So I downloaded RE: Afterlife and watched it today. I figured that I'd check if there were things I'd rather see in 3D or not.
Spoilers ahead, not that I expect anyone to care.
[spoiler]
First, a little background: I've always felt that the live-action RE movies were kinda like a bad fanfiction gone horribly wrong, and then screenplayed. Milla Jovovich plays Alice, a Mary Sue who happens to get screwed by Umbrella at the beginning of the very first movie in the series, which brings about only two "characters" from the series itself: the zombies, and the Licker. By the end of film one, she and a guy named Matt are the only survivors out of a team of... about a dozen, I can't recall, coming out of one of Umbrella's underground labs. (Matt gets infected, they mention the "Nemesis Program", which means you know he's coming back as a villain in the next movie. The whole thing is pretty much Alice in Wonderland with zombies, only Wonderland is a secret lab. The computer is called the "Red Queen" for crying out loud.) Movie two of the series is about as close to the actual series as it gets, based off RE3 at least. Alice wakes up after being gang-raped sodomized by llamas experimented on, manages to pick a lock with one of the needles stuck in her brain, stumbles out and gets a shotgun. Cue Raccoon city being locked down as the virus spreads. At this point we get Jill Valentine going BACK to the police station for some reason (death wish, probably, or maybe she just readed too much zombie hentai off the internet and figured she'd get herself a taste). Oh, Nemesis also randomly shows up to spray people full of bullets. Mary Sue Alice rendezvous with Jill's team (she's also accompanied by a couple of expendable extras. You know they're expendable extras because no one mentions their names much, and they don't have any skills to speak of). Jill notes that Alice is pretty much killing zombies bare-handed. She might as well say that Alice's ass is hot, because that's fucking understating the obvious. Cue drama about Alice being infected with the T-Virus (which for some BIZARRE reason, turns her into Superbitch instead of a zombie), expendable extra keeping Jill from putting a bullet in Alice's head and screwing up the only chance of correcting the most basic mistake the director made (oh yeah, he also wrote the script). Somewhere along the way, they run into Carlos Oliveira of the Umbrella's anti-biohazard team (he's the guy who keeps Jill Valentine from dying to the T-Virus in RE3, in case anyone forgot. You play briefly as him). Nemesis shows up again, nothing new. He ain't even saying "STARS". Some black guy full of bling gets spared because he drops his weapon in front of Nemesis.
The dude who helped create the T-Virus and its antidote contacts Team Hopeless by tapping into the public service telephones of the city. He proposes to get them out if they'll fetch his daughter, whom happens to be hiding at her high school. They go there, lose a couple more extras, Alice somehow manages to set ONLY the school's cafeteria on fire to kill a couple of dogs (despite having killed them before with matrix kicks in the first movie, that's BEFORE she went superbitch, folks), and then they set out to go to the extraction point, which is on top of a building filled with guards that hasn't been overrun for some reason. Cue Team Hopeless slaughtering the guards. No good, because the fucker who's the scientist's superior uses him as a hostage. Then he forces Alice and Nemesis to fight by shooting the hostage in the head and promising to do the same to the little girl. I was hoping against hope Nemesis would KILL the bitch, Jill would escape, and we could get on with the program and make this franchise better. But noooooo. Alice manages to impale Nemesis, and somehow they all get on board the chopper that was conveniently awaiting them there (oh yeah, extraction point, I forgot). For karmic vengeance, AFTER they departed, superior fucker gets overrun by zombies, including his ex-hostage, whom seems to zombify for no good apparent reason. Apparently something to do with the virus being transmissible airborne, which brings to mind HOW THE FUCK THE MOVIE LASTED THAT LONG, since the virus kills and zombifies once it's in your system. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, the little girl had a pack full of antivirus.
Then they remember they were in a hurry because someone decided to drop a nuke on Raccoon city. The helicopter crashes, everyone apparently survives. Cue the highest point of the entire series: naked Milla Jovovich. She wakes up and decides to kick her way out of wherever they happened to be holding her. Oh, and she apparently can kill people with her mind now. On the way out, someone mentions activating a program, she meets up with Team Hopeless, now a bunch of Umbrella suits, and the second movie ends, just like that.
So I figure, thank fucking God. Now she can come back as a villain in the next movie and get a bullet in her brain the way she so richly deserves.
But Paul W.S. Andersen will have none of that. No, he chooses to kick my hopes in the nutsack again. Instead, the world goes Mad Max. Apparently, the virus killed everyone and changed the ecosystem in a matter of months, while Umbrella sat with their thumbs up their asses and a case full of antivirals for a bench.
