Zach Cregger's Resident Evil Puts a Nameless Citizen at the Center
By building the film around a nameless protagonist instead of a game icon, Cregger gets to reconstruct the Resident Evil worldview without inviting the casting arguments that followed Welcome to Raccoon City's changes to established characters.
Reporting from 1 source: Game Spark.
Game Spark's review of Zach Cregger's live-action Resident Evil film notes that the director centers the story on an ordinary citizen rather than series figures like Leon or Chris. The piece traces the film series from Milla Jovovich's action-driven entries through Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which returned to the early games while changing character settings.
Cregger's approach departs from what the earlier live-action films did with their leads. The review argues the Jovovich series drifted from the games' sense of enclosed-space fear toward watching Alice defeat enemies, while 2021's Welcome to Raccoon City reorganized the first two games into one film and altered character settings outright. The review holds that what matters is how such changes function in the work, not the changes themselves, and treats an original protagonist as a way to rebuild the setting while sidestepping that argument.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.