The Undying

I suspect the reason I so enjoy zombie movies is that, in some ways, my life is a zombie movie. Not just the frequent zombie dreams, you understand. My whole, waking life could easily be interpreted as a zombie movie. It's like that line from The Sixth Sense:

"I see dead people... ...Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other.
They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead."

And sometimes, particularly at work, that's exactly what it's like. All these people who hate their jobs and what they're being asked to do, and yet they plod on. Surely they must have lives to get on with, hobbies to enjoy, real friends to spend time with... and yet, without fail, every Friday night (more often in some cases) they're down at the bar in our office complex.

So, naturally, I went off to see Resident Evil: Afterlife on its opening night. The original plan was to see Salt, but that's doing late night showings only now, so I guess I've missed out... The latest entry into the cinematic Resident Evil franchise seemed like a reasonable substitute and, despite none of them bearing much relation to the continuity set up within the games, and despite none of them being very good (1 was OK but completely unrelated to the games, 2 was blah, 3 was WTF?), I'm actually kind of a fan of the series. They're Zombie Movie Lite - all the undead, none of the subtext on the dangers of consumerism. They also tend to be seriously action packed.

And Milla Jovovitch isn't exactly hard on the eyes.

So the third movie ended with the revelation that there was an army of Alice clones... this one begins with Matrix homages aplenty, and more Milla Jovovitch than even I'd know what to do with. Armed to the teeth.

Bizarrely, the plot is fairly coherent - straightforward, even - progressing nicely from set-piece to set-piece, reliably killing off the chaff and granting miraculous escapes to the wheat (several lines of dialogue from the meat puppets may as well have been "I'm going to tell you something about myself that will hint at the manner of my death"). And, while it seems Alice is still completely badass even when stripped of her T-Virus superpowers, by the end of the film, there's a very obvious implication that she'll have them back in time for the next film.

Yes, that's right - there's going to be another.

This series has become a zombie itself.