Sony released a new trailer for the upcoming animated film Resident Evil: Death Island earlier today and it has some fans wondering why some of Resident Evil's female characters don't seem to age. It turns out that there is a reason that Claire Redfield, Rebecca Chambers, and Jill Valentine stay young longer than the boys, though it's definitely a weird one.Announced in February, Resident Evil: Death Island is the upcoming fourth installment of the animated Resident Evil series. The new movie finally sees series protagonists Leon Kennedy, Chris and Claire Redfield, Rebecca Chambers, and Jill Valentine brought together to investigate Alcatraz Island during a zombie outbreak in San Francisco. Unlike the live-action Resident Evil movies, which only loosely adapt parts of the game's setting and characters, Death Island takes place in the same universe as the Resident Evil games. The upcoming movie will also be the first time Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine ever directly meet in the Resident Evil canon.As some fans realized, this raises some weird questions regarding the characters' ages. Resident Evil: Death Island takes place in 2015, seventeen years after the first three Resident Evil games, which canonically took place in 1998. Nevertheless, Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, and the prequel's Rebecca Chambers don't seem to have visibly aged since their zombie-fighting careers began. However, that's not true for the male characters. Leon Kennedy is no longer the wide-eyed rooky cop from Resident Evil 2, and Chris Redfield looks downright grizzled after 17 years of fighting the Umbrella Corporation's science experiments gone wrong.
However, those unethical experiments are the key to the women's apparent eternal youth. As some Twitter users pointed out, all three have been infected with one of Umbrella's zombie-creating viruses. Jill was briefly infected with the original T-Virus during Resident Evil 3, while Rebecca and Claire contracted the A-Virus and T-Phobos Virus. A side effect of all three genetically engineered viruses is that they halt the victims' aging process. One fan even noted that Rebecca looks a little bit younger than she did in her last video game appearance.
Some Twitter users were quick to poke fun at this weird little explanation, with one dubbing it the "Young and Hot Forever" Virus. Another pointed out how, while it was one thing when Resident Evil's Jill Valentine gained convenient anti-aging powers, extending it to Claire and Rebecca is just getting silly. Still, at least it shows that the Umbrella Corporation might have a future in skin care if it ever decides to get out of the bioweapon and super soldier market.
Resident Evil: Death Island releases in Japan on July 7th.
Source: GamesRadar