This doesn't really follow the original film in terms of genre, since the original was mystery and horror and this was action and military. The tension comes from the mechanics of depicting the action, not much on working out deeper aspects of character or about the precise way aliens work. The acting, writing, and cinematagraphy are great. I wish the score gave us a little more space, more weird atonality to hype up the setting, but that wasn't the way things worked at the time this was made. By the end I was already pretty certain that this wasn't a story about a successful mission, even not thinking about the rest of the films in the franchise.