89 - Resident Evil: Afterlife

    After an army of clones of Alice take their revenge on Umbrella in Japan, Alice tries to find a safe haven in a place called Arcadia in Alaska. Then Alice makes her way down to Los Angeles, finding a small group of survivors living in a prison.  Then she finds that there's an Arcadia off the coast nearby, a large ship.

    The fourth Resident Evil theatrical movie is roughly as much fun as the third one was.  And I feel similarly about both of them.
    I like them, and it's hard to justify why I do.  I own Resident Evil: Extinction, as well as this one.  I remember seeing the first two movies in the theater, and feeling disappointed, and sort of confused by them.  But when I saw these two, I was able to ignore the problems that having an incomprehensible plot brings.
    One thing that usually sticks out is that there are characters and creatures introduced without any work put in to identify them.  About halfway through this movie, we start to see the Axeman.  He's a massive guy, wearing an executioner's hood, dragging a giant sledgehammer/axe.  We see him approaching the jail.  Then we see him working on hammering down the gate outside the prison.  One of the characters shoots him in the head.  This doesn't seem to slow him down.  Then we get to have a fight between the two female leads and him.  Suddenly, he's vulnerable to gunfire.

    I did some research afterward, and found that the Axeman does exist in the games, but doesn't play a role anything near what this was.  But do I mind that they invented a unique character, they skipped over what it is, how it came to exist, what motivation is has… and instead made it into a conspicuous plot device to force them to leave the prison.
    There's also a massive gap in the story.  After leaving the prison by the sewers, the next we see the characters, they're on a boat on the way to the Arcadia.  There is a line of dialogue that sets this up, saying that they would follow the sewers to the coast.  But it's actually a little jarring.

    Seeing the movie on Blu-ray was interesting.  Some of the sequences look amazing.  There's a lot of slow-motion in this movie, and those sequences were shot originally at 200 frames per second, which comes off incredibly clear.  But there's also an absurd amount of CG work in the movie, and a lot of that looks very processed.  Is that a problem?  Actually, no.  I still feel just as good about this as I ever have.