I'll kindly skip over the third movie. Suffice it to say, we're introduced to Claire Redfield as the leader of a convoy of survivors, the black guy with bling extra gets killed, and so does Carlos Oliveira in a nutjob suicide mission to break into one of Umbrella's last remaining facilities. Alice fights a Tyrant, killing it with more psychic powers she pulled out of her perfect ass, and then finds a basementful of clones of herself. She also kindly mentions to Wesker that she'll be dropping by for a visit. (The whole third movie is a homage to Mary Sues everywhere. Seriously. The only way Alice could be MORE Mary Sue-ish would be if she had LESS screentime than the other characters from the original series, and that pretty much doesn't happen.)
The fourth movie began on a good note, for the most part. In the first twenty minutes, they kill Alice's clones (which happened to drop by Umbrella's HQ in Tokyo. Don't ask me how they got there. They probably flew in by farting), strip her of her powers, and have her discover that there's no life in Alaska. From the screenshots before, I also knew that Chris Redfield would be introduced in this movie, which was a good thing. Despite, of course, the fact that the guy who played Carlos in the second and third movies had the right bodytype, overall appearance and attitude for Chris, while Michael Schofield had the right bodytype, appearance and attitude for Carlos.
Anyhoo, Alice is on a two-seater plane that looks like it came out of a 1920's airspace museum. (Apparently she forgot whatever vehicle she'd transported all her clones in on her other pants.) When she lands on the coordinates in Alaska where everyone else who survived the third movie and had no screentime whatsoever is supposed to be, she finds... nothing. Well, nothing except a disheveled Claire Redfield with the mind control device from RE5 on her chest. (They never DO explain exactly what the device does. Basically, everyone who has it seems to be either scared as fuck or mad as hell. And when they take it off, instant memory loss.) For whatever reason, Alice is doing a videodiary (probably to add more 'depth' to her character... or more lines, since if it weren't for said videodiary, there wouldn't BE any dialogue for at least ten minutes of the movie). For whatever OTHER reason, she decides to fly over Vancouver and L.A., which, as she arrives... is in flames. (Interesting little detail: between the initial outbreak and her incursion of the Tokyo HQ, there's supposed to be a timespan of four years, six months. HOW THE HELL ARE THINGS STILL BURNING?!)
She ends up spotting a group of survivors on top of a building, and after some crazy-ass antics, manages to land on the roof (said antics include a 2 meters tall guy jumping up to grab the tail of her plane, which as it turns out - as if you couldn't guess from the moon leap and the fact white men can't jump - used to be a professional basketball player). You discover that the building they're in used to be a prison. And from the looks of it, it was smack in downtown L.A. too. You also discover that Arcadia (supposedly the name of the town full of refugees, no infections, etc., which has been sending radio broadcasts apparently since the middle of the third movie, but which no one had noticed in between then and the current point in time) is actually a boat off the coast of L.A..
Oh, you also find out that Chris Redfield is locked up in a cell at the basement of said prison, and no one wants to let him out because everyone is afraid he's a murderer (apparently, Alice's psychicness rubs off on people, despite her not being Superbitch anymore). To note, Team Screwed (which is the designation for the team of extras in this movie. Perhaps Alice should consider stopping trying to find other human beings, as every group of people she runs into apparently always end up as zombie chow or dying in explosions. To note, the teams thus far have been Team Fucked Up, Team Hopeless, Team Clueless and Team Screwed) consists of the aforementioned ex-Basketball Player (whose name I can only remember because they decided to name him Luther, which reminds me of Lex Luthor), some asshole movie producer called Benett (he looks like he probably produced porn), some stupid would-be actress who can only think of using Alice's plane to fly people to the ship one at a time (despite the fact it has next to no fuel), some ridiculous asian dude (whose only apparent use is to soil himself), some guy who looks like a mechanic, Chris himself, and the guy who watches Chris' cell. Chris claims to have an escape plan, if only they'll let him out, and claims to have been part of the military stationed at the prison (therefore possessing knowledge that could be useful to those poor schmucks).
Anyhoo, Luther shows Alice around. And then he shows her to the showers.
Let me disappoint you in advance: Alice doesn't end up taking one. Instead, she hears a noise, finds out that Chris' caretaker is peeping, and then gets surprised by a pair of zombies that appear to be inexplicably there (oh, and they have the flower-petal-like maws like the RE5 Majini). She kills one, while the other noms caretaker guy and carries him underground. That's right, we've got mole zombies now, bitches. Why they never tried to break in earlier is a mystery for the ages.
