Resident Evil: L'Île de la Mort

I watched this movie with my friends and we all had a blast. Don't expect it to have a unique or well-written plot. After all, it's a Resident Evil CG movie. However, for fans of the characters, watching all of them interact in this movie is a treat to those who have been waiting since the original trilogy. Additionally, Jill's return into the chronological timeline since 2009 is exciting.

The main villain and his henchmen are very one-dimensional and flat, but that is to be expected. The villain has a tragic backstory that isn't even worth getting invested in. His motivations are incomprehensible. That didn't stop me from finding the movie fun, though.

I am a huge fan of the Resident Evil games and all the movies. So, naturally, I had big expectations for this movie. For the first time, we saw Chris, Leon, Jill, Claire and Rebecca together and I cant say that I'm disappointed, but I'm also not very satisfied. The story is good, nothing special but good enough. The villain is very archetypal but it has some interesting details. The most important thing is that the five main characters are great. They act as you may expect, having known them from the video games and such.

Now, the reason why I think it is not great and just good. It's all part of one problem: it's too short. Normally, talking about movies, people complain about the opposite, that movies are too long, but this is a special case. This movie lasts almost 90 minutes. It is very short and it feels that way. It should last at least 30 minutes more. The problem is that this movie should be epic, but it doesn't have enough time to be. Because you need time to build expectations and create emotion. You have five main characters and a villain. Each of them needs screen time. Everything happens very fast and you don't get any time to digest this epic reunion.

This is supposed to be like The Avengers for Resident Evil fans; all your heroes together at last. But it ended up too quickly and didn't exploit any of the big moments that we waited years to see.

I'm not too familiar with the Resident Evil game franchise, however I have seen all the movie adaptations and thought most of them are stupid fun. I was never a huge fan of animated stuff but since I rather enjoyed the animated movies from Resident Evil I thought this might be good. Also the title death Island sounded promising to me and with the movie taking place on Alcatraz, I thought you would be able to make something interesting from the setting. Well after seeing this I felt like we've seen it all before. The usual recipe for the animated Resident Evil franchise but with an even more massive fight at the end and an interesting new way to infect the people. Also the movie was definitely more action than horror. All in all it was just nothing new and had the same cool action scenes but also weaknesses, like our heroes surviving everything and didn't even get a scratch which made you not feel worried about them for a second. Another thing is, in the end fight there are conveniently placed weapons everywhere, which was not logical and only served the plot. I think for fans of the franchise this movie will not disappoint but also definitely is no masterpiece. [6,3/10]

While Infinite Darkness looked a bit dated, they dialed up path tracing to the max here.

It really looks good most of the time and styled like recent RE game remakes.

That's about it.

Although, you could say the "movie" is very efficient... short is maybe a better word for it. Action kicks off right away and it's dumb, so dumb.

Plot is on par with previous non-game entries, nothing really important to the overall plot. A side mission if you will, against some random evil doers. Zero horror, all the action. No stakes. Life saving chekhov's gun is mentioned 10 minutes into the movie and is used at appropriate time. No surprises.

It really is a placeholder, a franchise promo so you don't forget for five minues it exists.

Is the plot relevant? No. Is the action engaging? Somewhat. Are the characters immersive? No.

Listen, Resident Evil is here a long time and when you look at it, starting from the first game there is something Resident Evil almost every year since - so I'm not expecting someting mind blowing, given the way whole franchise jumped the shark multiple times during these almost 30 years. But, I'm still hoping to see one solid, good RE movie or at least above average animated feature. And it's just not coming.

Could you watch this? Sure. Should you watch this? Maybe, it's your time, do with it what you will but don't expect top tier horror animated action movie. It is schlock with dumb script and it looks good.

When started to stream this movie, I didn't realize it is a full CGI creation. When I finished watching this movie I was surprised to see voice actors was involved, as I thought the dialogues were for sure done with AI artificial voices. They were so soulless during the movie that I almost turned it off at some point. What kept me going was a great action scenes, slow-motion and nice monsters.

To be honest, watching this movie is like watching a series of a game cut-scenes. Granted these cut-scenes are very well made, it still at a level of a gaming studio and not a movie production. This made it very hard for me to rate it anything over a '5'.

I couldn't help but thinking how good this movie could have been if the actors were actually real human (like the legendary Milla Jovovich) that are able to provoke emotions with language that sound human and body movements that are not robotic as the result of the 3D models that are used here. That totally ruined a reasonably good story and great fighting scenes, but that movie would prob cost north of 200M to make.

I will keep watching the "Resident Evil" franchise since most of the creations are exciting. I heard Netflix series is coming soon, maybe that is something to look forward to, hopefully at the level of "The Last of Us" but "Resident Evil: Death Island" does not provide the entertainment that the viewers deserve.

Exact score: 49 / 100. Guide: No Sex, No nudity, very few curse words, lots of shooting, I would rate "PG-13" and not "R"