A very telling moment occurred at the press screening I went to for Outlander. A middle-aged woman was talking with her friend about all the bad movies she’d been to lately and didn’t sound too enthusiastic about Outlander, either. “They say it’s Vikings vs. aliens?” she asked, rolling her eyes.

A guy in his twenties in the row in front of her turned around. “That’s funny that you would say that,” he said. “When I heard it was about Vikings vs. aliens, I got really excited.”

So apparently there’s a litmus test for wanting to see this movie: does Vikings vs. aliens sound like fun to you?

If it does — in that creative B-movie monster-mash kind of way — it’s worth seeing Outlander, although I can’t guarantee that you’ll be entirely satisfied. Though well-executed, the script, after a lively setup, actually plays the material pretty straight. I’m not asking for complete camp; I just wish, given the concept, that things were a little livelier and the subplots were less by-the-numbers.

The story begins when a spaceship crashes in Norway in the year 709. Onboard is an alien who happens to look exactly like a human — Kainan (Jim Caviezel). Unfortunately, he also brought with him another alien race called a Moorwen, which is basically a dragon.

Thanks to some kind of super-cool technology that involves getting shot through the eye, Kainan quickly learns the local language and heads toward the nearest settlement, intent on hunting and killing the Moorwen.

From here on out, the script doesn’t really do anything with the fact that Kainen is an alien. There’s an extended flashback sequence to the Moorwen planet, but that’s it. It’s like somebody thought of a cool opening, then ran out of inspiration and relied on familiar formulas.

The nearest settlement, as it turns out, is led by an elderly king played by John Hurt; Sophia Myles plays his daughter Freya, a startlingly obvious rip-off of Eowyn from Lord of the Rings. The similarities don’t end there — the main warrior, Wulfric, (Jack Huston) is made up to look exactly like Eomer. They might as well have called the place Rohan.

It’s funny, because what Outlander is really trying to ape is Beowulf. The story is meant, I think, to be a sort of Beowulf: The True Story — the events that actually happened and, through years of oral storytelling, morphed into the Beowulf we know today. (The giveaway is that the king’s name is Rothgar.) That’s a clever enough idea, except again, the movie doesn’t really follow through with it — if that’s what you want to do, you might as well go all the way with the idea. In borrowing only a few names and plot points