The Alien 3 design worked.
Honestly, the thing that bugs me the most about most ADI alien designs isn't that they made it so fleshy- though obviously that is a gripe.
It's just that personally, whenever I see an inhuman monster in a movie that just kind of has this constant 'angry face', I can't take it seriously. It works with Predator because for one thing, he's usually wearing a mask, and then he's not just attacking, he's clearly trying to do something specific. With alien, usually it does a surprise attack, or just assaults people, or otherwise sneaks up on them and abducts them for impregnation with a facehugger. What worked so much about the first three Alien movies for me about the alien was that there was not human emotion on its face. It had no eyes, like they all do, but it had such a cold, unfeeling feel to it. With Alien 4 onward, it just looked pissed, but overtly so, and that's just not scary to me. The first alien design was based on a human skull but acted without a really malicious look on its face. With ADI's latter designs, the aliens looked really inhuman, but with too much obvious human emotion, and kind of set to 'snarl' and I think it just doesn't work.
