Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien was simultaneously a landmark science fiction film and a landmark horror film, one that married slasher and haunted house scares to a techno nightmare about the future of capitalism. Of course, it spawned many sequels. James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens is maybe the most influential science fiction action movie ever made, to say nothing of its thoughts about militarism and motherhood. David Fincher’s third entry is a gnarly meditation on grief and loss. And then there’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, capping off an early section of a franchise that has always dealt in imagery of pregnancy and rape, and which now works in regard to abortion. Ridley came back almost 20 years after all of this with two more prequels, Prometheus and Covenant, which both extended his general misanthropy while moving the franchise into new ideas about artificial intelligence and humanity’s relationship to its creator. In other words, these movies have always been “about stuff,” to put it bluntly, and maybe that’s why the series has so much staying power beyond just the astonishing visual of its central monster.

So now, in 2024, we have Alien: Romulus, and if this latest film is about anything, well, then it’s about the other Alien movies. Director Fede Alvarez has proven himself an adept maker of brisk, gnarly horror pictures, and while this is certainly that — when it’s a full-on Alien splatter movie, it’s undeniably fun — whenever it decides it needs to turn into an Alien legacy sequel, it falls completely flat, specifically with a couple of admittedly ballsy choices that are certain to divide audiences.

Set 20 years after Scott’s original, Romulus locates its protagonist Rain, (Cailee Spaeny), who just wants to get shed of the absolutely awful-seeming mining colony on which she’s been stuck. Just when she thinks she’s finally free of her debts to “the Company,” those darn intergalactic capitalist bastards stick her with another 10 years’ worth of debt to pay off. So, she and her “brother,” a slightly busted synthetic android named Andy (David Jonsson), hook up with some of Rain’s friends, who plan to steal the cryopods from an incoming derelict Company space station that’s hovered into their planet’s orbit, and then high tail it to more prosperous pastures. What they don’t know is — and here’s where the wheels start to come off this bicycle a little bit — that this particular station was researching the captured corpse of the original Xenomorph from the very first film, from which has been grown a host of those nasty, chest-egg-laying face-huggers. You can sort of guess where things go from there.

Alvarez has really faithfully recreated the look and feel of the ’79 original, down to the esoteric analog tech and all its attendant steamy bulkheads and chonk-y sound effects. Anyone familiar with the series will recognize alarm sounds and video screens and on and on. And when the bugs get loose, the film proves suitably grisly, relying more than audiences are probably used to anymore on some excellent practical VFX and animatronics. In other words, when Romulus is spending its energy watching these poor jerks get chased around by acid-dripping face-eating monsters, it’s a total blast.

Unfortunately, like all franchise entries nowadays, Alvarez’s film is also littered with some truly boneheaded, momentum-killing references to pretty much every other movie in the series. Beyond the initial boringness of having this spread from Alien Patient Zero, we’ve got connections to Prometheus, famous lines from several of the other movies directly quoted by the new characters (did we really need to hear someone else say “Get away from her, you bitch!” — doubtful), and in a move surely to be a bone of contention, a legacy character has been resurrected via visual effects, and they play a huge part in the movie — and it’s way more than a cameo. There’s in-franchise precedent for this decision, but it’s also mightily distracting, as is a third act twist that features a truly diabolically Giger-esque new monster, but also in execution it’s narratively pretty much an exact duplicate of the finale of a previous entry that frankly nobody liked back then either. This latest film doesn’t break down because, unlike the others, it has nothing on its mind — that’s its best quality. But the problem, then, is that it insists on continually interrupting itself to ensure that we remember the greatest hits.

DIRECTOR: Fede Alvarez;  CAST: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced;  DISTRIBUTOR: 20th Century Studios;  IN THEATERS: August 16;  RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.

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