In space, it is said, no one can hear you scream. While I watched Alien: Covenant, I started to wonder if it was possible to hear aggressive eye-rolling into the middle of a booming movie theater.

The latest attempt to wring a few more dollars out of enduring nostalgia for the 1979 sci-fi/horror film — or, more likely, the inferior 1986 sci-fi/action sequel — returns Ridley Scott to the director’s chair, continuing the eradication of goodwill that he began with Prometheus. That prequel effort to the franchise Scott inadvertently launched a lifetime ago trafficked in pretentious, exploratory mumbo jumbo and disconnected kinetic clatter, all of it rendered with a sputtering disregard for logic or consistency. If Scott was trying to rescue the legacy of one of his strongest cinematic efforts from the dire sequels it spawned, he mostly delivered an argument that the whole endeavor should have ended once and for with the last survivor of the Nostromo signing off, all those years ago.

Alien: Covenant is set approximately ten to fifteen years after the events of Prometheus and still a decent stretch of time before Alien. A crew of space explorers are guiding the ship Covenant to a distant corner of the galaxy, intending to terraform a planet, populating it with humans settled into cryosleep in the cargo hold and a whole batch of “second generation” settlers (embryos arranged in drawers like prized curios in an especially strange collection). When the crew is roused from their own deep-space slumber by a cosmic event, they discover a strange audio message in space that leads them to another planet which just might be habitable.

Of course, this promising orb is not just workable for Earthlings. The ravenous critters H.R. Giger sketched out around forty years back also find the landscape accommodating, especially when the human hors d’oeuvres comes stumbling around, making ill-advised decisions at every turn. The screenplay — co-credited to John Logan and Dante Harper, with a story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green — is completely scattershot. It introduces concepts — such as the role of faith in a time of scientific marvels and the defining components of humanity — only to drop them almost immediately, with nothing more than barest level of curiosity in evidence. Characters make choices according to the needs of the narrative’s twists rather than any internal honesty in the fiction. The actors are left as stranded as the shipwrecked space travelers they depict.

Amazingly, Scott offers this clacking indifference as the follow-up to The Martian, maybe the strongest film of his career. It’s not that it’s perplexing that Scott would bound from an cinematic high to an ugly low — he’s certainly pulled off that unfortunate artistic whiplash before — but The Martian is a science fiction film that smartly avoids every flaw that mars Alien: Covenant. Scott learned no lessons from his own accomplishment. With Alien: Covenant, it isn’t just screaming that’s pointless.