What do you want from an X-Men movie? Do you want a Christopher Nolan-esque story grounded in reality? Or do you want something with, um…aliens? How about both?! Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg says you can expect the best of both worlds for his upcoming X-Men film.

Does anyone involved with the X-Men franchise know what to do with the X-Men franchise? I have my doubts, but they’re going to keep making these movies as long as they make money. So here we are, barreling towards the release of X-Men: Dark Phoenix, and director Simon Kinberg is offering up some details. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Kinberg says that Dark Phoneix will be both accurate to the comics…and also real and grounded:

“It’s much more loyal to the original comic than X-Men 3, which told the Dark Phoenix story. It’s a movie that involves extraterrestrial characters, which is not something that we’ve done in the X-Men franchise before, and is something that is a huge part of the Dark Phoenix saga in the comics. … It’s more intense and it’s more real and grounded, and hopefully more relatable.”

Calling your superhero movie “real and grounded” sounds like a hold-over from the era when all superhero movies were trying to emulate Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. I’m not saying the X-Men movies have to become big, goofy affairs, but this answer from Kinberg comes across as a series of buzzwords without any real meaning behind them.

That said, adding aliens to the mix is certainly a twist as far as this franchise goes. Then again, if you want to count Deadpool as part of the X-Men universe, Kinberg’s statement than X-Men movies haven’t had aliens is an’t entirely correct – in Deadpool 2, the character Shatterstar says he’s an alien. What say you now, Kinberg? What say you now?

The quality of X-Men films has waxed and wained over the years. Some of the movies are pretty good! Some, like the recent X-Men: Apocalypse, are dreadful. Will Dark Phoenix succeed where others have failed? We can only hope.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix, starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Sophie Turner, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult and Jessica Chastain, opens on February 14, 2019.