Paul W. S. Anderson wrote and directed Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth film in the series and the first shot in 3D. It runs 97 minutes. Milla Jovovich returns as Alice, the superpowered human who has spent three films fighting the Umbrella Corporation. This time the film takes something away from her before it gives anything back.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Tokyo, the Sinkhole, and the Anti-Virus
The film opens with Alice and her clones storming Umbrella HQ in Tokyo. They kill the entire branch except Albert Wesker, played by Shawn Roberts, who escapes in a tiltrotor plane and detonates a bomb that leaves a massive sinkhole. The real Alice boarded beforehand. She tries to execute Wesker; he injects her with an anti-virus that strips her superhuman powers. Wesker says he used the T-virus to gain his own abilities. The plane crashes into the mountains. Alice survives and flees.
That opening is the best idea in the film, and it is over in minutes. Anderson trades his hero’s advantage for vulnerability, then spends the rest of the runtime in a prison.
Alaska, Claire Redfield, and the Arcadia Broadcast
Six months later, Alice flies to Alaska tracking broadcasts from a safe haven called Arcadia. She finds a field of abandoned planes and is attacked by a feral Claire Redfield, played by Ali Larter. Alice destroys a scarab-like device on Claire’s chest. It leaves Claire with amnesia and pacifies her.
They fly to Los Angeles and find survivors living in a prison ringed by thousands of undead. Luther West, played by Boris Kodjoe, leads the group: Wendell, Crystal, Bennett, Yong, and Angel. Luther explains that Arcadia is actually a cargo tanker traveling along the coast. The ship has stopped moving, and its crew does not answer the group’s rescue flares.
Luther shows Alice a caged man, Chris, played by Wentworth Miller. Chris says he is innocent and promises an escape route if they free him. The survivors do. He jogs Claire’s memory by revealing they are siblings.
Zombies in the Shower, an Axeman, and a Ship
The prison sequence is where Afterlife lives or dies, and it mostly treads water. Zombies tunnel into the prison and kill Wendell after Alice catches him peeping on her in the shower. Chris tells the group about an armored car in the prison, hoping to escape in it. Then a giant axe-wielding monster, credited as the Axeman, arrives.
Anderson stages the 3D with obvious care. The problem is what he stages. A prison, a tunnel, a corridor, a bigger zombie — the film keeps reaching for the next threat instead of the next idea.
| Character | Actor | Role in Afterlife |
|---|---|---|
| Alice | Milla Jovovich | Loses her powers to Wesker’s anti-virus, leads the survivors |
| Claire Redfield | Ali Larter | Found feral in Alaska, freed of the scarab device, regains memory |
| Albert Wesker | Shawn Roberts | Umbrella chairman, escapes Tokyo, crashes in the mountains |
| Chris Redfield | Wentworth Miller | Caged inmate, Claire’s brother, knows the escape route |
| Luther West | Boris Kodjoe | Leads the Los Angeles survivors |
| Bennett | Kim Coates | Former film producer among the survivors |
What the New Pieces Actually Add
Chris Redfield matters most here. He is a primary character from the video games and appears in the film franchise for the first time. So do the P30 mind-control devices and other elements pulled from Resident Evil 5. The film also brings back Wesker and Jill Valentine, played by Sienna Guillory.
Miller had never played the games. He prepared by searching the internet for images of Chris and found the character far more muscular than he could match in three weeks. He did cardio for endurance instead. His read on the game version: “He’s definitely capable and heroic, but there’s also something quite innocent. He was still freshly scrubbed, in a way, at the beginning of this horrifying journey.” His film version, he said, has “been walking down this particular road for quite some time. The edges are sharper, and they’re way more jagged.”
That is the honest summary of Afterlife. Sharper edges, same road.
The tagline promises “a new dimension of evil.” The 3D delivers a dimension. The evil is the one we have met three times already, and the anti-virus that should have reset the stakes gets undone by a script that would rather stage another corridor fight. Anderson’s second turn at the series is competent, watchable, and content to be the middle chapter nobody quotes. It is the first Resident Evil film to look expensive and the fourth to feel interchangeable.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
