Resident Evil: Death Island

Once a popular tourist attraction, The Island of Alcatraz becomes the latest sight of a biological nightmare.  This time, it isn’t bites that turn innocents into the infected, it’s something far more dangerous.  Answering the call to action are a team of longtime fighters in the fight against bioterrorism and the undead: Jill Valentine, Leon S. Kennedy, Chris & Claire Redfield and Rebecca Chambers.  Once more these five will take on the terror they’ve fought against since before Raccoon City.  But will even their combined experience and cunning be enough to prevent a world ending apocalypse?

While they’re certainly far more faithful adaptations than their Live Action counterparts, the Resident Evil Anime movie series isn’t a flawless representation of Capcom’s megahit survival horror franchise either.  Out of the three movies (or four if you think Infinite Darkness was meant to be a movie and was needlessly chopped up into a 4 episode Netflix series) before Death Island, only one of them was actually good, Resident Evil: Damnation.  Everything else was either underwhelming, too familiar or way too stylized.  Death Island presents the most promise, not because of its premise but because it brings together a quintet of franchise legends.  However, just because we get to see Leon and Jill on screen together (for the first time?) fighting side by side with Chris, Claire and Rebecca, doesn’t mean the movie is gonna be good.  In fact, this might be the most disappointing of the RE Anime movies thus far.
 
For me, the real draw of Death Island isn’t just seeing the gang together but getting the chance to explore Jill in her post controversial appearance in Resident Evil 5, where she was kidnapped and brainwashed by Wesker.  Her time after that event hasn’t been explored in games or media to my knowledge and the trailers seemed to promise to do just that, deal with the psychological fallout of such a traumatizing time in Jill’s life.  But no, instead Death Island brings it up once or twice and then sweeps it under the rug in favor of yet another Raccoon City Survivor who wants to unleash another bio apocalypse his own way because blah, blah, blah.  Seriously?  Jill is front and center in every promo of this movie.  So why aren’t we spending time flashbacking to RE5 or before, seeing what she’s done since, trying to tie this event to her learning to move forward?  The minute I realized we were never going to get any of those kinds of scenes in favor of the action, I knew this movie was in trouble.
 
Don’t get me wrong, it is nice to see a gathering of characters like this and they do bounce well off each other, both in battle and in the quieter moments.  To my knowledge, this is the first time Jill and Leon have shared screentime together and dammit, I wanted more of this.  Leon’s still got the one liners and you can tell he and Jill have instant chemistry.  Personally, this movie could have been focused on just these two alone.  Cause when it comes to Chris, Claire and Rebecca, I kept wondering why are they even here?  Ok maybe Chris because he’s Jill’s longtime partner and was there for RE5.  But Claire and Rebecca serve little to no purpose in the grand scheme of things other than just giving us more RE characters in the same room.  By the time we see everyone assemble Avengers style and see that cool group dodge moment seen in all the trailers, I’ll admit, I felt little excitement.  Everyone, even Jill and Leon, is wasted on a mission that’s basically just another day at the office.
 
Death Island does continue the RE Anime films penchant for improving its animation with each entry.  Everyone looks more lifelike than ever (and man did they have fun animating the heck out of Jill, she has never looked sexier in her RE3 Remake look).  But such a gorgeous presentation cant hide more of Death Island’s story flaws and style over substance approach.  Again, we get another Racoon City Survivor who wants to make a statement with a bio attack and the movie pauses for what seems like a good third of the runtime so he can ramble on about his philosophies and why he’s chosen our core heroes for his experiments and…yeah like I said, nobody cares.  Again, all of these meaningless speech heavy scenes could have gone to a deeper look into Jill’s psyche.  As for the action, there’s the initial outbreak on Alcatraz and the tunnel scene with Jill and Leon that are both pretty good.  But then you get to everyone suddenly pulling random weapons out of thin air to take on the final boss and it just feels hollow and forced.  Not to mention the scale of it all makes it feel closer to Resident Evil 6 than classic Survival Horror Resident Evil.  It lacks that personal attachment to the characters seen in the games and instead just says “hey guys look at everyone shooting giant bio monsters”.  I know I had a similar complaint about an over the top scene with Leon and Chris in Resident Evil: Vendetta, but at least they were the focus (also that hallway scene is admittedly super cool despite the God Mode Cheat both characters have).  Resident Evil has done better though and this bombastic, soulless approach that leaves character development in the dust is so disappointing. 
 
Man, I was really looking forward to Resident Evil: Death Island or Resident Evil: Avengers Assemble.  Seeing Chris, Leon, Jill, Claire and Rebecca on screen kicking ass together should feel like pure joy for any RE fan.  But the cast and premise are largely wasted on a generic and boring RE Villain and action that echoes the lowest point of the franchise when it comes to the games.  I really wanted to like this movie but when you have a chance to do something different with a long time cast of characters and you spend it with them just being there and not doing anything special, well to quote Lelouch from Code MENT (aka Code Geass Abridged), “WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS THING?!”  Who knows, maybe if Resident Evil 5 gets the remake treatment next then maybe we’ll get the well rounded Jill story we haven’t gotten since Resident Evil 3.  Til then, this is one island vacation that needs to be skipped in favor of another playthrough of a much better story in a much better game.
 
3.5/10