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Ridley Scott returns to the franchise he created with Alien: Covenant, which is equal parts Alien remake, Alien prequel, and Prometheus sequel. The plot is a retread of both the original 1979 film and the 2012 prequel: a group of space travelers respond to a signal on a strange planet, discover monsters, and get killed by monsters. Halfway through, we learn the planet is the home world of the Engineers from Prometheus, that the surviving characters of that film — the android David (Michael Fassbender) and the human Shaw — arrived there and accidentally unleashed the alien toxin upon the Engineers, wiping them out. Shaw was also killed, and David now wanders the ruins alone, studying animals and music, as androids are want to do. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Where Prometheus keeps David a morally neutral observer in the meeting of mankind with their creators (the Engineers), Covenant takes an entirely different approach that is as intellectually unfulfilling as it is emotionally bereft. David turns bad. Very bad. It turns out that he sacrificed both Shaw and the Engineers for his own esoteric pursuit of biological perfection. He is the one responsible for bridging the genetic gaps between the aliens we saw in Prometheus and the ones we know from the 1979 film — a leap I never thought needed explained. This is a lame revelation dooming Alien: Covenant to an oppressively dire and gloomy second half, without any hope for our protagonists or their mission: to deliver thousands of colonists in cryogenic sleep to a brave, new world. Halfway through the film, you know the colonists are doomed to be alien hosts for an android gone mad.

Covenant tries to be everything to all people without succeeding at being anything original or remarkable. The broad strokes are all Alien here. Half the soundtrack is even from Jerry Goldsmith’s original 1979 score. The one thing Prometheus sets Covenant up to be is an explanation for why the Engineers decided to kill humanity with their alien bio-technology. Frustratingly, Covenant never touches on this, its best chance for distinction.

If you’ve never seen any previous Alien movies, or if you can forget for a little while, you might find Covenant to be an okay monster movie. Despite all my criticisms, I do still enjoy the movie as popcorn entertainment. Scott conjures a nice, creepy vibe throughout much of the film, as characters traipse around the ruins of a dead race’s paradise. The final half hour offers some good monster movie excitement and fun as the film’s few remaining protagonists fight a lone xenomorph who has followed them from the planet onto the ship.

If that sounds familiar, but you still kinda want to see it done in only a slightly different way, Alien: Covenant might be for you.

With Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, and an uncredited cameo by James Franco. Look for notorious actor Jussie Smollett, who faked a hate crime for attention, as one of the ship’s crew.