"I admire its purity," Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) tells the crew of the Nostromo when asked if he admires the titular Alien killing its way through the ship in Ridley Scott's 1979 classic. It's a sentiment that can be applied to the film itself, too: a stripped-down work of sci-fi horror as ruthless as it is efficient in how it both deploys scares and builds character. Alien has retained its power through the decades because audiences simply hadn't seen anything like it. Every piece fits within the whole to the point where even director Ridley Scott publicly disavowed the original version of the so-called "Director's Cut" for throwing off the pacing of the film.

Fede Álvarez's new/old take on the franchise with Alien: Romulus is not that. If the original is the alien, this strange unfamiliar beast whose every action terrifies, Alien: Romulus is the synthetics of Weyland-Yutani: mass-produced and loyal to the company first and foremost. In the latest installment of Franchise Management in the vein of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we're introduced to a new cast of characters who will soon be facehugged, stalked, and murdered by the various alien xenomorphs that roam an abandoned spaceship.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) has lived her entire life on a lightless mining planet along with her adopted synthetic brother Andy (David Jonsson, taking on a Herculean task of carrying the movie on his shoulders). When Rain realizes there's no escape through the company channels, she teams up with some old friends to steal cryopods aboard the abandoned spacecraft Remus/Romulus so they can make the lightyears-long trip to a planet with sun and no Weyland-Yutani. As you'd expect, aliens emerge, creatures burst through stomachs, et cetera, et cetera.

There is a pleasant, squirming excitement to watching the first act of a horror movie in which you know most of the cast won't make it to the credits. A great horror movie can make you feel like you're part of the group, an invisible member of the gang instead of just a witness to their eventual slaughter. You might (I do) sometimes catch yourself hoping that they don't take that shortcut through the dark woods, that they'll somehow know better than to knock on the door of that decrepit cabin to ask for help once their car breaks down, even if that's not what you came to the movies for.

But while Álvarez and his regular co-writer Rodo Sayagues (Don't Breathe, Evil Dead 2013) make overtures to the characters having deeper lives than we see onscreen, it never once feels real. Character beats are rattled off with all the sincerity of a playable character’s description insert in a video game. This guy hates synthetics because one let his mother die to save 18 other miners. This woman is pregnant (gee, I wonder how that will play out?) and wants to show her baby the sun. This woman is cool and has a shaved head. And while the original Alien seemed light on character beats, casting actors like Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, Ian Holm, and the rest meant that audiences could infer deeper connections between the characters. While the new actors playing the doomed crew certainly try, they have neither the experience to portray a truly nuanced person nor a script that's able to help them get there.

But how does the actual alien fare? That's the reason you buy a ticket in the first place, characters be damned. Álvarez largely delivers exactly what you'd want on that front, with distinct set pieces that make use of the various evolutions of the alien that we've seen for decades. And while much of the film's tension and horror comes from the audience's foreknowledge of what each form can do, it's fair to say that the individual moments do have a weight and energy to them that the rest of the movie often lacks. Does it especially matter if we see the facehugger on Navarro (Aileen Wu) and know instantly that she's already dead and that a baby alien will burst from her chest shortly? I suppose not, so long as the audience still feels dread at how gory it will be when the thing emerges.

At the best of times, Álvarez successfully delivers his own spin on the expected sequences. A scene set in thigh-deep water, facehuggers scrambling through the red-tinged murk like deadly eels as the crew races to unlock the only door out, has a certain hard-to-define Alien-ness to it. Another scene in which a character's triumphant shooting massacre of aliens leads to a second, more deadly obstacle as they then have to navigate all the acidic blood now splattered across the tunnel in zero-gravity feels fresh and inventive. Even the beginning of the film offers an intriguing perspective, the medical team tasked with analyzing a dead alien filmed like cult worshippers, choral music swelling as they gather to present their findings.

Unfortunately, these fresh moments come sandwiched in between the most awkward franchise callbacks to make it to the big screen in the last decade of reboots and modern-day sequels. There is, of course, the requisite (and unearned) "Stay away from her, you bitch," explicit references to the Nostromo and Ripley's battle with the alien, even (shockingly) a pseudo-continuation of a subplot in Ridley's underrated and critically-reviled Prometheus duology. I even have to begrudgingly applaud Álvarez for paying homage to the Aliens: Armageddon arcade game with the pulse rifles and the aliens helpfully leaping toward the camera, a deep cut in a franchise whose iconic moments have been stripped for parts like a truck on an overgrown lawn.

But there is a ghoulishness lurking behind all those requisite moments of fan service that's grimly emphasized by the AI replica of Ian Holm as half-destroyed Science Officer Rook. Partially played by Daniel Betts wearing what seems to just be a CGI mask of Holm's face, Rook appears again and again throughout the film, constantly reminding the viewer with a breathless, anxious energy, "Hey! Remember Alien! Remember when Ash said the line while dripping milk out of his parts? Remember? Remember your youth and what it felt like to have the whole world in front of you, endless possibilities?"

It's, unfortunately, surely inadvertently, the strongest metaphor for Álvarez's reboot/sequel/interquel and his own capabilities as an artist in this franchise: a new person wearing the familiar mask of a dead man, interrupting scenes showcasing new concepts and visuals to drag the viewer's focus back, back to 1979 and their memories of that original Alien. He’s a company man who can't even die without being resurrected and put to work, dedicated to bringing the alien's genes back to civilization to propagate more sequels. By the time the film veers toward its conclusion with a new version of the familiar alien (one that I can complimentarily say goes full sicko mode), it's too late. The damage has been done. Spaeny's Rain is just Ripley, her hair blowing back in the wind to remind you of Sigourney Weaver; the fan service has been delivered, justice to the studio has been done.

As much as Scott's latter Alien sequels were lambasted by fans, they pushed the franchise forward into new territories—aliens who created humanity (with one lightly implied to be Jesus Christ) disgusted with their creations, synthetics whose loyalty to their own masters was tested by the nagging thought of "What if I made my own decisions?" Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, for all their arguable flaws, asked questions of the series and of the viewer. The only question Alien: Romulus asks is "Do you want more slop?" And based on the box office and critical reception, the answer from most audiences has been a resounding "Yes, please!"

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of Hyperreal Film Journal for as low as $3 a month!

Here We Go Again: Alien: Romulus