What exactly is wrong overall with the Alien series of films, and why don't the directors and writers seem to be able to

Imo the main problem with Alien3 is that no one wanted to make it. At least not the producers at Brandywine nor Sigourney Weaver. But Fox really needed a sequel. Giler and Hill had a good original treatment idea, but they got the wrong scriptwriters for it, and Ridley Scott wasn’t available to direct. Renny Harlin’s idea of exploring the Alien home world was interesting but would be too costly to make in the 80s.

Then Sigourney Weaver got too heavily involved and demanded all these stipulations for the movie to have no guns, Ripley to have sex with an alien, and Ripley to die. The studio went with 1 and 3 and the movie sucked royally because of it.

Alien3 is a decent movie on its own, but as an Alien sequel it is no where near up to par.

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I LOVE this series.

It's probably my favorite.

But it's the same old stuff done over and over. The Aliens are always chasing after someone. And someone wins in the end?

Humans?
Aliens?

What more else is there to work with?

I think the series should have ended with Aliens.

I think the problem may be really simple ... when they wrote the original Alien they conceived it as a monster in the haunted house, and then as they went along tried to add in features that made the movie mysterious and bigger than it was, but with no real feeling or idea what or why.

Now, those same people cannot put themselves in a science fiction mindset or appreciate the ideas of others, so they just continue with nonsense, ... and then partially because if you make too much sense people get bored or feel no tension.

They know the realities of the market for this movie. Lots of old people who saw the original will go see anything that comes out in this alien universe by Ridley out of sentimental reasons ... so they don't really care much about what they do. I think the series is dominated by whatever they think will make money ... that's the bottom line.

I don't know why the studio would mess with Ridley's ideas, unless he is going senile, which from hearing him talk about this in interviews maybe he is. His comments on Alien and the sequels have been contradictory and kind of silly for the most part.

But look at Alien and compare it with other series and the sequels are almost all universally bad .. like Star Wars. They don't care, they know they will make money.

I'll probably be ridiculed for this, but, for me at least, the Alien series started to go wrong with Aliens.

Alien introduced us to this unique, terrifying creature, that was virtually unstoppable.. It bled acid, it was as vicious as hell, and the life cycle was enough to make your skin crawl.. If it didn't eat you, it would inject an enzyme that metamorphosed you into an Ovomorph, which would give rise to the Face Hugger, Chestburster, then back to the Xenomorph, completing the cycle of life.

Aliens changed all that. It introduced the Queen, destroying the originality of the Alien lifecycle, and meant that they could now be produced en-masse, the Ovomorph became as egg, and in so doing, the Xenomorph was changed from 'the perfect organism' into an insect.. A large, nasty one, admittedly, but an insect nonetheless that could now be dispatched with nothing more than a shotgun.. As good a movie as Aliens is, it took the horror out of the Alien and became an action movie, plain and simple.

Fincher tried to rectify this with Alien 3, and, with the extended cut at least, he pretty much exceeded. He even introduced the fact that the adult Xeno, anatomically, would resemble the host.. It stood on two legs in the original, and was a fast, four legged beast in Alien 3. He even brought back the almost unstoppable nature of the Xeno with the molten lead.

It again tripped up with Resurrection.. That could have been such a good movie, but that hybrid destroyed it, again trying to make the alien something that it wasn't.

Personally I loved Prometheus, with it's explanations of the early Xeno and the 'Creators', and the only real problem I saw with Covenant was the fact that it didn't lead straight on from Prometheus, but that was done to try and keep the fans happy, both are decent movies. If you ever get the chance to see the 'Chaos' fan-edits of either you should, especially Covenant, as cut scenes are re-inserted explaining the events since Prometheus.

I think the thing people forget is that there's no point in repeating the same thing twice, and so Aliens is a very proper, logical, intelligent continuation from the first film.

Do I think they could have nailed home how dangerous a group of xenomorphs were? Absolutely. One of the biggest issues is that the only way we know that xenos can become cannon fodder the way they're depicted in the film is because of the weapons the Colonial Marines are using. They sort of rattle through this during the drop down to the planet, where Hudson explains that they're using caseless explosive rounds in the pulse rifles, which is why the xenos were exploding upon impact when the marines were lighting them up.

What they really should have hammered home was that basic parabellums had no effect on the carapace of the xenos. I can't remember which movie it was -- maybe it was Alien: Resurrection? -- where they were shooting the xenos with basic small arms and it just ricocheted off their outer shell.

But I think Aliens really lacked a sequence to visually showcase that without proper armament you were SCREWED facing off against a xeno, something that was made apparent in the first film but only through off-screen actions.

It's also a shame because the AvP movies could have been perfect vehicles to showcase just how outmatched humans are against both xenos and Predators, but instead those movies devolved into stupidity, and Alien Covenant has killed any chance whatsoever at there ever being a good Alien film again.

In some alternate universe Neil Blomkamp would have been able to make the proper Alien 3 he pitched to Fox and all would have been right in the world. *sigh*

" that he wanted to make 'Prometheus 2' and go to the 'paradise' home world of the Engineers" - but that's exactly what he did ..

"The World's Greatest Monster Movie?"

I dont think so.