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Resident Evil – Afterlife 3D: A Visually Stunning Mess

Tell me one more time how I violate the dress code of this “white” party.

Rating: 5 out of 10

From the moment of inception each film runs the gamut of a seemingly endless series of choices before the final product shines its way onto the silver screen. One choice in that clamoring multitude is whether to attempt an overall balance of effort through each aspect of the film or puts all your eggs in one basket and let the rest fall where they may. Most people might think the clear answer is to go for the balanced approach, maybe reach a broader audience and critical support – that is a very logical suggestion, yet for certain films with a pre-built fan base they find their needs are much more specific. In the video game adaptation realm, in most cases the number one desire is to bring to life the video game essence, which these days means incredible visual elements. Crank that knob to eleven, drown out the rest and you just might find yourself the number one movie of the weekend, like the subject of this review. Will it gain lasting cinematic glory, not likely, but why glow forever when you can burn big and burn out? Sometimes the money is exactly the same.

Resident Evil: Afterlife continues the revenge fantasy of Alice against the evil Umbrella Corporation. This time she follows an emergency beacon to the long sought after safe haven of Arcadia, supposedly a city in Alaska where the deadly T-Virus has not yet reached. Once there, Alice finds the pieces of civilization she expected are not so easy to put together. She finds her way to a prison in the middle of Los Angeles, where she leads a small group of survivors to what she hopes is the real promised land.

It has been said that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, but as any editorial reviewer would tell you, that would make our job all but moot. Yet, I will say I find it sets up a nicer flow to begin with the good before delving in to the muck, so let me explain where nearly all five points in this rating came from…the visuals! Afterlife put all its money and talent into this one facet of the movie and it really did pay off. Bright colors that pop right off the screen and 3D effects that never make you second guess paying the ridiculous extra price for those glasses, specifically in the scene halfway through the movie featuring my personal favorite character, crazy-sack-head-super-duper-axe-pounding-stick-guy. The possibly overused, but perpetually enjoyed, mixture of 3D with bullet-time technology really painted this picture with a slick glossy coating that was hypnotizing to say the least. Even the set design was expertly crafted to shine, ranging from the picturesque outdoor landscapes to the stark white rooms of the secret Umbrella hangars, brought together a visual experience worth talking about after the final credits disappeared.

But every campfire rendition of “Kumbaya” must come to an end, and so I must bring in some of the downsides to the continuing adventures of our incredibly limber video game heroine. First off, the entire movie leaves you with the impression that director and writer, Paul W.S. Anderson, the video game adaption king, watched The Matrix one day and thought, “Man, I wish I’d made that. Oh wait, I can just do it again and name it something else!” Sure, the deep philosophical monologues about reality are missing here,  but the opening action scene bore more than just a passing resemblance to Neo and Trinity storming the building. Even more of an homage was made with the character of Albert Wesker, played by Shawn Roberts, but could’ve easily been a digital photocopy of Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith, even down to the bullet dodging in the final fight sequence. So much of the action rang unoriginal that it dissolved some of the magic from the highly powerful visuals. I’ve got nothing against picking up a technology or style where one film leaves off, but you have to show us something new. It’s even worse when the audience begins to feel the original film did it better, even eleven years ago.

Moving beyond the lack of originality in action, the rules created by the universe seemed tossed away from five minutes in. After Alice, played once more by Milla Jovovich, goes through what should be a physical and existential change to her character, she proceeds through the movie as if nothing is different about her. It would have exponentially more interesting to see her try and deal with those changes while still attempting to be the superhero and save everyone, but that idea was not even hinted at.  Ali Larter, continuing in the role of Claire Redfield, also undergoes significant emotional and mental shifts throughout the movie, but the script never gives her an opportunity to fully explore that side of her character. The same problem existed for Wentworth Miller, who is new to the revolving cast, but failed to find a single place in the movie to change the one, single expression on his face. Also, I don’t know if anyone else will find the irony, but I liked the idea of the character found locked inside of a portable prison cell is the same actor who starred in the TV show Prison Break. The only moments in interesting character development were between Jovovich and Boris Kodjoe, who played basketball star Luther West. Some may find the romantic sparks unnecessary and trite, but I actually felt they were played well and provided a good break from the monotone being pushed up to that point.

The End of the Page Recommendation: Resident Evil: Afterlife already brought in enough money to greenlight another sequel, but the franchise is now finding itself relegated to the video game version of the Friday the 13th series. People will watch, but mostly out of novelty and a gross curiosity to see if it got any worse.

Terminator Salvation: More Human Than Human

Yeah, that’s right, you stupid robot. Pull my finger…

Rating: 5 out of 10

I’m going to change up my tactic for you. I’m going to make an effort to increase your enjoyment of this movie without giving away any type of spoilers. Great debates have been held inside my head about the formation of this review, so let’s see if I can get them all to come together in print and actually make sense. If I get lost along the way, please send a search party and ask them to bring Nerd Rope.

