Forty-five years after “Alien” launched horror into space, little hasn’t been analyzed about its hissing xenomorphs, face-huggers or the lingering untrustworthiness of “synthetic persons.” These recycle endlessly through a franchise that is ever expanding, like space itself, but the metaphorical power of the 1979 original and its 1986 sequel, “Aliens,” still inspire appreciative analyses all these decades later.

Ridley Scott didn’t intend for any of that when he set out to direct the first film. He wasn’t even the first choice for the job. But, as told in the Director’s Cut’s commentary, he won it by pitching “the most straight-forward, unpretentious, riveting thriller like ‘Psycho’ or ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ or even the most brilliant B-level like ‘Night of the Living Dead’ or ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ but I want it to look, and I’m going to do this, like ‘2001.’”

A scary movie, in other words, except in space. Where no one can hear you scream.

“Alien: Romulus” director and co-writer Fede Álvarez honors that conceptual seed in mood and feeling, dispensing with the allegorial freight in favor of taut, pulse-pounding standalone adventure bumping with legitimately earned jump scares.

It is also consciously merging the universe’s greatest hits, incorporating cues from James Cameron’s action fest and the crimes against nature seen in “Alien: Resurrection” and the stoic, mythology-expanding prequels. By some miracle, Álvarez weaves all this into the plot without it deteriorating into a mess of cliches or “don’t go in there” stupidity . . . if you don’t count the entire reason we're setting out on this adventure.

Imperfect though “Romulus” may be, it’s also a solid entry in a slate of films whose original maker has taken the extended story seriously enough to petrify it.

Álvarez returns us to the simple sweatiness and anxiety that made "Alien" magnificent, paying homage to its basic realism and the timelessness of corporate exploitation. It’s easy to forget that this franchise began with a crew of grumpy underpaid space truckers having an assignment beyond their scope of expertise forced on them by the undercover android embedded with their small team.

Archie Renaux as Tyler and Cailee Spaeny as Rain Carradine in "Alien: Romulus" (Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios)The 20-somethings signing themselves up for trouble in........

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