It’s been a while since we’ve had an Alien movie worth seeing on the big screen. Ridley Scott’s return to the franchise more than a decade ago gave us Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). Prometheus has a lot of interesting things to say, but fans complained because it wasn’t a movie featuring Xenomorphs stalking and killing. Because of that, Covenant paid too much attention to fan gripes and in turn, gave us one of the worst films in the franchise.

Alien: Romulus, for better or worse, is a return to bloody basics. It’s even set between the first two films, widely considered the best in the series. Directed by Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead 2013), the film follows a group of young miners desperate to get the hell off of their deary planet, which sees zero days of sunlight. The Company won’t allow them to transfer and keeps upping the number of years they have to work. Yes, The Company is still just as evil and horrible.

Cailee Spaeny stars as Rain, an orphan who’s only real sense of family is an android/syntenic named Andy (David Jonsson). He’s essentially a product that The Company disposed of, before Rain’s father rescued him and reprogrammed him to look after Rain. It’s a really interesting twist on the android aspect that’s always been a part of this franchise.

Rain’s friends, also miners, hatch a plan to board a derelict space station that’s drifted into their orbit and steal the hibernation pods so they can reach a much sunnier planet and create their own lives. They refuse to labor until they die on a bleak planet, all on behalf of The Company. Yes, some of the class politics from the first two Alien movies are certainly at play here and generally handled well.

Unfortunately, however, most of the other characters are mere cannon fodder for the Xenomorphs and face huggers, which are quickly unleashed once the group’s plan goes terribly, terribly awry. There’s the ship’s pilot, Navarro (Aileen Wu), the pregnant Kay (Isabela Merced), Rain’s hunky boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), and the real jerk of the lot, Bjorn (Spike Fearn). None of these actors are bad per say, but too many of them are given little to do. It’s really Spaeny and Jonsson’s performances that are the most memorable. They’re the only fully realized characters who also have quite a complex relationship. Can a machine be family? Can it even be trusted? Rain wrestles with this very question throughout the two-hour runtime.

Because of various narrative turns his character takes, Jonsson goes through quite a range of emotions that straddle hero and villain, another common trait of the franchise regarding the synthetic characters. Spaeny, meanwhile, makes a kickass final girl. No, her performance isn’t as iconic as Sigourney Weaver’s various iterations of Ripley, but that’s an unfair comparison. Spaeny handles her own well enough, and we come to care about Rain’s fate.

This is certainly the scariest Alien movie that we’ve had in some years. The Xenomorphs and face huggers, which were largely created through practical effects, are downright menacing. The ship feels confining, perilous, and suffocating, much like the first film. The sound design, especially the moments of space’s eerie silence, really enhance the suspense and that fear of the unknown.

The film’s main problem, at least throughout the first half, is that it has way, way too many nods to what Ridley Scott created in Alien and what James Cameron did with Aliens. It’s too much of a homage. The film really becomes interesting in the last act, when Alvarez manages to expand the lore and mythology in quite a creative way, while keeping on point with some of the franchise’s main themes, that being the dangers of technology, fear of the unknown, and The Company’s disregard for human life. There’s a lot going on with AI that speaks to our times, and I’ll leave it at that to avoid spoilers.

Alvarez is known for really gory scenes and sexual violence. There’s a lot of that in this film, especially in that harrowing and surprising final act. It’s at that point this truly feels like a Fede Alvraez movie and less like a tribute to the strongest two films in the franchise. He very much makes that final act his own and takes the franchise in some exciting new directions.

Alien: Romulus has plenty to enjoy, especially for long-term fans of the franchise. It operates best when it’s less a tribute to what came before and instead carves out its own path within the broader Alien universe. Alvarez crafted a horror movie through and through that’s actually scary at points. Though flawed, this is the best Alien movie we’ve had in some years.

Alien Romulus opens nationwide on Friday.