Saturday 15 March 2014

Esident Revil Afterlife

I have little memory of this movie. I did see it, but clearly it left no impact.

This feels like a Part 2 to Extinction. We follow up on the multiple Alice clones (which is dealt with in 15 minutes), and the Arcadia link. Then there's a long sequence of 'introduce a bunch of people' which takes up a large chunk of time, and the movie is half over before the real action begins. But the action does begin, and it's largely a long ass zombie fight going from location to location (boy, does that sound like what I recall of the next movie). There are a couple of boss fights, which you can tell because they involve woman looking badass in slow motion and guns firing. And one of the bosses is Pyramid Head, so it's not just one franchise they are ripping off (although this is from the game, which ripped it off first). But at the end... actually, not a lot has changed. Umbrella comes back and are big dicks. The End.

And this movie could easily have been the end of the franchise, with everything wrapped up enough. But no, the producers wanted more, so the end was added on. Thanks for that. The movie does work well enough story wise, with not a lot going on... but the pacing is weird. After the long introduction sequence, suddenly there are three actions sequences going on simultaneously and the movie jumps around a lot. Fine, not everything needs to be explained to the audience, but a bit more structure wouldn't have hurt.

I feel that this movie ties is more (loosely speaking as all the movies are loosely tied in) with the game, with the Redfields and Wesker and such. It's a bit late now for this, but the effort is appreciated. Thinking about it now... I'd say this was up with the first movie, and I can't rightly say right this moment which is ahead. (Probably the first still, as you need to see the other movies to completely get the plot here.)

One more to go... (before number 6 comes out next year...).

[END]

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