So now that they've got their backs to the wall, they need to figure a way out of there yesterday. Alice's crazy plan is to let Chris out. Chris promptly points out to them the garage where they have an armored vehicle waiting, and a way to the armory. They could've even pulled it off too, if it weren't for the fact things must occur at the speed of plot. A bigass Executioner from RE5 starts banging on the door. They find out that the engine for the armored vehicle had been taken out for maintenance. Asshole porn producer flips, kill an extra, runs to the roof with shitonhispants asian dude, zombies follow as Alice and Chris swim their way to the armory, followed by UNDERWATER ZOMBIES (which gets me thinking, if the zombies have underwater mobility, why is the ship safe?). Everyone runs to the roof once Alice and Chris return. Executioner FINALLY brings down the main gate, zombies storm in. Asshole porn producer takes off with Alice's plane, people run into the elevator, Alice blows up the elevator's cable, rappels down the side of the prison a la Tarzan, and goes back inside. So they have the brilliant idea of using the hole the mole-zombies came in through to escape. Chris and Luther take point. Asian dude is too scared. As the others try to convince him, the Executioner's axe comes down on his ass. Hey, problem solved. Cue Alice trying not to become a delicious steak as the Executioner starts chopping left and right, then sends her flying against the wall with the tenderizing side of his axe.
At this point, I'm hoping, again against hope, that he'll chop her head off. Not so, he decides to go after Claire instead. She runs like crazy as the Executioner starts chopping pipes as he misses her, obviously with the intent of making her all wet. After she pulls off an Olympics-level backflip and lands ON HER FEET, she slides under the Executioner's legs Megaman-style, picks up the shotgun Alice dropped, and fills his chest with coins (Alice had somehow improvised shotgun bullets. With coins). He drops, you figure he ain't dead. Nope, he ain't. Cue Alice going in and finishing him by blowing his head off. Seriously Alice, when are you going to let actual characters from the game do anything?
They manage to escape to the ship. Well, all but Luther, who's left behind as a mole-zombie grabs him. You know he'll be back because he's black and he wasn't the first extra to die.
Guess what, the ship is empty and owned by Umbrella. Alice and Team Screwed realize that the people brought here have been used for MORE T-Virus experiments. Claire conveniently remembers that the people she was supposed to be with (oh yeah, she had memory loss. Not important.) were captured by Umbrella and she ran the other way, but not before they got a handful of her boobies planted the device on her. Alice moves off as the others try to locate and calm down one of the surviving extras from the third movie. (At this point, I should point out that I have a theory regarding horror flicks. The inherent goodness of the flick is inversely proportional to the number of survivors at the end. The less survivors, the better it is. Maybe that's why the third RE movie sucked so much. Survivors were on the upwards of hundreds.) She ends up running into Wesker. Little chit-chat about how he survived the helicopter crash at the beginning, how he's basically Alice pre-power strip but better (oh wait, that was during the heli crash), and how the Virus is trying to dominate him after it revived him, so he has to nom Alice to restore the balance. Oh, asshole porn producer is here too. He manages to get Alice to drop her guns by getting the drop on her. (At this point, it's confirmed he's a snuff porn producer, as he mentions with none-too-subtle innuendo he intends to do her after Wesker's done. EW.)
Claire and Chris manage to sneak up behind Wesker. Wesker mentions a big family reunion (despite the fact there was NO reason for him to know either of them in this movie). Alice kicks off the fight by trying to kick a table full of scalpels at Wesker. Claire and Chris start shooting at him, and he shows those really cool moves he did in RE5, which is nice, despite the lack of kung fu. Meanwhile, Alice is trying to fend off two of those split-head dogs. She ends up managing to kill both, as Wesker kicks both Chris and Claire into cryogenic capsules. Then he turns to Alice and goes for the nom. Strangely, he apparently got very stupid in a matter of seconds, as Alice shoves the shotgun into his mouth and blows his brains off. She gets Chris and Claire off, they empty a few clips into Wesker because he was already regenerating from his mouthful of coins, and they decide to leave asshole porn producer behind locked in the same room as (they hope) dead Wesker. Who, of course, ain't dead. He noms the asshole porn producer, escapes somehow (the door locking mechanism was shot by Chris on the way out. And it was a huge door) and goes to steal one of the choppers. He activates the self-destruct mechanism for the ship... which, it turns out, someone had removed and placed amid the parachutes of the heli he was in. (Again, Alice's ability to predict the future is uncanny, since there was about a score of helis in the hangar and she knew EXACTLY which one to place the device in.) The heli explodes. Cue Alice and Team Screwed talking about the future and trying to rebuild mankind and Umbrella helicopters sweeping in. Oh, you also see Luther's alive and slipping into ghetto lingo. And after the credits you see Jill Valentine with a device on her chest and instructing the guys on her chopper to kill everyone. A hint at another sequel.
I believe the only adequate punishment for Paul W.S. Andersen is being publically cockslapped by a moose, following potential sodomy if he insists on creating a sequel. But if you do, Paulie, do us all a favor: kill Alice. I get that Milla Jovovich is hot and you're probably banging her in the backstage, but her character is fucking awful.[/spoiler]
