11:50 pm: I’m watching the cleaned-up 4K Bluray of James Cameron‘s Aliens (‘86), and it’s truly wonderful. Every frame is immaculate. Heaven.

Beware of minor, dismissible spoilers…the kind that only lily-livered, falsetto-voiced spoiler whiners will arch their backs over:

Earlier this evening, however, I sat through Fede Alvarez‘s Alien: Romulus, a handsomely designed, densely and confusingly plotted, under-lighted greatest-hits retread (“Get away from her, you bitch!”), and it made me feel more bored and frustrated and furious than I could possibly convey.

It was good to see the old, primitive, 1979-era computer fonts; ditto the return of Ian Holm’s Ash, but he overstays his welcome. Oh, and I really hated the spider-like human xenomorph mutant…I wanted to throw something gooey at the screen.

Wait…there is intact wreckage from the Alien-era USCSS Nostromo, which was totally blown to smithereens, and “remains” of the original Xenomorph are being researched? He/she/it was ejected into the external nothingness of space by Ripley.

The ensemble cast is way too young (“Where are the adults?”, I was muttering early on). I was able to discern roughly a third of the dialogue, if that, which forced me to pull out the phone and read the Wiki plot synopsis as I went along. The busy-bee script (penned by Alvarez and Rodo Sayaguez) drove me crazy, and the general overkill approach drained my soul. Alvarez is a house-music DJ.

I knew right away, of course, that each and every cast member except Cailee Spaeny would be dead before the finale, so there was that small comfort at least. Except Spaeny, a first-rate actress, is way too small of stature (what is she, 48 inches tall?) to take Sigourney Weaver‘s place.

Cameron’s 38-year-old film is somewhere between 15 and 20 times better than what Alvarez has wrought.