After Ridley Scott’s return to the Alien franchise with Prometheus garnered a divisive critical and popular response, the aging director’s follow-up, Alien: Covenant, feels like a retreat to more familiar territory. Still owing to the film that came before it, but not always beholden to it, Alien: Covenant contains more nods to the first film in the franchise and a handful of thrilling action sequences that wouldn’t feel out of place in James Cameron’s Aliens. It doesn’t abandon Prometheus’ religious and philosophical leanings, but Scott has consciously made the decision here to deliver something a bit more rousing and primal. For the most part, that decision turns out to be the correct choice.