Could've been better

Rating: 7/10 (18 April 2012)

I was watching Resident Evil: Afterlife for the 2nd time on DVD. I'd seen it a long time ago and needed to refresh my memory. I decided to read the reviews on IMDb and I noticed that most of the one-star reviews came first. They're so misleading for such a high-budget movie and probably come from rival movie directors.
I agree that the fourth RE is too pretentious, hollow and a Matrix copy-cat, but none of this justifies giving it only one star, because it does have its moments; cool fight scenes, a fantastic protagonist, lots of cool mindless action, and a cliffhanger type ending. Clair wasn't bad either; especially her battle with the Monster was really awesome. I'd say it's one of the most memorable fight scenes in the franchise.
The change of style in the movie is a tad hard to get used to. I'd like them to go back to the original style; no slow-motion, lots of scares and gory scenes, some suspense, which is lacking because the movie jumps from one location to another before you begin to develop a feel into the atmosphere of the location; from a futuristic base to sky, from there it cuts to snowy mountains, then quickly to some sort of desert, the beach, the sky, the plane, the prison, the ship. Maybe if they had slowed things down a little and made the duration a bit longer and had spent some time on character development, we would've got a far more enjoyable movie.
What I didn't like about this movie was that there was no blood. Alice dips knives into the enemies' heads and they don't even seem to feel any pain. There's no emotional element in the movie. The survivors are as good as dead. Most of the characters are useless. You can't even connect with the villain. Nothing makes any sense. I hope they'll fix these problems in RE5, which I cannot wait to see.