Nobody’s more surprised than I am to report that Alien: Romulus is actually pretty good. It takes a while to set up, but then it’s tense throughout, with a genuinely scary nail-biter of a final escape sequence.

It’s a shame I can’t describe the ending, because it’s a doozy, but you have to see the movie to find out for yourself how fresh shudders can be added to the very familiar Alien franchise. I’ll simply note that the Alien movies have always centered on the horrifying implications of sex, birth, motherhood, evolutionary development, and nightmarish corporate interference in all of those areas creating ever worse biological nightmares. One of the crew members in Alien: Romulus is pregnant. You can start speculating from there.

Though if you follow the commentary of certain critics and fans, who seem to have total recall of every plot point in all eight previous Alien films in the forty-five-year-old franchise. there’s nothing new under the sun, and it’s all sadly derivative. Reliable old crank Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle takes this jaded position to its logical end point, grousing,