The dichotomy of the Resident Evil movie lineage is a tale of two different lines. First came the live action movies first starring the cardboard cutout of an actor, Milla Jovovich and her useless hack of a director husband Paul W.S. Anderson. Where the first one was okay at best, then devolved to absolute shit by the third movie. Finally, in 2021, we get a (somewhat) faithful retelling of the first two games as one movie. Well, faithful is pretty loose. However, the execution was fucking terrible.
However, there is a line of computer animated movies, getting better and better with each release, continuing with the latest release, Death Island. This is the first piece of media where the stars of the first two games are all in the same place, at the same time. This is something monumental. On top of that, this is the first time the stars of Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 each were together in a long time. For long time fans of the series, it was absolutely crazy and amazing to see.
As for the movie itself, it’s a different take on the formula, and it worked. The normal zombie infection wasn’t happening. It wasn’t an infected rat or infected water. There was a giant fleet of bio-drones carrying the T-Virus variant. And the boss was holed up underneath Alcatraz. Dylan Blake’s motivation, however, is very flimsy. Causing the same type of zombie apocalypse that caused him to kill his best friend doesn’t hit. I mean, I get being bitter and mad at the world because your bosses put you in an impossible situation, but getting revenge by doing enacting the same situation isn’t it.
Seeing the different team ups between Chris, Jill, Leon, Claire, and later Rebecca was really fun. Each person brings a very different type of fight. Chris brings a type of fight where he just punches boulders into lava. Leon and Jill are more pick and move. Claire and Rebecca are the espionage type of characters trying to get the shit done on the back end. Giving the writers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with all five characters was a godsend. I hope, that going forward, the writers go hard with giving us more team ups. Give us more Barry!
The final boss of the movie was…weird. It wasn’t bad weird, at all. Just different. Dylan Blake’s final form wasn’t so much him turning into a giant biomass. What was different was that he took a form of the virus, and fell into the water of the armory, and got eaten by a zombie shark. In the next 45 seconds, Blake turns into a giant shark biomass fusion. The ending harkened back to the ending of the Resident Evil 3 remake with Jill shooting a giant plasma gun at a giant bioweapon. There were a lot of cool throwbacks in Death Island, the plasma gun being just one of them. The writers dug deep, and long time fans will love them.
Resident Evil: Death Island is the quintessential throwback to everything great about Resident Evil. I went in thinking that Death Island was going to be in its standalone-ish universe. But this was a culmination to what all of the recent remakes of the Resident Evil games have given us. This resurgence of popularity with all of these games just proves Resident Evil is going strong. Now, if only we can get a decent live action movie…