This movie had everything going in its favor.

When the news came in that Covenant wasn’t getting a sequel, it looked like a pretty surefire sign that the PTB had finally figured out that this new “Prometheus initiative” wasn’t working out. Then came word that Ridley Scott had not only passed the torch, but handed the next movie off to Fede Alvarez, the Sam Raimi protege responsible for some of the most surprisingly good horror films in recent memory. Then came the trailer, which promised a film about a tight-knit victim pool in a claustrophobic space setting, running away from a legion of facehuggers.

Everything was primed for a return to form for the franchise. Alien: Romulus was set to blaze a new way forward, built on the intimate sci-fi terror that made the original such a classic. And then they fucking whiffed it. Such a damn near miss, too. Let’s take it from the top.

Right out of the gate, the film opens with the wreckage of the Nostromo. Obvious nostalgia-baiting aside, at least this helps to set the film in between Alien and Aliens. Okay. Let’s just shake that off and move on.

After the opening credits sequence, we go to Jackson’s Star, a mining colony owned by Weyland-Yutani. The bad news is, there’s a new medical disaster every year and all the miners are dropping like flies. The worse news is, Weyland-Yutani is pulling all manner of bureaucratic dirty tricks to keep everyone on the colony and literally work them to death.

Our protagonist is Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), a young miner whose parents died some time ago, leaving her with a defective android (Andy, played by David Jonsson) whom Rain loves as a surrogate brother. Rain is sadly unable to get off-world, but she’s friends with a ragtag group of other mining orphans who all want to get off the colony just as badly. And they catch a lucky break with the discovery of an abandoned space station hovering just out of orbit.

See, the space station — actually two space stations named “Romulus” and “Remus”, fused together — holds cryosleep pods that our crew will need for the long journey to another world. The plan is to get up there, steal the pods, jet out off-world, and do it all in 36 hours before the space station collides with the planetary rings surrounding Jackson’s Star.

Trouble is, the space station got abandoned after an incident with the xenomorphs held on board. And the cryosleep technology our kids are stealing were the only things keeping the facehuggers on ice. Whoops.

Incidentally, you might be wondering why Weyland-Yutani left such extremely valuable property up there when the space station was getting blown to smithereens in a day and a half. That would be an excellent question. And no answer would be given.

That said, I want to stress emphatically that this movie has a lot going for it. The basic premise is a strong fit for the Alien franchise. A younger victim pool is something we haven’t really seen in the franchise to date. The deeply personal and intimate sibling relationship between a human and an android covers some fascinating sci-fi territory that the franchise hasn’t really explored before, certainly not like this.

And that’s not even getting started on some of the truly ingenious set pieces we get. There’s a thoroughly awesome sequence involving acid blood in zero-g. There’s a neat variation of the egg chamber scene in Aliens, but done in a novel and suspenseful way. When the film is at its best, it perfectly rides the action/horror balance that defines the entire franchise at its best.

Granted, our characters often act like idiots, but that’s common in horror movies with a teenage cast. And anyway, we’re dealing with young untrained adults struggling against an alien species that would be a threat to full-fledged colonial marines. Oh, and pregnancy/childbirth is brought up in an ongoing and increasingly disturbing trend of films using that for body horror. Then again, the xenomorphs have always been explicitly sexual in their imagery, body horror is a foundational pillar of the franchise, and pregnancy/childbirth has never been used for body horror in this franchise in quite this way.

I could keep on making excuses for this movie. For the first half, I was happy to make excuses and enjoy the film for what it was in spite of its petty flaws. But then the film kept tripping over third rails and I had to give up. What third rails am I talking about? Well, let me try and put it as sweet and short and spoiler-free as I can.

• We seriously need to stop with the CGI necromancy bringing dead actors back to life. Even if it’s done with the full blessing and involvement of the actors’ surviving family — and that’s a big fucking “if” — it’s still insensitive to the fans who are mourning the death. Also, we’ve been trying this for however many years now and the effect still looks like shit. It’s bad enough keeping a franchise tethered to actors who are in their 70s or older (looking at you, Ghostbusters), but keeping a franchise tethered to actors who are literally dead sends the clear message that new ideas and talents aren’t welcome. If they really needed this particular character — and trust me, they didn’t — just recast the role. It’s not hard, it’s been done before, the audience will go along with it.
• Mr. Scott? Ridley, sir? Give up on Prometheus. We’re all glad you tried something new, but it didn’t work. Call it a loss and move on. I respect and appreciate the effort to clarify Prometheus within the films themselves, but sufficiently doing that with everything in Prometheus that nobody understood would take the next five movies. Nobody wants that. Nobody cares. Fucking drop it already.
• The age of Ellen Ripley is over. Watching somebody else go through Ripley’s motions and recite her catchphrases is like watching a Whitney Houston impression: It’s the genuine article or nothing.
• Nobody cares about Weyland-Yutani. They’re a big evil corporation, we get it. We don’t need to be told for the umpteenth time that they’re short-sighted and greedy and they’ll sacrifice as many lives as they have to in the interest of their own profits. It’s been done. It’s boring. It’s one-dimensional. Give this corporation a second gear or bring in a new corporation entirely, just do something with them that hasn’t been done to death.

To be entirely clear, this isn’t a situation like with Deadpool & Wolverine, a self-aware nostalgia-ridden movie in which the fan service is the point. This is more like a Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire situation, in which the execs are flailing to try and figure out what to do with this highly valuable IP, incapable of deciding what the best path forward should be, propping the movie up with callbacks because they don’t have enough faith in themselves or in the fans. It’s a significantly less awful case than Frozen Empire, I’ll grant you, but still.

Another factor is the uneven cast. On the one hand, you’ve got David Jonsson acting his ass off and Isabela Merced capably adding “scream queen” to her increasingly versatile range. On the other hand, the other male leads are unremarkable across the board, and as much as I like Cailee Spaeny, she’s not ready to headline a blockbuster franchise quite yet.

There are many problems with Alien: Romulus, but I don’t think Fede Alvarez is responsible for them. He’s a fantastic horror filmmaker, and the movie really is a fun time when it comes to action/horror. The big problems here all come down to Ridley Scott and the producers/studio execs. Somebody behind the scenes doesn’t believe in this franchise enough to take it in a new direction without leaning hard and heavy on callbacks. Either that or somebody is spitefully stubborn on shoving Prometheus down our throats until we learn to love it. Could be both.

What really sucks is that it doesn’t have to be so complicated. It’s a haunted house in space, and the ghosts are parasitic xenomorphs. We don’t need to bring back Ripley or Bishop or Newt or whomever. We don’t need to know what the black goo was in Prometheus. We just need a new twist on the premise of a small group of people trapped in space with a phallic alien being. And that’s what we got — nothing more, nothing less — for the first half of this movie. And it was awesome.

Regardless of what happens, I know this isn’t the death of the franchise. As with Terminator and Predator alongside it, this is not a franchise that can be killed by a bad entry. Fans and filmmakers will keep on flocking to this setting and premise, it’s simply too fun to play with. But until the franchise finds some filmmakers and executives with something new and interesting to say within the context of the franchise, it’s only going downhill from here.