A collection of failures

Rating: Null/10 (10 October 2010)

Afterlife fails on every level of what makes a decent movie.
Which is probably the most fascinating aspect about it. If one wants to learn how NOT to direct, cut, narrate, explain, suspension curve and visualize a movie, this is where it's all in one place. Adding shallow characters, mediocre acting and an incredibly insulting script does not make it better.
RE used to work as a zombie movie. While this has arguably gotten a bit old, Afterlife is just without purpose. In hindsight it seems to be set up as Alice vs. Wesker or the other way round, but it does not work at all.
1. The action scenes do not follow any logic, create no climax and are mostly pointless. Some style elements such as matrix-slow-motion etc. are placed randomly across the movie without purpose.
--Start: Alice infiltrates Umbrella headquarters, killing the first guards close combat. This is about the only decent scene in the whole movie. Reinforcements are then just annihilated by her superpower-look, along with devastating the entire area. Which makes the initial effort to kill people one-by-one feel pretty much effort. After that, suddenly she has countless clones of herself for support, who conveniently all die in a fire when the complex finally explodes. WHAT THE.. !?!? OK. Let's ignore the script, it just fails.
2. Suspense/Cut: There is no suspense at all. Things happen. Any chance for suspense is muted by the insane script and the incredibly bad cutting, where the scene switches EVERY TIME as soon as anything remotely exciting could be about to develop.
3. Visuals/CGI: Afterlife has no "feel" to it. The Umbrella stuff is always brand-new shiny tech and of the outside world we do not see much at all. At the end, when they enter the tanker-like ship, it promised to be some dark grungy place. Instead, EVERYTHING was bright white. Except the helicopters, which were just black. Actually it looked like the CGI budget ran out, but it could also be that silly intentionally.
4. Acting/Characters: Cheesy and generic. Not totally annoying at the best times. Kim Coates wasn't bad in the 2 scenes he got, this is not the type of movie he should be in but he is at least interesting.
I feel this movie was only pieced together lovelessly to generate some new video game sales.