If you want something new in your franchise, this is NOT the way to do it!

Rating: 2/10 (1 April 2003)

Well, yes! After all these bad reviews for this movie, we can do little more than place the blame and I think, the blame is with the producers, who wanted to bring something new to the franchise in terms of genre.
This worked extremely well with the first two movies. After "Alien" was tense thriller, "Aliens" added a big-boom-action element, for which there couldn't have been anyone better than James Cameron. "Alien 3" tried to mix the elements of thriller and action a bit more than the second movie had done and, while being too cartoonish as a whole, succeeded in that and - to this reviewer - it was a step down but still OK.
Then there's this! I don't even mind the guy who said "Hey! Let's make the fourth movie a sick comedy with camp-scale 10 acting and sick jokes and let's have a man pulling a bit of his own brain out!" No, I'll forgive this person, whoever he was. But who were the geniuses that said: "Wow! What a great idea! Let's do that!"???
They put a lot of money into this and got a few great set-pieces and a brilliantly made underwater scene. So, why did they go and waste it on this? There were some obviously super ideas, like Ripley returning as a part-alien and the lost crew of survivors trying to make their way out more or less adopting a man, who they know will soon die giving birth to one of the carnivorous extra terrestrials. But too many characters spend too much time, just trying to over-cool everybody else with brain-dead one-liners and their very special abilities ("Look at me! I've actually got two fire-arms integrated into my, er, other arms!") or dying in an unusual way, which is obviously supposed to make us laugh.
Let's all just hope, the executives at Fox learned something from this and if a part 5 comes along they a) do it with some dignity and darkness and b) let Ripley die for good. Not because I don't like her, but they have wasted a great chance to turn the character into something completely new and now it's going nowhere. If you need a part 6, let Ron Perlman take the lead, because he's the one slightly appealing character in this. (Sorry, Noni! I've seen you do better.) Or he's just used to working with Jeunet and therefore gives a more accustomed performance. Anyway, don't let him be too cool and give him a few problems to chew on and we'll be fine with him as our new Ripley.