hunt of the source of a radio signal, promising a safe haven from the virus for any survivors. Knowing that Claire Redfield was leading a band of survivors to the settlement of Arcadia, Alice is mystified to discover an abandoned airfield and a feral Claire, apparently under the control of a strange spider-like device attached to her chest and suffering from memory loss. Instead, Alice takes Claire with her to LA on her plane where a small band of survivors trapped in a prison signal to them for help...

If you're able to enjoy bad movies then this will be the most enjoyable one in the series so far. However, if you're like me and take things too seriously then Afterlife is a noticeable downgrade from what had come before it. On the plus side, the film actually looks pretty decent for a movie like this made comparatively cheaply. Set designs look impressive despite defying logic and there is an attempt to further increase the lore of the franchise beyond the stories the film tell. Take the devastation seen in LA, the result of raging forest fires that mankind is no longer around to combat. Unlike much of the film, this actually makes some sense.

All of the Resident Evil films so far have actually been about Jovovich's physical appearance, sex appeal and ability to kick ass and sur enough, this film offers more of the same. In fairness, she's not the only one leaping about like Neo on speed - Larter gives us another feisty heroine taking it to the baddies and the introduction of Miller gives us another cast member that audiences are more likely to be familiar with. Fans of the game will also be happy to see more recognisable characters from the series appear on screen - Roberts' Wesker certainly looks the part and feels a suitably campy antagonist while the mutant dogs and the hulking form of the Executioner (known as the Axeman in the film) make their appearance on screen too. Such meagre plus points are to be celebrated in a film as dumb as this.

• This was the first film in the series to depict Chris Redfield, who is an iconic character in the games who has featured since the very first Resident Evil game in 1996 as one of two playable characters. However, this would be his only appearance in the film series until it was rebooted in 2021 in Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City where he was recast with Robbie Amell in the role.
• The film is the first time that Anderson returned to direct a Resident Evil film since the first one in 2002. He was responsible for writing and co-producing all six films in the franchise before it was rebooted without his involvement and he remains the only person to direct more than one film in the franchise.
• This is the first time Jovovich played Alice since becoming a mother - she was pregnant at the time the previous film premiered. At the premiere of this film, Larter was visibly pregnant instead.

I suppose that anyone expecting the fourth film in a series to tinker with the formula too much is likely to be disappointed but Afterlife stick so rigidly to its formula that you'd be forgiven for thinking we were watching an earlier movie. The film is stuffed with lots of slow-motion gun fire, token gestures to fans of the games and blatant jump scares that I barely reacted at all. If anything, the film leans too heavily towards the action genre instead of the game's survival horror origins so this feels like it has almost nothing to do with them. It's like the films are simply leeching ideas from the games instead of trying something new and never before has it been more evident than here. Maybe it explains why the film's plot is so ridiculously stupid - can someone explain to me how, in a world where humanity is all but extinct, is an army of heavily armed clones supposed to travel from the US to Japan and back again in a matter of months? Did they fly Delta or something? And how do Umbrella continue to generate the trillions of dollars required to have an omnipresent premise in the world with improbably huge bases hidden in plain sight - in the midst of the apocalypse? Even the undead aren't immune from capitalism, it seems.

Even if you can forgive the plot which has about as much smarts as the brain-eating drones beyond the prison walls then the film doesn't have much else going for it. Even the returning cast members feel disinterested in things, phoning in their laughable dialogue and very much going through the motions. Other than Larter, Jovovich and Miller, the rest feel like they have been poached from a collection of Hallmark movies and TV soap operas but having said that, nobody gives a particularly good account of themselves. The worst of the bunch is Roberts who feels like a cosplaying Agent Smith from The Matrix, assisted by some dodgy-looking bullet-time effects which only fuel the comparison. It only makes the whole film feel derivative, unoriginal and boring. I didn't care about these people or what happened to them - the fact that I could accurately predict who would die and when tells you everything you need to know.

If I'm honest, none of the Resident Evil films thus far have impressed me but this one might be the worst one I've seen so far. The plot makes no sense, the zombies aren't frightening, the characters are one-dimensional and the film never feels like much of a progression from what came before it. Even Anderson's direction feels by-the-numbers, despite the effort put into the film's visual effects. It just doesn't feel like a Resident Evil adaptation, wasting the licence to produce an utterly underwhelming zombie film with no new ideas at all. It almost verges on parody. Why can't we have a film closer to the game's original idea of having overwhelmed characters struggling to survive in the face of a zombie plague, instead of an apparently unkillable heroine completely unafraid of the same creatures we're supposed to be scared of? It just creates such a disconnect that it makes it impossible for viewers to empathise with.

The only reason why people should watch this is to understand how the third film gets to the fifth in terms of narrative. Otherwise, there is nothing here to justify a normal person watching this laughable garbage. I'm staggered that the franchise managed to get to four films, let alone six, because it's clear that there are no new ideas and no direction for the series at this point. Even Jovovich's usually enjoyable action heroine feels bored and listless. What the franchise clearly needs at this point is exactly what its zombies need - brains.

Great For: fans of the series who don't care about quality, entertaining masochists, lovers of crap films

Not So Great For: fans of the games, perverts expecting the standard nude scene from Jovovich (there isn't one), anyone with an IQ above 65

I'm curious as to what kind of viewer enjoys these Resident Evil films, which have been universally regarded as poor-to-average-at-best. The first film is the one closest to the games, being a much-more claustrophobic affair that introduces us to Alice as the heroine trapped in a zombie-infested lab underground. But by making Alice (a character created specifically for the films) the focal point of the films, what point is there in trying to adapt the games? As the film franchise has shuffled on like one of its zombies, it has gotten further and further away from what the games represent. Thankfully, I have just two more movies to go before I can move on and forget about this series altogether which probably won't take long. The subsequent films in this series, Retribution and The Final Chapter, are equally bombastic action films that just happen to have zombies in them. And forgive me for not getting too excited about seeing either of them.

Zombies have been a popular choice for movie villains for decades now and have enjoyed a more-or-less constant presence on our screens since George A. Romero's pioneering indie film Night Of The Living Dead. They're almost a genre of film by themselves, covering everything from comedies like Shaun Of The Dead and Zombieland to action films like the underwhelming Army Of The Dead to even romantic affairs like Warm Bodies and Life After Beth. There really is something for everyone, whether you're a professional gore-hound looking for something brutal and bloody or if you're searching for a more family friendly picture to watch over the Halloween period.