Terminator Salvation brings the robot-battling franchise charging forward into the year 2018 and lands us deep in the war between machines and humans. The humans are being driven underground while the machines seem to be gaining more and more ground every day. When a miraculous tool falls into the hands of the humans which could swing the momentum their way and possibly end the war, John Connor has to make a choice between following logic and following his instincts.

Here’s the hint I’m going to offer you in hopes it will help you enjoy the movie just a little more: John Connor (Christian Bale) is not the main character in this movie! The trailer and the story arc up to this point have built him up to be the main focus, but while watching the movie your attention is drawn toward two other people: Marcus (Sam Worthington) and the teenage version of Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin). These two characters, greatly helped by the actors portraying them, provide numerous layers and poignant moments and steal the focus away from the top billed Bale. Bale suffers both from narrow development of his character and one-note deliverance throughout the film. For large stretches he just feels like Batman without the mask. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy him as Batman, but in those films we get to see him as Bruce Wayne as well and he achieves a balance between different sides of the character. Salvation doesn’t really give him that chance, so the blame doesn’t fall completely on him. Worthington and Yelchin, on the other hand, really become the main story of the movie and steal the spotlight. Worthington shows great dramatic range, but he does lose a step during a romantic subplot with Moon Bloodgood. Yelchin, who also plays Chekov in the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek (so far the summers best flick), lands another major role in terms of storyline and mythological importance. As the young Kyle Reese he single-handedly represents the past and the future for the life of John Connor, which is a lot of weight to be shouldering on such a young actor, but Yelchin proves he is up to the task. Displaying innocence and hardened street smarts at the same time, he manages to bring the much lacking human element to this movie front and center.

There is an argument to be made that movies in this genre are not here to astound us with great acting or well thought out plot development. They are here to create insane CGI and never-before-seen special effects to literally knock us out of our cushioned seats. In that realm, Salvation did an exceedingly good job. The robots were bigger, the explosions were louder and you could literally hear each and every gear and servo inside the machines as they whizzed towards our woefully under-prepared human survivors. There is a pair of impressive chase sequences which included some very unique moments and that kept people glued to the screen. Very little of the action seems to move the plot or story along though and in the end you begin to wonder what it was all for; you almost feel the entire film didn’t even need to happen. No matter how deep a movie is inside the action genre, the audience needs to feel that the story had a distinct purpose and Salvation fails to completely deliver in the end.

The decision to focus more on the effects than story falls in the lap of director McG, who gained massive exposure when he brought the 70s iconic TV show Charlie’s Angels to the big screen. It doesn’t seem like he’s really changed that much in his style since then though. It is still all about flash and visual onslaught to keep the people bouncing in their seats without a foundation to make any of it meaningful. Charlie’s Angels was meant to be summertime fluff, so it worked out well, but Salvation has a darkness and grit which needs to be motivated in the writing and direction as well and that just didn’t happen. To extend the olive branch slightly towards McG, he was definitely weighted down by massive paradoxical plot holes in the film created long before he ever dreamed of taking the reins of this apocalyptic franchise. Despite the poor directing and plot development flaws, the box office numbers are not terrible ($68 million opening weekend), so you can be sure the graveled and gruff voice of Bale will be heading our way in a couple years to remind us, “You are the resistance.”

Recommendation: If you are interested at all in seeing this, do yourself a huge favor and see it in the theater. The sound and picture are a large part of what makes this watchable, so don’t discredit yourself with lesser visual and aural impact.

Added recommendation to McG: Leave out the Arnold cameo next time. Seriously. Really.

Push: Borrowed Style Replaces Substance

“Wait a sec,  she’s only thirteen?!”

“Wait one more sec, he was in Fantastic Four? I can’t be seen with him.”

Rating: 4 out of 10

Just over three years ago hordes of people sat in their living rooms and bore witness to the birth of a phenomenon (however short it may have lasted). Heroes debuted and quickly gained a worldwide following as people everywhere attached themselves to the notion of ordinary people suddenly becoming extraordinary. While being glued to the comic-book styled serial every week, we all silently asked ourselves what power we would want, what would we do with those powers and would we turn into a ‘hero’ or a ‘villain’. No matter what the end result of those internal polls was, we were hooked to the live-action X-Men update and the rest of Hollywood was quick to make a note of that. Cut to three years later, Heroes is fighting to regain its mass appeal and while the shine has worn off of our shiny new TV toy, Hollywood unleashed their response to the comic book craze, Push.

