resident evil afterlife

There have been a number of attempts at 3D in film.

In the past this tended to rely on people having to wear differently coloured glasses (typically blue and red). The film would have both versions on it in different colours, but the filters would filter out one colour for each eye, giving a composite image that when combined by the brain was 3D.

This technique tended to be quite unpleasant for long term usage as was demanded by a film. Although the different views received by the brain were a good representation of 3D, the different colours was the thing that made it unpleasant.

Another big disadvantage was for those of us who where glasses. Us specy-types would really struggle with having to wear the flimsy cardboard glasses in conjunction with our normal glasses.

The more recent attempts have also used glasses, but the actual techniques have been slightly different. They again rely on a filtering process, so that different images are presented to each eye, but in some systems they use polarization and others they use a physical filter that flicks between each eye.

Apparently this has more satisfying results, because there's not the problem different colours going to each eye. I say apparently because I've never seen a 3D film. The reason comes back to the glasses - the newer versions seem to involve bigger glasses that fit over the top of your real glasses and I really don't fancy that.

Why do I mention all this? Well, Afterlife was shot in 3D and it suffers from the classic problem all 3D movies have when you watch them in regular old 2D. See, in action films you've always tended to get heavily designed sequences. This is inevitable because things like stunts and fights needs careful planning.

Well, what tends to happen in 3D films is you get an extra layer of planning where things are also worked out in order to give maximum 3D impact. But when you watch in 2D this just gives you a weird "slowed down", plodding feel to the scene, which is never good in an action film.

The actual plot of afterlife is okay, though it continues the slightly disappointing creep the series has undergone from horror to the aforementioned action/adventure genre. Also, since I've not played any of the Resi games since the second one, there's a lot of bits where I get the feeling those familiar with the games will go "oh, that's the thingy monster" but for me they're just other monsters. The zombies also feel like a bit of an afterthought - they're there, and they do play a roll but mostly it's about other monsters and humans, since with humans you can have proper gun fights.

As a stand alone film I think it works better than the last one, extinction, which was kinda dumb, but I'm not sure I'd really recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with either the games or the previous films.