Resident Evil: Afterlife:
Paul W.S. Anderson is in the hiz-ouse!
by Russell Lutz

The first Resident Evil was a fast-paced thrill ride of a zombie flick, and one of the better video game to film translations I've ever seen.  No one is going to mistake the film for art, but Milla Jovovich was a compelling badass, with a suprisingly warm performance from Michelle Rodriguez to boot.  Paul W. S. Anderson is a stylish filmmaker, if not always a good one.  (Mortal Kombat -- Yay!  Event Horizon -- Boo!)

The suits saw an opportunity to keep putting Miss Jovovich in slinky clothes and have her kicking the undead (and their dogs) in the head, so they followed the first film up with the non-Anderson sequels, Apocalypse and Extinction.  Apocalypse was actively bad, an extraordinary waste of my time.  Extinction was merely bland and uninteresting (which might be worse).

So I was pretty jazzed to learn that Anderson would return for the fourqel, Afterlife.  He had been kind of written into a corner for this one.  By the end of the third film, Jovovich's Alice has been mutated into a superbeing, with about a million clones of her at her disposal.  This film puts an end to that stupidity in a zippy opening sequence, and then we shift into more familiar zombie territory.  Alice finds Claire (a bedraggled Ali Larter, still hanging on from Extinction) in Alaska, then takes her in search of survivors, which they find holed up in a prison in Los Angeles.

In a nice nod to one of my guilty pleasure TV shows, they also find Wentworth Miller in a prison with the prison.  (Miller was the lead in Prison Break.  That guy cannot get a break!)  The mystery is if Miller is what he claims to be, a military operative who was jailed by prisoners fleeing the zombie hordes, or simply the worst psychopath in the joint.

From this point until the finale, you've got your standard "we've got to get to safety" zombie movie, and while it's not Romero or anything, it's pretty awesome.  I particularly liked the visuals, like the ten-foot-tall, hooded monster with an axe the size of a Mini Cooper.  This character is never explained, and really, I didn't care.  He was fun to watch.

This film manages to rekindle the spark of the original, while still retaining the elements of the mythology introduced in the intervening films, and still seeming fresh to boot.