Death Island is definitely a movie tailor made for RE fans, beginning with flashbacks to the Raccoon City incident while discreetly introducing new characters for the plot of this movie. Fast forward to the present? (actually 2015 due to the franchise weird timeline), we quickly encounter the familiar faces of Jill Valentine, Leon Kennedy, Rebecca Chambers and the Redfield siblings. Even if this character lineup sounds like a dream team, they aren´t quite working together but following their personal duties, basically following the events from RE4, RE5, RE6, Revelations 2 and the Infinite Darkness series and retaining the character development and characterization from these works. While the characters seem as stale and stoic as their portrayal on the modern RE games, Jill Valentine, a longtime missing series veteran, makes her return and is definitely the highlight of this movie. Dealing with the aftermath of the traumatic events from RE5, Jill has to learn to work in a team again with the help of her longtime coworkers.
The movie´s plot is basically just a poorly-written afterthought even for the standard of the RE series, being extremely similar to the plot of other outbreak incidents in universe, with the villain unironically having to acknowledge that our main characters are tired of dealing with such threats. The lack of creativity even extends to the virus´effects and mutations, recycling ideas from all over the series for the BOW present in this movie. The action segments of the movie are serviceable and enough well done to be fairly entertaining, although not quite reaching the heights of the other RE CGI movies.
Even with its mediocre setting, the character interactions between the main characters may justify the existence of this movie, full with cheesy dialogue and callbacks to other events within the series, Leon´s and Jill´s first meeting being one of the best scenes of the movie. Overall, Death Island is worth a watch for diehard RE fans, newcomers to the franchise might only enjoy the decent action scenes and impressive CGI animation.
