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Resident Evil: Afterlife is the fourth film adaptation of the Resident Evil franchise.
Four years after the global T-Virus outbreak (as described in Extinction), Alice finishes off the larger remnants of the Umbrella Corporation and leaves its chairman, Albert Wesker, for dead. Six months later, she heads to Arcadia, a supposed safe haven in Alaska where the survivors of the third film were heading to. Alice only finds an amnesiac Claire Redfield, who she takes with her on a flight along the coast to look for another safe haven. When Alice and Claire reach Los Angeles, they find more survivors — and an unexpected surprise.
Resident Evil: Afterlife contains examples of the following tropes:[]
- 3D Movie
- Abnormal Ammo: Alice uses quarters for her sawed-off shotguns; the effect is used chiefly to show off the 3D effects, but the ammo doubles as a rather good caliber.
- Action Girl: Alice. Also Claire.
- Actor Allusion: Alice meets a man locked in a special jail cell; he claims he isn't really a criminal and says he knows a way out of the prison. The man is Chris Redfield, and the actor playing him is Wentworth Miller — who played Michael Scofield on Prison Break.
- Authority Equals Asskicking / Bad Boss: Wesker
- Badass Boast: Wesker delivers a particularly awesome one to Alice, after she gloats about Chris and Claire showing up.
Alice: I told you I'd be bringing a few friends. |
- Badass Longcoat: Wesker
- Battle in the Rain: Though it's indoors, Alice and Claire's fight with The Executioner falls under this trope.
- Bald Black Leader Guy: Luther from Afterlife seems to serve as the de facto leader of the survivors.
- Bilingual Bonus: Alice's Russian coat in the beginning of the film says АРМИЯ, which means "Army."
- Black Dude Dies First: Toyed with, but ultimately subverted.
- Blond Guys Are Evil: Wesker
- Bolivian Army Ending: Alice, Claire, and Chris defeat Wesker and free the prisoners in the Arcadia — then watch a squadron of Umbrella troops led by a mind-controlled Jill Valentine descend upon them.
- Book Ends: The message for any survivors to come to Arcadia falls under this trope.
- Bottomless Magazines: Despite being based on Resident Evil, the film employs this trope in heavy doses.
- Revolvers are used frequently throughout the film, but nobody is ever seen reloading them — not even when Alice shoots every zombie around her with two 5-shot revolvers...
- Played with a bit in that guns can be emptied of bullets. However, everyone just tosses them and gets new ones out of the bottomless bags from the armory, except for Alice's dual shotguns, which are only fired once per gun per action sequence anyway.
- Brainwashed and Crazy: Strongly implied to be the reason Jill is working for Umbrella.
- Brick Joke: Luther, one of the prison refugees, appears to die during the escape — but at the end, he's still alive and none the worse for wear.
- Brought Down to Normal: Wesker cures Alice's T-Virus infection at the start of the film.
- Bullet Time: Usually when a "boss" appears.
- Canon Immigrant: Resident Evil 6's Chris Redfield seems to be based on the film's.
- Celebrity Survivor: Former pro-basketball player Luther West is one of these. A faded billboard of Luther shilling fancy watches can be seen from atop the building where Alice lands. Bennett and Crystal also qualify, since they were a movie producer and a struggling actress before the T-virus outbreak. Luther and Crystal hate Bennett, who thinks he still has privileges due to his pre-outbreak status in Hollywood.
- Chekhov's Gun: Alice's quarters aren't for arcade games.
- The nuclear device Wesker detonates at the start of the film isn't the only one Umbrella made.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The mentions of K-Mart and Chris are this, even if the latter has a large part in the film.
- Demoted to Extra: Unless their name is "Alice" or "Claire", any of the film's major canon characters (who are still alive, anyway) end up in this role.
- Elaborate Underground Base: Umbrella loves these things.
- Genre Savvy: Nobody really asks questions about the Majini or The Executioner (beyond a "What the heck is that?" for the latter). They just deal with it.
- Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: The Executioner and the Majini just saunter into Afterlife with no real explanation, although it's subtly implied Wesker is responsible for them. Nobody is the least bit curious where a ten-foot-tall zombie...thing that can use an axe came from.
- Guns Akimbo: Alice rarely settles for a single gun.
- Helicopter Blender: Bennett does this unintentionally with Alice's propeller airplane.
- I'm a Humanitarian: This isn't for zombies anymore. Regenerating from the huge explosion at the beginning of the film caused an imbalance in Wesker's T-Virus mutation. The imbalance forces Wesker to regularly ingest "fresh DNA" to maintain the balance — in other words, he needs to eat people to stay human. Emphasized in that his mutations seem to intensify with each otherwise-lethal blow he sustains during the final fight. It's kind of scary to imagine what state he was in when he ate Bennett to restore the balance.
- Implacable Man: The Executioner
- It's the Only Way to Be Sure: Raccoon City is destroyed by missile strike to purge the infection (and cover up the evidence). In the fourth film, Umbrella's corporate headquarters in Tokyo is consumed in an expanding plasma fireball to contain an infestation of Alice clones.
- Karmic Death: Bennett receives one. Kim, due to reluctantly helping Bennett and hesitating jumping into the sewer during the escape, gets vivsected by the Executioner.
- Large Ham: Wesker is one here, but he's nowhere near the level of RE5's Wesker.
- The Load: Bennett is too arrogant and Kim is too cowardly to do anything useful.
