Hot damn, what a mess!

Rating: 5/10 (5 December 2010)

HERE BE SPOILERS Wow.
I had totally made friends with the RE movie franchise: Not too good, taking quite a bit of liberties in regard to the source material, director really likes to shoot his wife in with high-speed cameras and play back in ho-hum bullet time... but all in all, harmless fun. There are films that actually hold some value in the fact that they are bad - they can be mindless fun, unintentionally humorous etc - and then there's just films that are bad. RE: Afterlife is one of the latter type.
Let's start with one of the film's main and (supposedly) high points - cinematography + visual effects. Sure, it's there and sure, it's been done with quite the craftsmanship. But I think we've come to a point in the surgical precision digital imagery for film that when done like in Afterlife, it tends to look just that - digital cutouts. And director Anderson's obvious worship for the slo-mo shots of Jovovich, CGI bullets etc manifests as this steaming turd with no substance past these things.
I won't touch the plot too deeply here, since it's sort of inseparable from the last film, but in this one it's clearly nothing but a shallow vessel for the director to "show off" (ho hum) the things mentioned in the last paragraph. In any case, my favourite part was right in the beginning. The last film's great cliffhanger undone in a matter of minutes. No exploration on dilemmas and complexities of having identical clones, better just to have them willingly kamikaze so we can get on with the other seemingly random plot elements that can be used to display more slo-mo VFX shots. Like a random guest star from Silent Hill with an impractically large axe. Did anyone notice Alice's magic powers were taken away? I didn't, not really.
BTW, while I usually totally miss most goofs, for a film so deeply based on visual exposition, it's rather interesting to see Alice follow a rather screamingly red trail of blood into the next random sci-fi chamber with pointless elements like green sleeping zombie guys, only to see that someone already wiped the floor clean in the next shot.
Both the script and direction obviously point to the fact that while Anderson's using similar elements to build his film as he did on the former RE films, he's become blind to how much shallow MTV exposition you can get away with without any actual content beneath. Also, while the RE films were never something that could be called horror flicks, the "BOO!" moments are especially lame this time round.
The acting's really not worth mentioning. The performances display cookie-cutter characters, but then again, I'm sure the script didn't give them too much to work with. I mean, how much more soul could Wentworth Miller pour into "Where is everybody? I don't understand." BTW, this film should get the award for most standard action/horror flick dialogue of 2010.
And what about that score? Can you get more mediocre with modern suspense/action soundtracks than this? You could probably get more emotionally stirring results by using stock music.
Man. Maybe I should watch RE1 again. Or Event Horizon, even.