When the trailer for Resident Evil: Death Island released this past April, fans immediately noticed something odd. Death Island finally brings the full cast of Resident Evil heroes together for one big, Avengers-style team-up, while merging the look and style of the film series with the character designs of the recent Resident Evil remakes. The film features Chris, Claire, Leon, Jill, and Rebecca all working together to stop a new threat on Alcatraz Island, but when you see all the characters together, it’s apparent that they aren’t all aging at the same rate.
Death Island takes place in 2015, 17 years after the Arklay Mountains Outbreak and the Raccoon City Incident. This put all of the characters in their late 30s or early 40s. Both Leon and Chris have aged significantly. Leon looks a lot older than his Resident Evil 2 counterpart - especially the version from the remake, where you clearly see the lines in Chris’ face that reveal his many years fighting Umbrella. Jill, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to have aged a day from Resident Evil 3 Remake, and both Claire and Rebecca appear similarly untouched by the ravages of time.
The official Resident Evil Portal Twitter account confirms that Jill is aging differently from her fellow Raccoon City survivors, for a surprising reason. A tweet titled Character Overview 3 states “Her T-Virus infection has slowed her aging but left some psychological scars.” Nothing official has been revealed that explains why Claire and Rebecca don’t seem to be aging either, but some have speculated that their own exposure to the virus (Claire was infected by T-Phobos and Rebecca by the A-Virus) explains why they’re also aging slower than their male teammates.
This phenomenon has been dubbed the Young and Hot Forever Virus by fans as a way to poke fun at the way women are treated in the media. The virus reasoning is a convenient excuse to do the exact same thing Street Fighter 6 did to Chun-Li - keeping women young and hot forever so they don’t lose their cultural and commercial value.
To Resident Evil’s credit, it seems to at least be making Jill’s decelerated decrepitude part of the plot, so during a recent press screening for Death Island, I asked screenwriter Makoto Fukami if we could elaborate on why the men in RE are aging while the women aren't. “It is in fact true, it’s a setup for Jill,” Fukami explains via a translator. “She’s gotten infected by the virus twice or three times I think, so she is indeed the one that’s not aging. It’s an official setup by Capcom actually.”
Capcom seems to be using Death Island to set up some future stories for Jill, which has some interesting narrative ramifications. We haven’t seen her since she appeared in Resident Evil 5, working as Wesker’s Thrall to thwart Chris and Sheva. Death Island deals with the fallout of RE5 as Jill copes and comes to terms with the things she did under the virus's control.
It’s been eight years since the events of Death Island and we’ve even seen a few decades in the future, thanks to Village’s Shadows of Rose DLC, but we have no idea what Jill has been up to in that time. Death Island is the furthest point in the timeline we’ve ever seen Jill, so the fact that Capcom is using the movie to establish her agelessness indicates we’ll be seeing more of her story soon.
As for Claire and Rebecca, Fukami simply says it’s “also true” that they’re not aging. “We kinda kept it the same thing.” It sounds like Jill was the only important character to keep young, for future story reasons, while the other two were kept young incidentally, perhaps to make the Blu-ray slip clover look more appealing.
Check out the full Death Island interview with writer Makoto Fukami, director Eiichirô Hasumi, and series producer Masachika Kawata. Then watch our interview with cast members Matt Mercer, Stephanie Panisello, and Nicole Thompkins, where they talk about their favorite Resident Evil characters. Resident Evil: Death Island, available on Blu-Ray, 4k Steelbook, Digital, and DVD July 25.