I believe the original Alice from the first film is just a regular person who works for the Umbrella Corp. At the end of the film she is taken away and exposed to the T-Virus. I assume because the virus gives her super-human psychic kung fu action chick powers instead of turning her into a grotesque monstrosity is why Umbrella is trying to clone her.
Later in Extinction, Umbrella is seen making clone after clone of Alice, but like any copy, they aren’t quite as sharp as the original. In the beginning of Afterlife, Alice leads an army of clones to attack an Umbrella base but all clones except (presumably) the original Alice are killed.
Now back and business school, we did a number of case studies on companies like Umbrella, OCP and Wayland-Yutani in my Evil Corporations Marketing & Strategy class. Going from memory:
The Umbrella corporation is a multi-national company with interests in health care, consumer products, information technology, telecom, satellite and aerospace, private military and security, bioweapons, and human cloning. Normal corporations will try to dominate one or more vertical market. However, the weakness in that business model is that not matter how much of the supply chain you control, you still require consumers to choose to purchase your product over the competition’s (or no purchase at all). This requires expensive R&D in continuous product improvements, plus all the marketing and avertising that goes with.
Umbrella figured out through a series of industrial accidents that the research they were doing in the health care and consumer product space, while having some applications in the field of bioweaponry, had the unfortuante side effect of turning people into mindless zombies bent on destruction. You would think that large corporations want to turn their consumers into “zombies”. Unfortunately, focus groups have consistently shown that zombies tend to make few purchases and have few drivers outside of eating anyone who gets near them.
But what if you could create mindless consumers who you can control? By leveraging synergies between T-virus research and human cloning, Umbrella could theoretically create entire markets for their products - literally. Once the “industrial wasteproduct” of zombies, mutant animals, monstrosities and abominations have been properly disposed of, Umbrella would be in a position where they would control 100% of every market on Earth.
Certainly an ambitious goal for any business!
But really a lot of it is about Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Michelle Rodriguez and Sienna Guillory wearing tight “tactical” outfits while firing guns and doing gymnastics.
Just watched Retribution and I could swear Alice was just another clone, we see a whole factory line of her model. Which would make sense why she is the only character who cares about the other clones.