Bad Bitcharama

Resident Evil: Afterlife Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson Runtime: 97 min.

Sometimes directors grab an opportunity just to stretch their filmmaking muscles. That explains both Mark Romanek’s new venture, [Never Let Me Go], and why Paul W.S. Anderson has essayed Resident Evil: Afterlife, his second movie in the Resident Evil series, which he initiated with the fantastically swift, streamlined and compelling original film in 2002.

In Afterlife, Anderson confirms his astonishing gift for imagery and frighteningly good action craft. Despite the grim, pessimistic CapCom video game premise where Alice (Milla Jovovich) fights a constantly mutating, globe-threatening virus—like Ripley always battling those aliens—Anderson finds ways to depict apocalyptic scenarios that actually suggest foresight. They have a stylish, sharp-witted sense of the future and a dreamy, exciting faith in human resilience embodied in Jovovich’s lithe, resourceful, strikingly lovely Alice, as well as a group of survivors that include actors Boris Kodjoe and Ali Larter.

If critics and fanboys weren’t suckers for simplistic nihilism and high-pressure marketing, Afterlife would be universally acclaimed as a visionary feat, superior to Inception and Avatar on every level. Just look at how Anderson activates his canvas in the plane crash sequence. First, the shock of the crash is solarized in a wide shot, then he cuts to the interior where the imagery is frozen yet the camera pans left, moving through suspended time, characters and objects, all composed in perfect pop-art balance like a James Rosenquist panorama, and then the camera pivots—and in 3-D.

Anderson redeems that techno-gimmick which James Cameron foolishly hawks as a gateway to new perception because he realizes it’s just a play thing, not a New Age talisman. Anderson toys with 3-D for artistic caprice, constantly shifting levels, distance, perspective, layers. He’s a clear-eyed visionary who expiates videogame cynicism, insisting on imaginative potential. When Alice is resurrected from her android state (“Thank you for making me human”), it confirms Anderson’s ingenuity as a life force.

Afterlife opens with deceptively dark movie homages to Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, plus teasing riffs on Hitchcock’s The Birds, Terminator, even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when Jovovich and Larter team up to facedown a terrifying male behemoth—it’s a stunning bad bitcharama. Anderson never got the respect he deserved for his great Death Race. But now that opportunity’s knocked again, he knocks it into the stratosphere.