Photo: 20th Century Studios

“You have symphonies in you, brother,” Michael Fassbender’s haughty super-android David whispered to his humble doppelganger Walter in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017) and attempts to evoke, in this stripped-down version, some of the ambition, intelligence, and culture (not to mention cruelty) that David saw in himself. That’s pretty much what I wanted to whisper to the screen during Fede Álvarez’s blunt and sporadically entertaining film. Alien: Romulusa film that was mainly intended to provide some basic genre thrills and keep the intellectual property alive so that the now Disney-owned Fox could Foreigner Movies. It will serve its purpose, but at what cost?

Romulus takes place after the events of Scott’s first Foreigner (1979) and also seems to have taken a page from the director Blade Runner (1982), with its opening scenes in the dark, wet, crowded space mining colony of Jackson’s Star, where we are introduced to young Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted android brother Andy (David Jonsson). After learning that her mining contract has been brutally extended by the all-powerful Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Rain heads to a decommissioned space station in orbit with her ex-flame Tyler (Archie Renaux) and his pals. There they hope to recover some cryo pods that will allow them to escape to the distant planet Yvaga, far from Weyland-Yutani’s clutches. It turns out that this space station was decommissioned for a very good reason, and off they go.

Despite some clever suspense scenes, Romulus still faces the same challenge, Foreigner Films have had to adapt to the changing needs of the Aliens (1986): How can one recapture the awe and terror that the series’ central creature, the Xenomorph (not to mention the Facehugger and Chestburster, which he also designed), originally inspired in viewers? Giger’s alien – tentacle-like and skeletal, a huge, whip-fast, crab-crawling nightmare vision of teeth and bones and tail and claws – aroused such unspoken, subconscious fears that it inspired filmmakers to gruesome visions of a posthuman universe. That is why the Foreigner films could never become the dutiful horror franchise their studio wanted; there was something too nagging, too disturbing, about the central image on which the entire enterprise was based. Scott’s later prequels, Prometheus (2012) and the already mentioned Federalwent in a more philosophical direction, downgrading the horror in favor of a general sense of existential unrest, and took the subtext of the previous films and made it fascinatingly obvious. But these last few films largely flopped as genre efforts; they were too strange to leave audiences clamoring for more, although I would love to see Scott (who produced this new film) finish his trilogy someday.

RomulusThe task of is therefore to give us something more substantial, and the fact that it takes place directly after the original film suggests a reboot of sorts. Will it “deliver”? Its aliens are largely functional shadows, with little of the uncomfortable ruthlessness of the first film or the scurrying, ever-multiplying terror of the second. A geek at heart, Álvarez seems more interested in the Xenomorph’s acidic blood, which can melt spaceships and people with terrifying ease.

What works best about the film, and what I wished more of, is the tender bond between Rain and Andy. We learn that their father found Andy in a garbage heap and fixed him up by reprogramming him with one instruction: to protect Rain. Bullied by others, the android speaks awkwardly and doesn’t understand the world around him; he makes lousy dad jokes because, well, their father programmed those too. This broken cyborg is completely dependent on his human, but the situation is reversed and complicated once they’re in orbit and Andy hooks himself into the space station’s operating system. But their relationship also gets somewhat lost amid the utilitarian space horror theatrics of the film’s second half, as everything degenerates into screaming, running and dying and the film loses its urgency. It all builds to such a disjointed climax that after my public screening, I found myself coming into contact with complete strangers as we tried to figure out what the hell had happened.

There’s something else in the second half, and this is where I have to give away spoilers. (Some critics have been advised not to give anything away, but since it adds nothing to the mood or the story, I’m not sure it’s a secret worth keeping.) On board the space station, our heroes are confronted with the sticky, bubbly, slimy, slippery remains of the ship’s science officer, Rook. He’s played by actor Daniel Betts, whose face has been digitally replaced with that of the late Ian Holm, who played Ash, the science officer in the original film. Nostromo. Holm died four years ago, but his heirs are thanked in the film’s credits, so Disney probably got permission to do it, although some may still question whether it was appropriate.

The question is not so much whether such digital necrophilia is appropriate, but whether it anything of value to the film. First of all, the effects used to revive Holm do not look convincing, which makes his presence distracting. There are enough different looking androids in the Foreigner universe that there is no need to bring back a dead actor to play a different model of an old one. It’s crude, unnecessary fanservice – in a film already overloaded with fanservice, right down to characters quoting multiple lines from both Foreigner And Aliens. Narratively, Ash was pretty famously revealed to be the villain of the first film, and having the same actor show up as a similar character also removes any suspense about what this new character is up to. It feels like a stunning miscalculation on multiple levels. It might even be the only legacy of this otherwise unremarkable film. Alien: Romulus is entertaining enough, but you forget it immediately – something I don’t think I’ve ever said about any other Foreigner Film, whether good or bad.