Quick Author's Note:
If you're wondering where the hell all the posts have gone lately, well, my laptop is broken.. Fried motherboard. Dude, I got a Dell. Anyway, while it's getting fixed, I have to do posts by stealing my wife's Mac and writing on that, which I only like to do if she's not around, like right now. Hopefully I'll get the stupid thing back within the next week. You'll know when I do by the sudden flood of totally awesome posts. I suppose it's ironic that I would write this particular post while my laptop is dead...
Now, on with our show.
I've said over and over on this blog that 3D technology in movies has got to be one of the most useless inventions in recent cinema, possibly in ALL of cinema. It can be entertaining when the film caters to it, like the 3D Muppet show at MGM Studios in Disney World - where Fozzie creates a remote-controlled flying pie that appears to soar out over the audience - but for your typical movie that doesn't involve thirty things flying at your face in every scene, I have yet to see it add anything but $3 to your already-expensive ticket price. I had thought it dead for years, but James Cameron's Avatar brought about this year's obnoxious revival, and in 2010 alone I have seen more films in 3D than I have in the rest of my life combined. Avatar was a visual feast for sure, but that was because Cameron and crew had the budget of a small country (around $310,000,000, to be exact) to make their excess of CGI look as real as possible. Even then, it just looked like expensive CGI. The 3D only served to help propel the film's earnings past all others that came before it. I honestly wonder how much it would have made if it hadn't come out in 3D.
Would you believe me, then, if I said that Resident Evil: Afterlife is the first movie I've seen where 3D actually added something to the experience?
If you're unfamiliar with Resident Evil, then let me sum things up for you. An evil corporation (Umbrella, named of course after the popular Rihanna song) unleashes a virus upon the world that turns most of the human population into a mass of mindless zombies. They have also created a sort of prototype-human named Alice (Milla Jovovich), who turns on them and fights for what's left of humanity. After three films, Alice has taken out several Umbrella compounds, made a few friends (and lost even more), and discovered an Umbrella lab dedicated to creating more of her.
This is a film series based on a videogame and made for videogame-players (that is, teenage boys). There's a lot of death, a lot of action, and a lot of Milla Jovovich, along with a handful of masculine men and other attractive ladies. In Resident Evil: Afterlife, Alice trails a radio signal to Alaska, where supposedly there lies a zombie-free encmapment of humans. But when she arrives, all she finds is Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), her friend from the previous film, and Claire is not at all well. Her mind has been scrambled by an Umbrella machine, but Alice takes her down the coast to Los Angeles anyway. I forget why, but it doesn't really matter. There's zombies need killin', and peoples need savin'. Alice lands her plane spectacularly on the roof of a prison where a few stragglers have taken up residence. Naturally, things go from bad to worse almost as soon as she arrives, and suddenly it's a race to escape that very few of the living will survive.
When I came out of this film, I had the odd realization that I had absolutely no idea what to say for this blog, no opinion whatsoever. It wasn't a good movie, but it wasn't bad, either. I was entertained, but only just. Characters died in remarkably unremarkable fashions. Zombies popped out and threw/spat things toward the 3D camera. Horror/thriller films, I am convinced, are the only ones worth seeing in 3D right now. When the Axman threw his enormous blade at the camera, you felt like ducking, and when zombies sprang out of nowhere and creepy tentacles sprouted from their mouths, you recoiled. You would anyway, but the 3D added just a little extra to the experience. But aside from this, I have nothing to say about Resident Evil: Afterlife. Nothing. Go see it if you've seen all the others, I guess. See it if you like zombies, or Milla Jovovich, or Ali Larter. Don't bother looking for plot or character development, and don't go if you have a squeemish tummy. I felt terribly profound and full of myself when I said to someone that, as a film, Resident Evil: Afterlife is undead, just like most of the creatures onscreen. A live movie tells you something, pulls you in, and leaves you feeling different than when you came in. A dead movie bores you to tears and makes you feel like demanding for your money back. This film was neither. It just existed in a kind of entertainment limbo where you find yourself floating through nothingness, neither bored nor enthralled, until the credits roll. Then you wake up from your trance and leave the theater feeling exactly as you did going in, only your wallet is somehow missing $12.
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