Resident Evil: Afterlife

Writer-director Paul WS Anderson's Resident Evil: Afterlife is designed, first and foremost, as visual spectacle; a 3D circus attraction that prioritises figures in (slow) motion over the lumbering plot machinations of a third sequel. This grasp at awe supersedes not just every aspect of the mechanism driving the film but the also the specific language used to communicate Anderson's extravaganza. Characters have absolutely no depth what-so-ever, operating, simply, as imperilled meat. The ensemble - made up of special forces refugees and victims - are depicted as likeable numbskulls, never asked to be anything more than attractive placeholders who don't so much emote as pose for an end times editorial. 

Anderson's film is given over to sequences, plot bowing out to centre elaborate fantasies involving the director's favourite action figure (and by now wife) Milla Jovovich. Afterlife's elasticated structure allows these newlyweds the opportunity to plunder beats and beat downs from the Matrix series as well as imagery and situations from the anime that informed The Wachowskis and, apparently, Anderson. Jovovich's stereoscopic Alice gets to play Carrie-Anne Moss' human missile, crashing through a gleaming tech facility, before taking on the graceful but expendable mass of the cloned Agent Smith. A moment of extreme peril for one ponytailed facsimile awakens the kind of concrete crumbling psychic powers seen in umpteen Manga Video releases, while a dastardly escape directly hijacks an apocalyptic explosion from Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. 

This is not to say that Afterlife exceeds or even equals the pieces it lifts from. Martial arts action registers as stiff and under-drilled while the film's gun fights are robotic, more about affecting a strong silhouette than stressing the power or danger of firearms. The film's special effects confrontations - usually revolving around Shawn Roberts' Wesker - are particularly weak; the villain's darting movement rendered as a stuttering smudge. What lingers though are the ways in which Anderson subordinates even basic tension to arrive at a crawling, hyper-detailed visual design - the screen frequently exploding with impromptu light sources. A shower room fight between Ali Larter's Claire Redfield and Ray Olubowale's towering Axeman is told at a snail's pace, every colliding element trapped in a temporal bubble, attempting to blast away from each other. The sequence is audacious in the sense that Anderson has completely abandoned all filmmaking decorum to describe, at length, the protracted beauty of unyielding forces hammering into extremely movable objects.