Notes on Resident Evil: After Life

What is it with the Umbrella Corporation? Not content with having destroyed human civilisation, they've set about kidnapping the few survivors in order to conduct hideous, inexplicable experiments on them. Will Microsoft go the same way? Confronted with apocalypse, will Bill Gates transport his top engineers underground, there to work on the development of their final nefarious project: an OS system barely distinguishable from the one before? (Who's going to beta test it?)

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In all fairness, Paul WS Anderson (he of not-to-be-confused-with-Paul-Thomas-Anderson fame) has made some good decisions with this instalment. For one thing, he's stripped the protagonist, Alice, of her super-human powers, not to mention her army of clones of herself. I'm sure I speak for most viewers when I say that it's hard to relate to a Ukranian ex-model ninja badass at the best of times, and all the more so when there are five of her on screen at once and they take turns finishing each other's one liners. I was considering rooting for the villain, Albert Wesker, who wears RayBans at all times and alternates between American and English accents (depending, I think, on how evil he's being at any given moment); fortunately, Anderson has spared me that indignity. It's just a shame he couldn't have worked in a shower scene first.

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RE:AL (was the acronym intentional?) is also an intriguingly tricksy film, in that numerous plot elements turn out to be red herrings. Is the brooding, gravelly voiced man in the Hannibal Lecter cell really just the victim of an unfortunate prank, as he claims? Yes, yes he is. Is the armoured car in the locked garage our heroes' only hope of surivival? Yes. Oh no, wait, it doesn't have an engine. Best do something else, then. Is that enormous, hooded beast significant somehow? No. Nothing is. That's the fun of it.