Where do you think?
I think the poor choice of directors for 3 and 4.
Fincher, before the Alien 3 selection did (if I am not mistaken) only music videos, while Jean-Pierre Jeunet was way off to begin with. He was no Alien type of director from top to bottom.
So why did they went in this way? Studio pressure or just poor selection?
Alien3 was abysmally conceived and executed like a BBC melodrama, along with all the standard sullen Brit actor cast, save the black american. It effectively killed off the memory of Aliens and tried to reestablish the tragic outcome experienced by the mysterious derelict ship in the fist movie. That was my only take away from Alien3 and it failed.
shareAliens was the first mistake, while it is a fantastic movie in itself, Cameron's intent on making a Vietnam type movie, and using his sequel to do that, changed what could have been a true out and out horror series by creating little more than an action movie. He changed the 'perfect organism' from being virtually unstoppable to one that can be dispatched using a shotgun.. He ignored the truly disturbing life cycle of the Xenomorph by introducing his Queen, turned it into little more than a giant space insect.
Fincher did his level best to turn it back into an 'Alien' franchise with his movie, and considering what he was left to work with when he took over, did a damned good job. Fox managed to neuter even that, re-editing his movie into what we saw in the theatrical version of Alien 3.. The assembly cut went some way to correcting this, and although it is a much better version than the theatrical cut, I do still wish we got to see Fincher's original cut.
It started to go wrong again with Resurrection. While it started OK, the introduction of that horrific (not in the good way) hybrid destroyed what could have been a decent movie.
Again, it was pulled back somewhat with Prometheus, and while it does have it's flaws, Scott does do a fantastic job of explaining, or starting to explain, where the Alien came from, and how Weyland-Yutani got to know about it before the events of Alien.
Covenant was a decent affair too, but with criticism over Prometheus, Ridley Scott/Fox decided to skip a chunk of the story and jump to the goings on in Covenant, all because there was not enough Alien in Prometheus, which then received criticism as it didn't follow Prometheus directly enough.. Fox shot themselves in the foot again..
As for Prometheus and Covenant, there are a couple of fan edits that do a fantastic job of fixing both movies by re-inserting the cuts, and adding the promo videos, then re-cutting them. Watch the 'Chaos' editions if you can, especially Covenant.
The second the scriptwriters killed off Newt, Hicks, Bishop and eventually Ripley in Alien 3 was when the series shot itself in the head. I’ll never understand why Fox did that, fucking idiots. It’s why I can’t consider Alien 3 to be canon, even though the assembly cut is actually a very good film in many ways.
Resurrection took Ripley’s corpse and just bricked hard into its mouth, adding insult to injury.