Film Review: Resident Evil Afterlife
Being new to the Resident Evil film franchise and not having played any of the games in the series, I felt like a real novice going in to the cinemas to see this film with a group of friends. Luckily, Resident Evil: Afterlife explains the main plot for people who haven’t been following the series from the get-go. A quick Wikipedia search is good enough, even. I quite enjoyed the film for what it was, although don’t expect it to be a scary, edge of seat thriller; in my eyes, it’s a comedy of sorts. Not so much Shaun of the Dead comedy, but anyway, let’s get to the full review to find out what I mean.
The film begins with a bunch of Alice clones breaking into the Umbrella corporation and killing everyone, starting the story with a bang, if you like. To be honest, seeing the cut off heads flying everywhere was more comical than anything else. Seriously, it was more corny than Sleepy Hollow, which is saying quite a lot as far as I’m concerned. This opening sequence is also not the only part of the film with such corny violence; it’s spread throughout the whole film. This might be a letdown to hardcore fans of the games, but me being put off by a lot of gore found it perfect. It’s really about your tolerance level of this kind of thing, so some will see it as rubbish, and others, if you’re like me, will love it for being funny. The highlight of hilarity was a fight scene between a returning character and an executioner zombie (thankyou to my mates for cluing me in on the name), which wouldn’t have been so funny if it weren’t for the slow motion effects that were used.
This leads me to another point; the special effects. The gore is not really shown much, in fact it’s a “blink and you’d miss it” sort of thing. I was wondering if this was the unrated version or something. You literally see guts for about 2 seconds per death, and the only time you really get to see proper gore is when you see the ugly looking zombies themselves. I have to admit, I was expecting more than a few flashes of blood here and there. Also, the slow-motion effects that I mentioned above were really overused, in fact every fight scene with a zombie used it. Even the opening sequence used it. It was kind of like watching Sherlock Holmes again, although with that it made more sense because it was explained that Holmes was thinking through what he was doing in the fight, but in this it seems thrown in for the hell of it, and is probably the main reason why the film was more corny than scary.
As most of you probably know the film was shot in 3d. I did go and see the 3d version, and I can safely tell you that it is the worst 3d I have ever seen in a movie to date. It looked nothing like 3d, either. There was rarely a time when I saw anything fly at me, and it seemed like an excuse to spend 21 dollars on glasses. Felt like a waste, to be honest. It wasn’t needed to enhance the movie in any way, and could have done without it completely. I know I’m using comparisons a lot in this review, but even Spy Kids 3 did a better job at 3d than this, and that was in purple for most of the movie!
In the end, Resident Evil is still the best sequel to a trilogy I’ve seen, but there are still a few things that could have been done better, most notably the 3d and overuse of slow-motion. The comedic tone didn’t bother me that much, so if you’re going to see this movie, go into the cinema treating it as a comedy and not a thriller. With these things in mind, I rate Resident Evil: Afterlife a 7/10.
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