Strap yourselves in, because Ridley Scott is trying to reinvigorate the Alien franchise with Covenant, an action thriller in the vein of Aliens. Unfortunately, as you can see in the first trailer for this sequel to Prometheus, there's a lot of cheesiness in the mix.

This is one of those red band trailers that's so long that I worry it contains all the best scenes in the movie. We begin with an intense moment, probably late in the film, where characters are bursting with aliens (and we meet the legendary backburster neomorph—more on that in a second). Blood is everywhere! People are sweaty! The spaceship is on fire! OMG WTF!

Then we backtrack to meet our protagonists. There's David (Michael Fassbender), the freaky-ass android from Prometheus who has his own plinky/creepy musical score. He's in a giant mansion all alone, the sole human-ish creature on a planet that's about to be visited by the Covenant.

Meanwhile, on board the Covenant, we meet Walter, the next-gen version of David (also Michael Fassbender), who is assisting a rag-tag crew of terraformers in search of a planet to colonize. For some reason, they're going to land on David's world and meet the real star of the show, the neomorphs. These are more animalistic, toothy versions of the xenomorphs from Alien, and they come from spores. There's a brief scene where we see the captain (Billy Crudup) step on some bulbs, which release a CGI spore that dives into his ear. Only the scientist Daniels (Katherine Waterston) seems to suspect that something is wrong on David's world.

Neomorphs gestate like xenomorphs, but they can burst out of any part of your body—hence, the backburster in the first scene. Also, unfortunately, it feels like Ridley Scott's notion of making an original movie was to come up with slightly new powers for the aliens. Everything feels rote in this trailer, from the "leave the infected behind" tragedy to the "fight monsters on a spacecraft" sequences.

The action is intercut with explorations of David/Walter's android psychology, which is interesting—but also feels like some kind of Kurzweilian tangent about posthumanity plopped into the middle of a mediocre action film.

The worst part is the way this trailer ends. To tease us with how gross/shocking/intense Covenant will be, we see two people having sex in the shower... until a neomorph tentacle snakes its way up the lady's leg and rips everybody apart. Really? The old alien tentacle sex trick is all you've got, Alien franchise? C'mon, if I wanted that I'd just watch Decoys or waltz over to the hentai section of the Internet.

My point is that I support tentacle sex in all its forms, but I expect more from an Alien movie. Though after Prometheus, I really shouldn't. And this trailer for Covenant doesn't give me much hope for the future of this franchise.

Listing image by 20th Century Fox