Sorry, Alien: Romulus, The Best Alien Sequel Is Still Alien: Isolation

There's something specific about Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien that makes it such an enduring classic. With the combination of its heavy focus on relatable, blue-collar characters, its dingy, lived-in capitalist version of space travel, and its stalking, unknowably malevolent creature, it creates a feeling that other horror movies have chased and tried to replicate again and again across the decades since its release.

The latest attempt to recapture what made Alien so viscerally, singularly frightening is Alien: Romulus, a sequel to that original movie. It does a better job than some of the Alien canon of at least creating scary moments with the universe's greatest killing machine, but it relies on explosive, bombastic moments with H.R. Geiger's xenomorph, much like the rest of the series' sequels.

It's a solid-enough movie, but it's not frightening in the same way that Alien is frightening. Facehuggers burst from hiding and scramble over each other as they chase their prey, while xenomorphs clamber after the humans, hissing and bearing teeth, making sure to get right in the faces of the heroes as many times as possible. And at key moments, Romulus does what most of the Alien movies and games have done in the years since the original was released: It turns the creatures into cannon fodder to be blown away by machine guns.

Sorry, Alien: Romulus, The Best Alien Sequel Is Still Alien: Isolation

Sorry, Alien: Romulus, The Best Alien Sequel Is Still Alien: Isolation

Sorry, Alien: Romulus, The Best Alien Sequel Is Still Alien: Isolation

Sorry, Alien: Romulus, The Best Alien Sequel Is Still Alien: Isolation

Sorry, Alien: Romulus, The Best Alien Sequel Is Still Alien: Isolation