I mean, to play devil's advocate with Extinction...Wesker wasnt present, only his hologram so I dont know what people expected...its clear they were teasing him and Alice confronting in the future. About his powers? How do we know he doesnt have them? Its not like he will get up and demonstrate to others in the meeting. The third movie was exploring the more mastermind aspect of Wesker instead of a physical threat right away...tho if that was their intention all along Im not sure, maybe Im just covering for their crap writing because Im sure anyone could write something better.
They were clearly going for the empire strikes back setup with him. Wesker: "Get that zombie cure shit done and dont make me get out of this chair."
And now its time for that man to get out of the chair.
So Resident Evil Afterlife… is a mixed bag. Id love to call this RE back to Bollywood, but that’s only the first 10 mins or so. As im something of a fan of this franchise, I enjoyed it. The beginning and end were fun. However, the middle portions of it vary in quality.
This is the point in the franchise where you can see the wheels come off a bit, with an over-reliance on CGI and 3D gimmicks inspired by the Avatar craze of the time. There’s a little less of a shit given for continuity (Remember the cure plotline? gone) and it has some of the funniest bits of unintentional hilarity out of all them so far.
Describing the plot is a little difficult… This franchise has had a bad habit of having interesting ending teasers for its movies and then either going in a completely different direction or just failing to utilize it properly. I failed to mention this before, but at the very end of Extinction Alice comes across an entire clone army of herself. In this, she immediately sends this army of clones into the meat grinder that is Tokyo and gets them all killed without any remorse or mention afterwards. Not that I mind much, as I enjoy that kind of delightful retardation. They just could have played the star wars angle a bit more for meme potential.
So yeah, Wesker is in Tokyo for some reason. They replaced Jason O'Mara with Shawn Roberts and he does a pretty nice ham fisted job of playing the character. I don’t think they get any more RE5 if they tried. So anyway.. The clones get Wesker to bomb the shit out of Tokyo and then the movie has a hilarious 3D plane crash because he was dumb enough to not put the plane on autopilot while he was kicking the shit out of Alice.
Interestingly enough, they actually nerfed Alice. After Wesker injects her with a serum, she can’t use her powers and is basically a normal RE hero now. So on one hand she’s less Bollywood badass, and on the other she has more screentime now. Did not mind one bit, as I have consistently enjoyed her performance across all these movies. Regardless of the limited potential of the writing, she does well when she’s allowed to have quiet moments of reflection and interaction.
So 6 months after this plane crash, she goes and flies a yak-52 plane looking for the survivors who went out to Alaska. She finds only an amnesiac Claire and has no plan or idea of what to do. So decides to just randomly take a flyby of the western coastline and ends up in Hollywood. Which surprisingly looks a lot better than the desert hellhole of las Vegas. There’s trees!
They find a group of surviving celebrity’s (and one marine) on top of this prison surrounded by zombies and decide to land and help em out. This middle section is undoubtedly the weakest part of the movie. It feels less like Resident evil and more like a shittyer version of the walking dead. The stakes were so dam low compared to the last couple movies. I couldn’t have cared less for any of these OC characters and they are all forgettable. But.. this section does have one really bright spot.
CHRIS PRISON BREAK REDFIELD!
I legit enjoyed Wentworth Miller’s performance in this, You can tell they brought him in more for prison break then anything else, but he did the role justice and I liked how they used him in it. The lore on him being in Hollywood is fucking ridiculous though. Apparently he was transferred there to help the military during the initial outbreak and got locked up by the prisoners for shits and giggles before they left. So he’s basically been in a cell for almost 6 years while the world was burning because these dumbass celebrity’s didn’t trust him. AND YET, somehow Wesker knows who he and claire are. Bonkers shit.
Even better, this film is clock full of fucking RE5 plagas zombies, right down to the Executioner enemy from the opening of 5. Why? No reason aside from the fact that RE5 released a year before this movie. Even Wesker has that plagas mouth shit. Rule of the cool baby!
Eventually the zombies finally start trying to bust though the walls and things get fun again. The Executioner starts hitting this gate with the hammer and it’s hilarious because he is just lightly taping it. Black guy celeb made me bust a gut when he pathetically swings an ax at him and the zombies. Just some limp wristed girly shit, from a tough muscle man. Wish I could find a clip.
Then we go balls to the walls with zombie asskicking action and Alice uses her secret weapon. Quarter shotgun!
This I like!
Claire gets a badass action scene too! (mostly)
Eventually everybody else gets taken out and it suddenly becomes the adventures of Alice, Chris and Clare. I am 100% on board with this. They have good chemistry and have a fun team dynamic. I do wish there was more interaction between Chris and Clare, her amnesia makes their relationship a borderline moot point. Apparently they did plan to film some flashbacks that were cut.
So they go to this ship I forgot to talk about, that’s promising safety and security and was the origin of the Alaska message. Find out that no shit, its an umbrella trap that’s containing the rest of the survivors in stasis.
Then we get the final fight of the movie. Wesker vs everybody, cheap Bollywood action at its finest!
But that’s not even the best part! The best part is where Chris starts slobbering out Clare’s name and they leave it in!
So yada yada, The good guys win, Wesker gets pwned and then umbrella helis come in to kidnap everybody.
I have to admit this is the worst one so far. I enjoyed a good chunk of it, but it felt unbalanced and rushed compared to the other ones. It definitely needed more polish to bring it in line with the quality of the last movie. But as a film that basically requires you to watch the other three? Still some stupid fun.
The one thing that sucks ass is apparently they don’t bring Back Chris after this. Dam shame. He’s not dead or anything, they just have him stashed in a lab or prison somewhere lore wise.
