The idea of ​​a new Alien sequel is now a controversial one. Alien: Romulus is the seventh installment in the series, and every time we queue up for another film, even one as full of “mythology” as Prometheus, we hope we get a taste of the shock and awe that Alien evoked 45 years ago. Aliens evoked enough of that sensation in 1986 to be considered a classic—and while Alien 3 (1992) is loathed by everyone in the known universe, including its director, David Fincher, I’ve always found it to have a slowly brewing, queasy power in its way of portraying a maternal nightmare as an art film.

But since “Alien: Resurrection” (it’s never a good sign when the title of a film sounds like a commercial for shareholders), the series has lived less from honest fear than from nostalgia for space beasts. The facehugger, the adult alien with his helmeted head and dripping silver jaws, the whole primal fear of having your own body not only attacked, but penetrated – the truth is: the more Alien movies you see, the less nightmarish they are.

So when I say that Alien: Romulus is one of the best Alien sequels, and that it delivers the gooey scares in a way that none of the last three Alien films have, I’m not suggesting that the shock and awe is back, or that the film reinvented that series in some visionary, mind-bending way. Quite the opposite. Rather, this is a superbly efficient greatest hits thrill ride packaged like a video game. Yet on that level, it’s a confidently creepy, slickly filmed, and at times nerve-wracking piece of entertainment.

The film is set in the time between “Alien” and “Aliens,” which is a sort of flashback without forgoing the narrative darkness of the prequels. Most of the action takes place on the wreckage of a decommissioned ship, very similar to the Nostromo but decommissioned and floating through the cosmos. Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), a miner, is tricked into joining a group of four young renegades trying to escape the Jackson Star Mining Colony, which is basically a dystopian corporate prison with no daylight. (Rain learns, after receiving a travel permit, that the policies have changed and she must now work an additional 12,000 hours — five years — to have the right to travel.) If she and her rebel brigade can reach the abandoned ship and get it running again, and if there is enough fuel for nine years of cryosleep, they can escape.

The ship looks fascinatingly old-fashioned (primitive computer graphics, a cooling system made of backlit propeller fans), and it’s not the only one that looks that way; so do the monsters. Director Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe,” the “Evil Dead” remake) is a visually brash, dramatically banal showman, staging the alien encounters with a barrage of special effects, which in this retro era tends to delight some viewers as much as a Gen-X hipster cooing over his vinyl collection. Early on, several of the characters explore a waterlogged walk-through deck, where they encounter things thrashing around them. It’s an army of facehuggers who are now almost like old friends. (At the screening I attended, rubbery models of them were being handed out as PR items, a sort of Leatherface mask.) They don’t seem as powerful as they once did (I don’t remember the characters in “Alien” being able to just shake them off), but there are plenty of images of bony tentacles, and a hugger clings to a crew member, the close-cropped Navarro (Aileen Wu), who soon after disgorges a writhing fetus with her jaws.

There are other elements that remind us of Alien: a hole burned through the ship’s layers, as well as a mutilated droid named Rook, played by a digitally reconstructed version of the late Ian Holm (though his character in Alien was named Ash). He looks a little slimmer than we remember him, as if he’s been on an AI diet—but seriously, if this is what the future of AI replication looks like, it’s more creepy than promising. Holm’s monologue in Alien was one of the film’s highlights, but Alien: Romulus isn’t a thriller where characters stand out in the same way. Some of them have off-puttingly incomprehensible British accents, and it’s not as if the script fleshes them out. But Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, with her clear eyes and serene determination, makes her presence felt as Rain, the closest thing here to the fearless Ripley.

Rain has brought her own droid named Andy, who tells bad jokes and whom she considers a spiritual brother. He’s played by David Jonsson in a smooth, ambiguous voice that’s captivating; when he’s reprogrammed into a Company henchman, we find ourselves missing the old Andy more than the characters who are killed off. There’s a disturbing half-formed alien that looks more vaginal than anything we’ve seen in the series so far, as well as an elevator shaft lined with the obsidian exoskeletons of living alien bodies. In a terrific sequence set in an anti-gravity zone, Rain obliterates this army of monsters with a mega machine gun, leaving yellow acid blood hanging in patches in the air.

But it’s the final act of Alien: Romulus that’s meant to make audiences’ eyes pop: a Prometheus-esque birth sequence that ties the series together, though the best part is simply the flair with which Álvarez stages a showdown between a lone woman and a humanoid alien. It’s a sequence so thrilling it’ll go for your throat, if not your face.