In the not so grand pantheon of Alien rip-offs, it’s likely there will be far worse movies than Daniel Espinosa’s Life. There’s Roger Corman’s 1982 effort Mutant, AKA Forbidden World, which features a monstrous alien with xenomorph-like teeth, while 1981’s Inseminoid ramped up the body horror of Ridley Scott’s iconic 1979 slasher-in-space, with a plot in which an extraterrestrial comes to Earth and begins cheerfully impregnating the local population. Perhaps worst of the lot is Dark Universe (1983), featuring a very HR Giger-esque creature bent on destroying humanity via a gruesome combination of instant zombification, bad acting and dodgy sex scenes.

All of the above were produced by film-makers on the margins of Hollywood, at a time when Rotten Tomatoes did not exist and video store shelves were overloaded with low-rent, copycat sci-fi and fantasy trash. But Life, the first full trailer for which aired during the Superbowl on 5 February, looks very much like an attempt to re-imagine Alien on a big budget, with an A-list cast and high-calibre special effects.

Both Alien and Life feature a relentlessly destructive extraterrestrial lifeform that seems to adapt to its surroundings and has the potential to wipe out life as we know it. There are obvious parallels between the scene from the trailer in which Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) is trapped in an airlock with the fast-growing creature and the bit in Alien in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is forced to lock her crewmates out of the Nostromo after John Hurt’s unfortunate Kane is attacked and impregnated by the facehugger. Ryan Reynolds’ use of a flamethrower to take on the monster in Life explicitly recalls the tactics used by Ripley et al against the xenomorph to stop it haemorrhaging acid blood. Even the reverse lens-flare accompanying the new film’s title appears to have been borrowed from the earlier movie, in a reference so obvious it cannot possibly have been accidental.

The story, though, is set closer to home. Instead of being discovered by a motley assortment of poorly paid 22nd-century freight workers on an uncharted planetoid in deep space, the new alien threat is found on Mars by the present-day crew of the International Space Station. The look and feel of Life are nearer to those of Gravity or Passengers, all crisp CGI and pristine interiors, than the grimy, gloomy veneer of Alien. The closer we get to the future, Hollywood seems to be telling us, the cleaner everything begins to look.

Where JJ Abrams’s Super 8 and the TV series Stranger Things act as spine-tingling homages to their 70s and 80s influences, Espinosa’s movie (lens flare apart) seems to lack such gorgeously rendered nods to the past. To put it another way, on the basis of the trailer, it appears to have stolen the plot from its predecessor without quite nailing the tone. Moreover, it’s arguable that by expanding the threat from the new organism to the whole of humanity, rather than just the astronauts, the story loses something of its power. It’s also worth remembering that official Alien movies are still being made – Scott’s own Alien: Covenant will open in cinemas just six weeks after Life, even though the saga has veered a long way from its original, claustrophobic, body-horror roots.

In the wake of the huge success of movies such as Gravity and The Martian, Hollywood has fallen in love with space all over again, and it’s easy to see why Life was greenlit: it takes the realism of those movies and adds some tried and tested fantasy-horror elements. Perhaps Espinosa’s film will be to Alien what this year’s Arrival is to Robert Zemeckis’s Contact: a movie that takes the raw ingredients of its predecessor and refines them into something more fascinating. But Zemeckis’s 1997 alien first-contact movie was so hampered by its focus on the Christian reaction to the discovery of extraterrestrial life that it left plenty of room for improvement. By contrast, Scott’s iconic film was – to paraphrase Ash the android – already pretty much the perfect organism.