The
Resident Evil movies have elevated the "It was all a dream" conceit into the longest-running
Simpsons rake gag in cinema. In the series' expansion ever outward, continuity bends and narratives repeat themselves with minor variations that culminate in massive, butterfly effect divergencies.
Afterlife, the previous film in the franchise and the first since the original film to feature Paul W.S. Anderson back behind the camera, gave this tendency an extra push by incorporating some of the distinct styles of the preceding three films. It brought back the claustrophobia of the first film's haunted-mansion setup,
Apocalypse's street war congestion of bodies, and
Extinction's sense of sheer scale and devastation (taken one further by going from a national backdrop to a global one). In folding back the series into this new film,
Afterlife revealed itself to be more concerned with the self-reflexive, and video-game-like, aspects of this franchise than its straightforward upheavals with each film.
Nothing in
Afterlife, however, can compare with
Retribution. In a defiantly metacinematic opening,
Retibution plays a sequence in reverse, instantly calling attention to the falsity of the image even before it zooms into into a black void filled with screens dotted with scenes of the
Resident Evil films to this point. Alice (Milla Jovovich) pops up on one of the screens and directly addresses the audience, providing a recap of what has happened so far. I'm not one for lengthy exposition, but in a series filled with convoluted repetitions, incessant reversals and an increasing amount of clones, every little bit helps. Yet Alice's clarifications become amusingly irrelevant mere moments after she concludes her spiel, as Anderson soon plunges into constantly shifting levels of false reality that render moot an awareness of the story from sequence to sequence, much less across films.