- Made of Iron: Even after losing her powers and being Brought Down to Normal, Alice is still able to walk away from a massive VTOL crash-explosion and suffer a brief bout of unconsciousness after getting smashed across the room with a giant hammer.
- Wesker is a villainous Badass Abnormal version, given that he manages to recover and casually walk away from damage that action movie convention dictates should be enough to kill any other supervillain, right up to having a good chunk of his head blown off and having his corpse riddled with bullets by the heroes just to make absolutely sure.
- Meaningful Name: The refuge Alice and her friends are looking for is called Arcadia. When Alice finds the diary, there is a sentence in Latin scrawled on top of the page with the supposed location of Arcadia. It starts with "Et in Arc-". The complete sentence could be Et in Arcadia Ego, a sentence which has many meanings. One meaning is a memento mori, and if this meaning is used, the sentence translates to something Death says: "Even in Arcadia/Paradise, I am there."
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Wesker gives one of these to Alice..
- No Kill Like Overkill: The bomb Wesker uses to wipe out the Umbrella facility leaves very little doubt as to what happened to Alice's clones.
- Wesker is badass enough to apparently survive his own nuking.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Luther manages to survive being ambushed in the tunnels.
- Oh Crap: A nonverbal but apparent one occurs when Wesker sees the nuke he activated to blow up the Arcadia is onboard his escape craft.
- Psycho Prototype: Albert Wesker is implied to be this to Alice.
- Punny Name: One character described as an excellent swimmer is named "Crystal Waters"
- The Plot Reaper: A majority of the Los Angeles survivors are killed; they were in the way of the plot.
- Remember the New Guy?: At the climax, Wesker appears to know both Chris and Claire despite no indication the characters have any history together in the universe of the films, since Wesker is Chairman of Umbrella and Chris is ex-army rather than STARS.
- The Renfield: In exchange for his survival, Bennett ends up becoming Wesker's willing — and still-self-aware — Majini henchman. Wesker should have picked a better sidekick.
- Retcon: In the beginning of Extinction, the voiceover says that the T-Virus destroyed the environment and showed all the water on Earth drying up. Notwithstanding the impossibility of the water disappearing, that plot point doesn't even survive the end of the film it appears in: Tokyo is shown in a rainstorm at the end. By Afterlife, the Pacific Ocean is right back where they left it.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The Umbrella minions aboard the Arcadia jump ship when they learn their boss is eating people.
- Sequel Hook: There's one for Resident Evil: Retribution - Jill, in her battlesuit, is leading a squadron of Umbrella VTOLs towards the Arcadia.
- Also: A parachute can be seen opening in the distance in the movie's obligatory Disney Death revelation. This implies that Wesker survived the earlier destruction of his helicopter and that he'll return.
- Shout-Out: There's plenty of these to Resident Evil 5.
- Alice jumping off an exploding rooftop while holding onto a cable for dear life could be seen as a Die Hard reference.
- The poster may also reference the "death" of Trinity from The Matrix Reloaded, as Alice is in a similar position to Trinity prior to the latter being shot by an Agent in pursuit of her.
- Shown Their Work: The fight between Wesker, Chris, and Claire recreates moves and camera angles used in a fight scene between Chris, Sheva, and Wesker in Resident Evil 5.
- The Executioner's designed is the same as his game counterpart, save for a lowered HP stat. (Then again, nobody knows the strength rating of those quarters. Maybe they're a secret item Alice received after completing the last movie.)
- The only change to Jill's battlesuit is that it's purple instead of blue, and they decided to go all cleavage initially rather than waiting to show the mind control spider (in the game, she tore open her suit in a brief moment of lucidity to show Chris what he needed to do to help her).
- Smug Snake: Wesker is wonderfully slimy.
- Sunglasses At Night: Wesker
- Super Soldier: Alice, as per the revelation in Extinction. However, Wesker is also revealed to be the same as Alice, and it is strongly implied that Wesker was one long prior to Alice's creation, thus making him a Psycho Prototype.
- Super Speed: Wesker
- Super Strength: Wesker
- Surprisingly-Sudden Death: Nearly all the survivors die one of these, either at the hands of Majini or The Executioner.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Subverted. See Made of Iron above.
- The Starscream: Considering what Wesker does with Umbrella in the game series, it's notably averted with Wesker in the film series, as he notably doesn't even attempt to backstab Umbrella for more power. Then again, considering how Wesker was made the chairman and the implied founder of Umbrella in the film adaptations rather than a high-ranking member of Umbrella's researcher division who went rogue, this is probably justified as he doesn't even need to usurp Umbrella for his own agenda, as Umbrella is his agenda.
- Trailers Always Lie: The poster lies, too. The shot of Alice diving out a window firing SMGs doesn't actually occur in the film; instead, it's two Alice clones firing one gun.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Jill returns in a post-credits scene; she's revealed to be under Umbrella's control thanks to the same mind-controlling device seen on Claire earlier in the film. This is subverted with K-Mart, since she's in cryostasis aboard the Arcadia.
- The credits point out Sienna Guillory's role as Jill Valentine before Jill is shown.
- Wall of Weapons: The armoury in the prison basement.
- Bag of Spilling: Alice and Chris only take a single bag full of weapons with them, and they're either Throw-Away Guns or dropped with explosives for some reason.
- Word of God: The explanation for The Executioner and the Majini's presence? Wesker sent them.
- You Are Who You Eat: Wesker needs fresh human DNA to keep his T-virus mutation at bay.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Duh