As a lifelong film junkie, there are few memories more immediately accessible than my first viewing of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). I was only nine years old when the film came out, so did not see it in theaters, but fortunately my parents were early adopters of home-video technology. I was probably 11 when I popped Alien on one late night after everyone else had gone to bed, in the dark living room of a silent house so isolated in the country we may as well have been in space. I can still hear the film's immersive sound design, still remember its creeping claustrophobic dread, still feel the near paralyzing revulsion of seeing that now iconic creature for the very first time. More than four decades later, that solitary viewing still ranks as one of the most attentive, engrossing, viscerally terrifying viewing experiences I've ever had.

By way of contrast, I just had to go reread my own reviews of Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017)—the last two films in the franchise—to even remember what they were about, let alone to recall my own reactions to them. In between, we had Aliens (1986) (a thrilling action movie), Alien 3 (1992) (a moody misfire), and Alien Resurrection (1997) (a silly train-wreck). None of them recaptured the magic of the original, any more than all the sequels to Psycho, Jaws, Halloween, or most other top-tier horror movies have done. Horror relies on the unknown, and so familiarity and formulae—while they may sell tickets—are almost always fatal to fear.

(James Cameron understood this when he made Aliens, by far the best of the sequels. Aliens is arguably as successful a work as Alien, but that's because Cameron didn't even try to make a horror movie: he wisely riffed in an entirely different key, delivering a fast-paced action flick that could stand honorably alongside Scott's slow-burn haunted-house-in-space film without existing in competition with it.)

Now comes Alien: Romulus, from director Fede Alvarez (Don't Breathe). The film takes place about halfway between the events of Alien and Aliens, and thus exists in roughly the same relationship to its franchise as other soft-reboots like David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy (2018-2022) and Alvarez's own Evil Dead (2013). Inserted into continuity at a point where we can all agree the franchise was still good, these "retro-sequels" all exhibit an almost sycophantically desperate desire to go back to basics, ignore what wasn't working in later films, and deliver only more of what everyone liked the first time.

Unfortunately—like those other cinematic retreads—Alien: Romulus blindly overlooks the fact that what we liked the first time was that we were seeing things we'd never seen before.

Like a competent cover-band, Alvarez and his team (including co-writer Rodo Sayagues) assemble a lot of familiar-looking pieces that almost compel belief. Cailee Spaeny plays Rain, a miner working off a debt to the reliably evil Weyland-Yutani Corporation, on a bleak, sunless planet that seems drawn from the grungy urban squalor of Scott's Blade Runner. As the film opens, Rain thinks she has finally logged enough hours to be released from her contract and get travel visas for her and her adopted synthetic brother Andy (David Jonsson). Alas, it turns out the bosses have raised the work quotas, and Rain still owes her soul to the company store. This injustice inspires her to join a heist planned by her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) to escape to a sunnier world by stealing the cryogenic sleep-pods from an abandoned spacecraft in orbit. (On this seventh installment of the franchise, no points are awarded for guessing why this mysterious vessel—which turns out to be a space-station—was abandoned in the first place.)

The actors who make up the rest of the team do what they can with disposable roles, which apparently were each afforded exactly one character trait to define them: Bjorn (Spike Fearn) is a bigoted hot-head; Kay (Isabela Merced) is pregnant; Navarro (Aileen Wu) is the tough pilot. To the extent that we will have any emotional investment in the increasingly menacing proceedings, it must rest in the relationship between Rain and Andy, and—like everything else in the film—it almost works. Spaeny (so good recently in Civil War and Priscilla) is incredibly likable, and very nearly brings some genuine humanity to the central role. But Rain—through no fault of Spaeny's—is never as sharply defined as her franchise ancestor Ellen Ripley. (Dan O'Bannon's screenplay for Alien is a masterclass in succinct character development, quickly making every member of the crew feel like a real, fully inhabited person. Scenes like Ripley's refusal to break quarantine told us exactly who she was, efficiently demonstrating the canny judgement and stubborn, flinty determination that would define the character for four movies. The script for Romulus—nowhere near as tight or precise—grants the vaguely plucky Rain no such favors.)

Jonsson—excellent in last year's criminally underappreciated Rye Lane—is the real standout here as Andy, a slightly malfunctioning recycled android with a sweet temperament, an endearing penchant for dad jokes, and a programmed prime directive to protect Rain at all costs. But Andy—effectively a mentally disabled Black man completely loyal (and subservient) to the interests of his White companion—comes dangerously close to the "happy slave" trope. In a franchise that has made class a persistent theme (and race a frequent vein of subtext), it would be nice to believe this character had a deeper purpose, but that would require a more generous interpretation than I'm inclined to give the film: Andy just seems clumsily conceived, and ultimately problematic in ways Romulus neither recognizes nor is prepared to deal with. It's to Jonsson's credit that the character is as compelling and sympathetic as he is, but—like most elements of the plot—it works less and less well the more we think about it. 

And this, finally, is the problem with Alien: Romulus: it is a passable but shallow facade of a film, a careful imitation of a superior work meant to fool us for the duration of its running time, and no longer. Alvarez and his team have obviously studied the first two films in the franchise very closely, with notebooks in hand: they have carefully—and mostly, it must be said, convincingly—recreated the wonderfully tactile sets, the smoky cinematography, the industrial sound design, and the (largely) practical special effects in ways that immerse us in our memories of those better movies. And the effect of this slavish recreating is betrayed by overt references to specific iconic moments: there are shot for shot "homages," absurdly repurposed lines of dialogue, and—most egregiously—a necrophilic digital resurrection of an actor who is no longer with us. These ham-fisted callbacks do nothing but take us out of the movie we're actually watching, and—in the latter case—clash garishly with the grounded pleasures of the practical production design. (The same is true of the film's third act, which trades quieter tension for larger, louder, less convincing stunt pieces.)

There are moments of Alien: Romulus that feel, as they pass, like worthy successors to the earlier movies: there is some nice acting, some lovely cinematography and set design, a few sustained sequences of genuine tension, and even one or two original ideas. (A late use of zero-gravity to solve a particularly thorny problem is especially clever.) But the cumulative effect of all these assembled moments is a soulless simulacrum, a patchwork Frankenstein-monster corpse without any real spark of life: there is no point to any of it, no reason to exist except to exist, no emotion than lingers or meaning that lasts. Let us remind you of this earlier magic, it says, over and over again, for we have no magic of our own to offer. Lacking vision of our own, we can only look longingly back.