Push takes place in a world where descendants of human experiments conducted under the Nazi regime have evolved into modern-day test subjects for the U.S. Government. Powers are unveiled, but not controlled, so a group known as Division is created to hunt down and collect ‘special’ people. In all the various types of powerful people, one group  is called the Watchers, who see the future, and a young, inexperienced Watcher has a vision which she must change, because if she doesn’t, she and others will die. A ragtag group of mutant outcasts on the run is brought together to fight Division and take possession of the one object they need to bring the whole conspiracy down to its knees and finally find their freedom.

On paper you have everything you need for a youthful, superhero-laden smackdown between the forces of good and evil, but what Push delivers is a badly paced, clunky, big-brother-esque mess only working its way up to four points on my ratings scale due to a fantastic fight scene at the end. In truth, those points might be cancelled out since while gaining points for the badass action sequence, it lost equal points for proving it could make great action scene and just chose not to. I fully support the right to try and create something new in an over-worked genre, but there are particular criteria which remain steadfast and necessary, like a training montage (such a popular tool, the South Park fellas made a song about it). We were supposed to buy the transformation of a main character from barely being able to mentally tip over a pair of dice to yanking down entire building structures without any increased practice with his powers. Beyond the holes in the structure, the visuals also leave something to be desired since numerous times throughout the film it cuts to grainy, 16mm-looking stock in an effort to make it look cool and edgy, but while dazzling you with the flashy technique they hope you won’t notice the scene is either totally unnecessary or unmotivated. I celebrate stylistic choices, but using them purely to make up for a bad script is sacrilege. Another sacrilegious thing is using a cinematic style that is a poor representation of Danny Boyle. Slumdog Millionaire is not a fluke, he’s just that good.

Flexing their dramatic abilities in this colorful mess is a group of young actors with a couple seasoned vets tossed in for critical weight. First in the brat pack is Chris Evans, who is no stranger to the land of comic book inspired cinema. He lit it up as The Human Torch in the pair of Fantastic Four movies and I will give him a certain amount of credit for being one of the only things done right in those tragedies. Evans gets a touch lost in the current landscape of young male leads, but he has done a decent job in the roles he sneaks in. He actually gave a surprisingly good show in the dark sci-fi thriller, Sunshine (directed by none other than Danny Boyle, coincidence?). Evans plays Nick, our reticent hero with the ability to move things with his mind, but unfortunately for the audience he is unable to move them for most of the running time of the movie. Next in line, stepping out of her creepy adult-like doll phase, is Dakota Fanning, who plays Cassie, the inexperienced and willfull Watcher who sees bad things ahead for her band of misfits (does she possibly see the sequel?). Fanning is doing her best to remind people she is a teenage girl and growing like a chemically-laden flower. There are a few moments where I think they took her need to look more adult a touch too far, considering she was thirteen when she shot it in Tokyo, but then again, Fanning played a rape victim at twelve, so nothing is really going to push her too far at this point. She still proves her level of talent and in a few scenes manages to vault herself above her castmates, but in the end the project felt more like a choice to open her up to a broader audience instead of being base don the merit of the story. Camilla Belle rounds out the youthful runts of Push, playing Kira, the mind-controlling supersoldier escaped from government hands. Of course, she also has a few hidden plot twists up her sleeve, but those never seem to play out right or feel supported in any fashion. They mostly appear in moments where the writer was thinking, “I bet they think it is going to go this way. It should go that way. Logically hat way makes sense. So I’ll do something totally different and they’ll love it because it’s unexpected.” Such a simple and flawed argument. Bringing in a touch of critical weight, beyond Fanning, is Djimon Hounsou, who first burst onto the scene as the earnest and determined slave looking for human rights in Amistad, which won him a Golden Globe nomination as well. Hounsou plays Carter, a powerful mind-controller on the government’s side who is on the hunt for Kira and has no qualms about who or what gets in his way, even his own people. While there is no doubt Hounsou has the ability to be amazingly intimidating, his stone-like stares and deep intensity have no context in the movie and never really get the chance to grow. His smoothness is indisputable, but the audience never truly gets to see how he backs up all that confidence. Not to be left out, Ming Na and Cliff Curtis have side roles as a “sniffer” who can figure out google-levels of information from the scent of anything and a “shifter”, which is basically a fancy term for an illusionist, respectively. Both do a decent job, but I know their work is much more layered when given better environments to perform in.

My last issue with Push is it repeats one of the worst things about Jumper, which easily qualifies as one of the worst sci-fi flicks of last year. Both films fail to adequately resolve the main story and arrogantly tease a sequel they fully expect us to beg for. Although Push gets to walk a couple spaces ahead of Jumper in the line of quality, neither is deserving of a second go-around.

