The first move was a horror film. Some called it "a haunted house story set in space." It was slow, creepy, atmospheric, and the tension built very steadilly and very relentlessly up through to the end. The crafting of that kind of a story takes a very delicate hand.
The second movie was an action flick. It was a kick-ass action film from front to back with lots of scary moments of danger. Two totally different genres here. I personally believe the choice to make that sort of a leap off into the genre of action worked quite well for the sort of story they wanted to tell in that second film.
The third movie tried to return to the franchise's original roots of horror. It also tried to be slow, creepy, and atmospheric. But it didn't quite make the grade. It went for cheap-shot creepines such as multiple instances of super-tight close-ups of someone's arm getting injected by a syringe as well as other needless forays into camera-dwelling upon medical and semi-medical procedures for no other reason that to make peple feel queasy. That's not well crafted horror, that's low brow audience manipulation.
The fourth film also attempted to be a horror film. I personally feel the fourth one was only slightly better than the third, excepting that the final "horrible revelation" of the hybrid-human queen giving birth in a mammal-like way to an alien-human hybrid wasn't quite pulled off with the desired horror. Instead the spectacle of the "pregnant" queen going into labor and then moaning in the agony of birth pains actually brought unintended weirdness and even awkward comicalness to the final outcome of the story.
Alien vs. Predator was an action flick cross-bred with a slasher-killer film, and also a fan boy wish-fanatsy 10 years in the making. The fans were begging for it and they got it. As for my claim that it was also a slasher-killer film, they were dropping like flies every ten minutes in that movie. I personally do not consider that story to be part of the true canon of the Alien saga. It's a comic book-level side-excursion. The only way I would be willing to allow this into the canon would be if the character named Bishop -- found in Aliens, and also in Alien 3, and then also found in Alien vs. Predator -- was the founder of "The Company" all the way back in the earluy 21st century and therefore the knowledge of the existence of that "magnificent" creature which possessed "structural perfection" was first revealed to true founder of "The Company" via that adventure down at the South Pole. So the long-standing mandate held for centuries by "The Company" of one day finding yet another specimen of that creature --no matter what, even at the epxense of the cew-- makes perfect sense.
Alien vs. Predator Requiem. I can't comment because I never saw it.
I like the idea of "alien origins." I also like icerose's thoughts where she questions whether it's even possible for the species to have evolved on its own rather then getting artificially engineered in a lab somewhere. The very notion of a naturally-occurring eco-system of any planet anywhere in the universe allowing such a creature to evolve within its enclosed eco-system WITHOUT such a creature utterly destorying the entire planet is something I also have pondered and found non-credible. So perhaps the crashed alien space ship we saw in the very first film (with the one and only corpse of the giant-sized humanoid alien sitting in that pilot's chair -- or is it a gunner's chair? -- with his alien rib cage exploded outward) were the race that "created a monster." And perhaps the giant-sized humanoids on that ship were fleeing their own chest-burster-overrun-planet without realizing they had a stowaway egg on board.
