Hogan Reviews

It’s time for another CG Resident Evil movie set within the canon game timeline that will inevitably not actually be mentioned in the games! Hooray! Seriously though, as a die hard Resi fan since day one I do love these as a guilty pleasure and boy oh boy does Death Island play to my fanboy heart: Chris, Jill, Leon, Claire and Rebecca all in one story? Actually following up on character development from Resi 5 and 6? A villain with an actual interesting backstory?! (before becoming a generic villain in the end) Yes for this fan this was a great 90 minutes, if you’re not a fan then… well, let’s take a look…

Death Island opens up with a flashback to Raccoon City during its outbreak and we see an Umbrella trooper called Dylan Blake and his best friend JJ, but the two are soon told that only Umbrella VIPs and politicians are allowed out of the city and that anyone else trying to escape should be shot on sight. Things only get worse for the duo as the incident passed, their colleagues get bit and they’re told to kill them, which JJ does much to Dylan’s horror, and then JJ gets bit and ironically tries to stop Dylan from shooting him like he’d just done but in the scuffle Dylan loses it and caves his partner’s head in with a blunt object. The whole incident sent Mr. Blake quite insane with a combination of guilt over what he did to JJ and just general survivor’s guilt, to the point where he frequently plays Russian roulette by himself and only carries on his goals if fate says he should still live. Dylan, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is our main antagonist, and while he does go a bit cheesy with some of his dialogue and his motivation for targeting Chris, Jill, Claire and Leon is shaky at best, he still made for a fun villain with at least an understandable psychological reason for his messed up head.

Dylan Blake acts subtly evil while nobodies looking… and when they are as well, to be fair.

So after the first part of the flashback and the credits the movie focuses in on our core characters, with Leon being given a mission from Hunnigan about a robotics engineer called Antonio Taylor who was selling US secrets being kidnapped by terrorists in San Francisco and soon gives chase to a van which was last seen carrying him but is attacked by another biker who turns out to be Maria Gomez from the previous film Vendetta, fittingly attacking Leon because after he killed her father (thus having a vendetta against him, you see?) After that and a fun scene where Jill enters a house and deals with a zombie we get some little character moments, particularly with Jill who is making her first canon appearance post Resi 5, still dealing with the mental trauma of being mind controlled to attack Chris, while Chris is worried about fellow BSAA agent Jill taking too many risks because he’s worried that they’re getting too used to B.O.W.s and getting complacent, using Piers death from Resi 6 as an example as he was expecting to have him take over as BSAA squad leader but he died in his care instead. It’s a fun exchange for Resi fans given RE7 and 8 was mostly disconnected from the “core cast” that had normally existed (with the exception of Chris in 8 anyway) so these things have never been addressed.

Jill Valentine hasn’t aged a day! … Literally, it’s “due to the T-Nemesis virus” apparently…

Claire meanwhile is still working for TerraSave and finds an orca infected with the T-Virus so talks to Chris, Jill and Rebecca (who is still a BSAA scientist, or at the very least a freelance one they use a lot) about connections to the humans that they’ve found infected in the same area and it all points to nearby Alcatraz, leaving Chris, Jill and Claire to head over to the island and investigate and sure enough that’s exactly where Dylan and Maria are, along with Antonio, who escapes. Dylan releases the T-Virus but it’s a new strain that can’t be transferred by any means other than tiny little robots he controls and it makes zombies that are oddly really agile. Jill gets separated from Chris and Claire and eventually meets Leon in the sewers, the two of them having some fun scenes with a bunch of Lickers. Meanwhile the two Redfields team up with Antonio without knowing who he is and there was a great moment where the scientist distrusts Claire when she says she worked for TerraSave due to “the Havardville incident”, which was a call back to the original CG Resi film! Now there’s a deep cut, even I don’t think about that, mostly because the CG and animation is rough nowadays. Anyway, Chris and Claire get infected by little robots but luckily Rebecca creates a cure and heads out to the island herself…

As mentioned I really enjoyed the film, the graphics are the usual blend of very highly detailed but still clearly CG people with very realistic backgrounds and environments with very smooth animation, works very well. Also as mentioned if you’re not invested in the RE game universe you’ll find the plot basic and full of references you won’t know about and the voice acting subpar, because being honest it is, I’m just more than used to it by now with this franchise (got to love Leon’s dry quips throughout the film though!) Death Island lacks the crazy gun choreography from Vendetta, which is technically a good thing but I did find it legitimately fun in an obviously stupid way so I was kind of disappointed by it not being carried over…

Overall Thoughts:

The dream team!

Resident Evil: Death Island is a great 90 minutes if you’re a lifelong fan of the Resi game franchise like myself but casual or non-fans will find little to enjoy here beyond some good CG work and a few action scenes to pass the time.

Leon and Jill find Chris and Claire locked up and suffering with the T-Virus and soon Leon is infected as well, giving Dylan a chance to talk about wanting to take down the rich and powerful in the world to even things up and make it fairer for everyone while also wanting to punish Chris, Claire, Leon and even Jill because they dare to think what they do actually helps people. That’s, um… yeah. A bit at odds with his general plan, plus he tries to get Jill to shoot Claire in the same way he had to kill a friend which you think would just trigger his PTSD rather than be something he sought to do, but hey… he had a good backstory, let’s ignore that 18 years later he turned into a generic mad man. Jill escapes, meets up with Rebecca and points her in the right direction and runs to the docks. Rebecca cures everyone (for the record I believe this is the first time Chris has been infected in the whole of this timeline, unlike the rest of his lead character allies) and we head to the final showdown.

Rebecca watches her new best friend “white haired SWAT guy” meet his end in the teeth of the giant shark thing.

Leon takes on and eventually kills Maria (but not before calling her father “a dick”) while Jill sees Dylan, who says he’s programmed all his drones, injects himself with something (of course!) and says that he can finally atone for what he did, falling into the water and merging with a shark B.O.W. that had been featured on and off to become an immense shark-man… quadrupedal… thing. With a big tail. Claire and Rebecca stop the drones while Jill, Chris and Leon take down Dylan in a long showdown with plenty of weaponry (they were in an armoury, to be fair) Giant Dylan thingy is eventually defeated and the drones are all stopped, allowing for the classic “having a funny conversation before being evacuated by helicopter” final scene.