Recommendation: My review isn’t all doom and gloom. There is a kick-ass fight scene at the end, which hopefully will be properly emulated if the filmmakers use some sort of mutant power of their own and manage to create a sequel. Wait until this hits cable TV, unless you have never learned to properly cook a decent hot dog, then go to the Arclight for a matinee.
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Slumdog Millionaire: Rising From the Ashes

You gotta get on that train, kid. Trust me. It was in a movie much older than this one.

Rating: 9 out of 10

The last two months of the year always bring out the heavy hitters from both the studio pipeline and the independent circuit. It can almost become a test in itself to keep perspective about what constitutes a good or possibly great film. The bar of quality can get subconsciously raised so high that everything starts to either blend together or pale in comparison to one overwhelmingly powerful piece of cinema. Yet no matter how hard the struggle may get, everyone wins in the end because the audience is presented with a plethora of great films to enjoy.

I’m sure you see where this is going in terms of how I feel about this next movie. If not, please go back and read the first part again. Slowly this time.

Slumdog Millionaire is the story of Jamal, a young boy growing up in the poverty stricken parts of the big cities in India. Through a twisting and winding series of events he finds himself as a contestant on their country’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. His fame and wonder grows as he answers question after question correctly until he is on the brink of completing game and winning the grand prize. As most good stories do, this film begins with a question; how does he know all the answers? Is he cheating? Or is it written?

Simon Beaufoy, the writer of the screenplay, got the story from a novel called Q&A by Vikas Swarup. It’s true I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how close the movie follows along or how much was creative license, but either way, the structure of the film is a beautiful example of intelligent and well-planned storytelling. Each question in the movie leads to another flashback, a new vignette into the history of where Jamal came from and the struggles he went through to get where he is. It allows the audience to get pieces of information that are only pertinent to the scene in front of it without having to wallow through sixteen years of a childhood. It also breaks the film up nicely and serves as a nice reminder when the footage you are watching is particularly harsh that he does make it through somehow, since we see him on the game show. The true power of the story is the celebration of love, destiny and the belief it is still possible, no matter what the costs. As mentioned previously, some of the footage, mostly in the first thirty minutes, can be very hard to sit through due to a few scenes of child abuse, alluded to and shown. The tolerance level gets pushed nearly too far, but at the last possible second the film turns the corner and those previous scenes now become the anchor to where it goes from there.

Danny Boyle, who directed this fine feature, is no stranger to telling love stories in the most chilling or tragic of circumstances (take a glance back at The Beach) or pushing cinema to new levels of uncomfortable (try some of the key scenes from Trainspotting or 28 Days Later). No matter if it’s love or death, Danny Boyle always comes to the plate with something visually interesting and compelling, never failing to leave a lingering impression which sparks conversation even weeks afterward. Beyond those intense scenes in the beginning, there are numerous moments throughout the film which stand out. I won’t go into them all here for the sake of saving surprises for the theater, but believe me, they are there. Another talent Boyle has is working with the actors, which should always be the main role of the director. The performances here from Dev Patel, who plays our lead Jamal; Freida Pinto, who plays the romantic interest Latika; and Irfan Khan, who plays the police inspector, are all incredible and worthy of mention. Dev is definitely the heart and soul and drives the film, but his skills are only exemplified by the support he receives in each and every scene by the other cast members. Dev has only one credit outside of this film, but I have no doubt it will be filling up nicely after this film makes the rounds. The same holds for Frida, who actually only has this single credit to her name, but with her presence, talent and striking beauty, she will be gracing the silver screen for years to come, if we’re lucky. Irfan was quite busy before this movie came along and that doesn’t look to be slowing down for him any time soon.

Now although everything up to this point has been glowing and full of praise, this film not perfect. I had one main issue coming out of the theater and it has to do with the character of Salim, Jamal’s older brother, played by Madhur Mittal. There is an obvious triangle in the film between Jamal, Salim and Latika, but even before that appears, Salim constantly jumps back and forth between an undying loyalty and love to his younger brother and in the next scene betraying him in the worst ways imaginable. Some might argue it is an issue of control and Salim’s constant battle to keep it over Jamal, but I’m not sure it is supported by the story. Whatever the case may be, the audience is never granted with any explanation of Salim’s motives and I feel it harms our ability to emotionally connect with his character. It is not a deal breaker by far in this film, but since everything else in the movie was done so well, this little fact stuck out for me.

Recommendation: This is a true must-see film. If you miss it in the theater or it doesn’t play anywhere near you, rent it the first chance you get. Strap yourself in and ride out the tougher stuff in the beginning of the film, you will not be sorry. Also, not to plug another film, but if you like great films with themes of undeterred love, check out Brick; it’s in my Top Ten Movies of All Time. Lastly, if you’re a fan at all of Danny Boyle, I would be remiss in forgetting to mention the under-appreciated and terribly under-marketed Sunshine, which was without a doubt one of the best Sci-Fi films of last year, if not the last five years.

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