It is quite brave of Fede Alvarez to enter the Foreigner Kanon a blatant remake. No, not a remake of one of the other eight films in the franchise, but of his debut film from 2016 Don’t breathe. A bunch of down-on-the-luck twenty-somethings, desperate to escape a dying industrial wasteland, decide to pull off a robbery in a remote ruin, only to find themselves hunted by a merciless, seemingly inhuman killer who hunts for sounds and wants to use them for bizarre breeding purposes. In Don’t breathetheir arch-nemesis was Stephen Lang, wielding a turkey baster. This time, it’s everyone’s favorite xenomorph, and Detroit is replaced by a remote, sunless mining colony run by the ever-evil Weyland-Yutani Corporation.

The company still aspires to expand its product line to include interstellar bioweapons, but for now it makes its profits from human exploitation (so nothing will change in the future), using old-fashioned servitude in a company store to keep desperate workers under contract until they drop dead in the mine. This includes the orphaned Rain (a perfectly good Spaeny, much more memorable in Civil War And Priscilla), who dreams of distant planets. When her ex-petty criminal Tyler (Shadows and Bones‘s Renaux as Artful Dodger in space), convinces her to steal cryocapsules from an abandoned Weyland-Yutani space station, of course she is there. And of course there are aliens there. And of course her autistic coded brother Andy (Rye Trail‘s Jonsson) is a synthetic human, because what is a Foreigner Movie without a damn robot?

Alvarez and his longtime writing partner Rodo Sayagues seem to be working their way through the major horror franchises, and while Romulus represents a dramatic improvement over her script for the depraved 2018 Netflix-backed series Texas Chainsaw Massacreit is not nearly as bloody as their gruesome evil Dead Remake from 2013. Unfortunately Romulus gets deeper and deeper into the swamp that is her adaptation of conspiracyThey lose themselves in the labyrinthine mythology, Romulus tries to cram references to everything except the Alien vs Predator Duet. This urge finds a physical form in the last act, a mishmash that crams together Prometheus, FederalAnd resurrection. Despite all the flaws in the final product, the filmmakers wanted to make their own contribution to the story, and therefore Foreigner has the longevity it has achieved. When James Cameron walked into that studio meeting and proposed a monster-hunting action movie as a sequel to the survival horror of the original, he threw open the doors of history. Alvarez has just sewn a patchwork quilt, and the seams don’t always hold.

Alien: Romulus could have been like The first omenthe attempt of the writer and director Arkasha Stevenson to develop the ideas of the original. Instead, it is like WishDisney’s completely misguided attempt to create a grand unifying theory of its fairy tales through a flood of references and Easter eggs. Some of them – like the return of a Colonial Marine’s best friend, the pulse rifle – are forgivable and even cute. But others, like the misuse of the Foreigner The series’ most famous one-liner and a rather tasteless cameo arrive like a dead facehugger.

Thankfully, Alvarez remains arguably the era’s best horror director when it comes to individual shots and scenes. The emphasis on practical sets and effects heightens the scares, while there are delightful little innovations, like the increased risks of acid blood in zero gravity. But such moments are distractions in what feels like a fast-forward through all the previous films, and with the least interesting cast yet. Originality is what made Alvarez famous. If only he showed more of that here when it comes to storytelling, not just innovative jump scares.