I've been meaning to respond to this and just kept forgetting about it.
I agree; (Alien Quadrilogy) is probably one of the best DVD collections I've ever purchased. 20th Century Fox would be fools to release another Alien collection.
At least this on this side of the pond, it's now been replaced by a 4-DVD set that only has the movies, without any bonus material. Booo, says I.
Hmm, I think Alien 3 is underrated. There are some elements of the plot I don't like but the direction is great and I like the gloomy atmosphere of the film. Alien Resurrection is okay. That's probably the weakest of the series. It just feels too removed from the series. By itself, the movie isn't too bad. As part of the Alien franchise, it's quite weak.
I'll gladly defend both the third and the fourth movie. The thing to understand about
Alien3 is that it's unfinished - there isn't a director's cut for the simple reason that Fincher refused to have anything to do with it after they stopped filming. All of the
Aliens movies were dogged by in-fights between studio, the director, the writer and the cast, but this really takes the cake. The original idea (you'll get the gist of it if you watch the bonus material) could well have been one of the most ambitious sf movies ever made - Dante meets Terminator - but it kept getting re-written so often that Fincher was apparently often directing from hand-written scripts that had been completely changed just hours before. According to one person on the bonus material (I forget who), they didn't so much wrap up the movie as simply stop filming when everyone was sick of it. The fact that they still managed to piece it together into a pretty damn coherent, grim and interesting story (and the longer version is the one to watch) is quite a feat; visually it's possibly the most appealing of all four, and it takes Ripley to a pretty logical conclusion.
I like
Alien:Resurrection not only because it's (mostly) a Joss Whedon script that must have given him the seed for
Firefly, but also because it does the only thing that remained to do with the story after they’d done horror, action, and philosophical thriller; they turn it around and subvert the story, making fun of the clichés while still trying to find an original – and serious – story to tell; the usual Nietzsche angle, Ripley has fought monsters too long to not be a monster herself. The main problem is that both Jeunet and Whedon are people with ideas and a sense of humour, but not the
same ideas and sense of humour, making for a pretty weird feel... and unfortunately, of course, they throw it all away in the last 10-15 minutes, which really are bad. Up until then, it's a fine effort (and certainly light years better than the ridiculous
Alien vs Predator).