Movie: "Alien" (1979)

Ah yes, I love the first one as well. I think our different personalities account for our preferences. The first Alien is a kind of straight up science fiction horror story, is more intelligent, and is more of a slow burn while the second is a shoot em up, more of an action movie, and has testosterone fueled bad arse space marines as main characters, and ends with Ripley fighting the alien queen in a power loader. You're probably more thoughtful, meticulous, and slowed down in your tastes and I'm more fast paced action style heroics based in my tastes. James Cameron is also my favorite director for directing Aliens and Terminator 2.

Yes, the other Alien movies did suck. The third one had flashes of being a good movie with the prison planet and the new idea of the Alien taking on traits of the host it incubates in and busts out of being interesting. In the right hands it could have been a return to form for the first movie but it was executed badly. I really think think that that there's an art to understanding when a successful series should end for good and when it is pointless to make sequels. If there is no real reason other than money to make a sequel, if you have no new interesting stories to tell and nothing to add to certain properties, and are just churning it out because you feel you have to, then the series should end.

Two film series that I can name that I think it should have been obvious to the directors that there should have been no sequels were the Halloween and Terminator franchises, but for different reasons. With Halloween they'd already told the only story they could tell about Michael Myers escaping the asylum and going on a massacre on Halloween night. Every sequel they were going to churn out with that franchise was just going to be a poorly done rehash of that original story, and that's what all of the sequels ended up being. 

With the Terminator franchise they very obviously ended the story in Terminator 2. They hammered home the message that the future was not set and they destroyed Sky Net before it was born in the same way Sky Net tried to do with John Conner. The third Terminator movie wasn't actually that bad but it contradicted the message of the second movie by making the nuclear apocalypse inevitable. It was a movie that didn't need to exist. 

Should the Alien movies stopped at number 2? I personally think that there were more stories to tell with that franchise but that they shouldn't have been told except by a VERY competent director. Ridley Scott, who's a very hit and miss director, caught lightning in a bottle with Alien and James Cameron hits his mark near perfectly every time. Someone who had real passion for the franchise and the talent to pull it off could make a worthy sequel but I think short of Neil Blomkamp who had both, I don't know who could've done it.