'Resident Evil: Afterlife' (2010) REview: When Resident Evil Became Generic Sci-Fi Action
By Dan Bremner - September 13, 2026
The fourth film in the Resident Evil franchise, and the one where Paul W.S. Anderson returned to the director’s chair after sitting out the previous two. This is the entry that actively turned me against the franchise. Even when Resident Evil: Afterlife first came out I absolutely despised it, I remember thinking it was one of the worst things I’d ever watched, which is an impressive achievement for a film aimed squarely at dumb 13-year-olds. I hated it so much that I didn’t even bother seeing the follow-up, Retribution, in the cinema (the first film in the saga I would actually have been old enough to see theatrically at the time). I had hoped that, like Apocalypse, it might have grown on me over the years, or that I’d finally see whatever the maniacs who call Anderson a vulgar auteur claim to see in it. I did not. I still absolutely hate it. An incredibly ugly, cheap and thoroughly boring film that tips the entire franchise into a headache-inducing mess.
This is easily the least Resident Evil the series has felt up to this point. There’s no horror left, it’s just a big, loud, dumb sci-fi action film that happens to share a name with the games. It drags in a few elements from the (already controversial) fifth game like Chris Redfield, Albert Wesker, some of the monsters, but this is Resident Evil in name only. There is not a single frame of tension, horror or puzzle solving to be found here. They well and truly lost the plot. It would be fine if what it was replaced with was at least fun, but it is not, far from it.
The plot is weak, rehashed and frequently nonsensical. It meanders between locations with almost no real progression, leans on every tired “safe haven is not actually safe” trope, and ends in a way that feels like pure setup for the next film rather than anything satisfying. One of the laziest decisions is how it immediately kills off the army of Alice clones from the end of Extinction and then strips the main Alice of her powers in the most contrived way possible. It’s a complete cop-out that removes the one interesting idea the previous film had left hanging. Alice then proceeds to survive a catastrophic plane crash with zero powers and zero regard for basic physics, which sets the tone for the rest of the film’s relationship with logic.
Milla Jovovich feels like she’s on complete autopilot, tired and just going through the motions. The supporting cast is mostly wooden and generic. Wentworth Miller’s Chris Redfield is a particularly weak, inaccurate version of the character. Everyone else, even returning faces, feel like CW rejects. The one brief highlight of the cast is Shawn Roberts as Albert Wesker. He’s clearly having fun playing him as a full Agent Smith knock-off, and the moment he throws his sunglasses directly at the camera is the single piece of pure cinema the entire film manages.
Everything else is a slog. Anderson leans incredibly hard on slow-motion and 3D gimmicks that were already tiresome in 2010 and are even worse now. Scenes are constantly interrupted by objects flying at the camera or bullet-time poses that kill any momentum. The visual effects and general production values look cheap and unfinished, the lighting is frequently muddy, and the whole thing has a green-screen heaviness that never goes away. There’s no suspense, no atmosphere, and barely any real excitement, just pose-heavy, video-game-style spectacle that never builds tension. I could also not get over just how grey and ugly the film is at every turn, the other films did not look this bad in the slightest.
It’s also shamelessly derivative, lifting heavily from The Matrix in both style and specific visual choices, while treating the actual Resident Evil elements as little more than set dressing. The physics, logic and world-building are all over the place with elevators, plane crashes, sudden monster appearances and Wesker’s selective superpowers all operate on whatever rules the scene needs in the moment. I tried my hardest to lock in and find the fun, but it's just dumb to the point of laziness.
Resident Evil: Afterlife is a colossal low for the franchise as a whole. It's not even Resident Evil anymore, it's just a loud, dumb and exhausting sci-fi action film that just gives me a headache whenever I give it a chance. A sobering time capsule of the awful post-Avatar trend of making everything 3D in the early 2010s. Painful stuff.
Come back for more Resident Evil content as we count down to Zach Cregger's 'Resident Evil' - Releasing in cinemas on September 19, 2026.
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Dan Bremner
Writer
Dan is a writer from Guildford with a love for all things genre, schlocky, and thoroughly '80s, and a part-time philanthropist.
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