Those of us old enough to remember catching the original “Alien” in a theater recall which cinema we saw it in, how it was worth going to this or that city’s lone “70mm Dolby Stereo” film palace to experience it.

A lot of us would round up friends to go for follow-up visits back in the summer of ’79, wanting them to be as immersed in this dank, damp and dark “industrial” spaceflight monster movie, ready to look away from the screen long enough to check out how shocked those friends were at the jolts Ridley Scott & Co. delivered.

So maybe we’re too worldwise/movie-savvy and jaded to be very impressed by a “Lost Boys and Girls Meet Aliens” entry in this forty-five year old franchise. That’s all that director and co-writer Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus” is — very young people, implausibly hurled into orbit, encountering the face-suckers, chest-busters and teeth-within-teeth penis-headed monsters on the resurrected set of “Aliens” (1986).

One can appreciate the back-engineered screenwriting necessary to take us “back there,” to the James Cameron space station sequel that launched the “bug hunt” that went so very wrong on behalf of corporate interests that did not have humanity’s interests at heart. Careful viewers will glimpse the wreckage of the old space freighter “Nostromo” and remember the Joseph Conrad reference it implied.

But as younger, callower characters get to experience what we viewers have experienced and re-experienced repeatedly for nearly half a centiury, reviving dead-characters played by long-gone actors and even repeating lines from the earlier movies, a cynical moviegoer is wholly-entitled to made a Fede case out of “Yeah? That’s all you’ve got?”

Alvarez — of the remade “Evil Dead,” “Don’t Breathe” and the “Girl in the Spider’s Web” remake — gets a little novelty and even less suspense out of rediscoveries, re-imagined pursuits and murders and ill-considered fights with “the perfect (killer) creature” that cinematic spacefarers have been stumbling into for generations.

So much is repeated, recycled and rehashed here that the delight of seeing long-gone “synthetic” science officer Rook (the late Ian Holm) brought back to digital life for more “mission” priority logic and advice wears off almost before it sets in.

On a distance ringed planet, the workforce, bound in their labor for generations, is mining and dying in accidents and deadly-unhealthy work conditions. Some of their orphaned kids are sure they’ve worked and earned enough “credits” to migrate somewhere less dingy and deadly to live.

No way, say representatives of Weyland/Yukani Corp., a reminder that back in ’79, Japan seemed destined to share in planetary domination with the West’s Greatest Oligarchs.

But some of the children of colonists, fearing their parents’ fates, are hellbent on escaping. Something has drifted into orbit around their planet that could help them flee, via cryo-sleep spaceflight, to planetary Nirvana. They just need to go up there and salvage what they need from this “decommissioned” space station, conventiently divided into halves named “Romulus” and “Remus.”

The only reason the plucky Rain (Cailee Spaeny of “Priscilla,” “Civil War”) is included in their half-dozen is that she’s friends with/protective of her “defective” “synthetic person” “brother,” “Andy.”

He (David Jonsson) is a glitchy, inarticulate “special needs” robot fond of bad puns and worse jokes.

“Why don’t monsters eat clowns? They taste funny.” “I’m reading a great book on zero gravity. I just can’t put it down.”

Andy, being synthetic, may have the digital codes in his memory to gain them entry to this station. As pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), handyman Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabella Merced) and rudeboy Bjorn (Spike Fearn) conveniently have access to a low-orbit access cargo hauler, they seem set.

The characters are barely sketched in before all hell breaks loose on that derelict station, which wasn’t so much “decommissioned” as slaughtered and abandoned years before.

Only the half-ruined corpse of Rook (Holm) can give them a clue about what happened, what’s coming and how they might survive it. And dormant for decades or not, he’s still got a corporate agenda to uphold.

Alvarez struggles to find fresh takes on old set pieces — a little zero gravity here, a bit of freeze-fighting there — and only manages moments of suspense, not sustained peril.

The “ticking clock” countdown here isn’t a self-destruct mechanism, but the impending decay of orbit that will crash the station into the planet’s icy, asteroid-riddled rings. It is a mishandled yawner. Seriously, dude, re-watch “Alien.”

The performances are perfunctory, by the book for the most part. Spaeny doesn’t dazzle. Jonsson’s Andy is given an Anglo-Android accent so garbled it sounds as if Christopher Nolan recorded it.

The effects are good to very good. The film plays around with the silent vacuum of space, something the original film borrowed from “2001” and made perilous with its ad slogan — “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.”

Intellectual points about how humanity is unsuited for longterm space flight and life on other planets occupy the mind — briefly. Young people resisting the slavery of labor is a nice variation on an earlier “Alien” theme.

Mainly, though, this movie is in the same business as all the “Aliens” that came before it — unleashing beasties on hapless humans who must adapt, fight back and escape, or die grisly, gurgling, incubating-their-murderer deaths.

Nine movies into this franchise, we have the right to something fresh. “In space, no one can hear you yawn” is hardly a selling point.

Rating: R for bloody violent content and profanity

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabella Merced, Aileen Wu and Spike Fearn.

Credits: Directed by Fede Alvarez, scripted by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. A Twentieth Century release.

Running time: 1:59