NEW YORK, NY.- On a fall evening in 1883, the Metropolitan Opera opened its doors for the first time with a performance of “Faust,” the classic tale of a man who sells his soul to Mephistopheles to gain power and pleasure.

On Monday, 141 years later, another Met season began with Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” a bloodless new opera on that same old theme of making an ill-advised deal with the devil.

The same old theme, but with 21st-century trappings — a plot about advanced weapons technology; a libretto loaded with words unprintable in this newspaper — that are still unusual in the tradition-bound opera world, particularly on the Met’s most important night of the year. There is an assumption that operas on charged contemporary themes must be risky and important. “Grounded,” which doesn’t risk much, politically or musically, shows this isn’t so.

Its protagonist, Jess, is a hotshot fighter pilot who falls in love with a rancher she meets while on leave in Wyoming. When she gets pregnant, she is pulled out of her beloved F-16 cockpit, and out of combat in the Middle East. With a loyal husband and daughter, she is without the sense of freedom and mastery she had soaring through — and dropping bombs from — what she calls “the blue.”

A few years later, her old boss, the U.S. military, has a proposal: Would she apply her gifts to operating a missile-bearing Reaper drone, thousands of miles away from her targets? It’s much less glamorous than her former “Top Gun” life, but she’ll be able to go home and hug her child at the end of the day.

“The threat of death,” she is told in a solemn choral hymn, “has been removed.” How can this Major Faust say no to “war with all the benefits of home”?

It won’t surprise anyone that things don’t end up being that simple — the devil always gets his due — nor that war is pitilessly traumatic for those who wage it. At her joystick in Las Vegas, Jess is far from physical harm, but she sees, through the drone’s unblinking eye, the carnage in which she is participating more clearly than when she was in the skies. She finds her work and family lives blurring together uncomfortably — and, in the end, disastrously.

When “Grounded” premiered last year at Washington National Opera, it was a 2-1/2-hour expansion of Brant’s 80-minute, one-woman play, which had an off-Broadway run with Anne Hathaway in 2015 before the Met commissioned an adaptation. Opening up the original monologue, Tesori (the Tony Award-winning composer of “Fun Home” and “Kimberly Akimbo”) and Brant loaded it with a full cast and a chorus, and the opera sagged under all the new weight.

Over the past year, the creators cut about half an hour, and the result feels trimmer, especially in a zippier first act. And while mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo — her wide eyes full of anxiety as Jess, her voice lean yet warm, her commitment palpable — remains the best thing about “Grounded,” Ben Bliss, whose melted-gold tenor and easygoing charm are new to the show, has nudged Eric, Jess’ husband, closer to being a meaningful presence.

Closer, but no cigar. There is still a sense of sketchiness to Eric, and to all the supporting roles: the Commander, who mostly curses; the Sensor, Jess’ vapid teenage partner at the drone controls; the unseen five-man “kill chain” that approves her missions in frantic counterpoint. The piece hasn’t really shaken its origins as a solo.

As in Washington, Michael Mayer’s smoothly flowing production, with a set designed by Mimi Lien, has some realistic scenes on stage level and, just above, a more stylized space dominated by LED screens. The projections, designed by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson, include blue skies and greenish viewfinders, a stage-filling drone and the imagery it sees; a fetus shown in a sonogram resembles an explosion on a grayscale screen.

Even after the revisions, what remains most sorely lacking — even more obviously now that the storytelling is a bit tighter — is musical depth and intensity. As in Tesori’s Broadway shows (and Broadway shows get no better than “Caroline, or Change,” her 2003 collaboration with Tony Kushner), her chameleonic eclecticism, a kind of stylistic agility, is her most notable quality here.

She moves from tender lyricism to pounding marches with a swift fluidity captured (if often quite loudly) by the Met’s orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director. The opera’s second act opens in a mall with a choral paean to Cinnabon, a touch of humor that Tesori dissolves efficiently into fractured dissonance as Jess sees security cameras and fears she is being watched as she watches the targets of her Reaper.

But Tesori’s gift for tunefulness, so charmingly evident in her musical theater work, has unfortunately been sidelined, as if it’s too lowbrow for the likes of opera. And there’s not enough that’s interesting or idiosyncratic in her score — its orchestration, structure, vocal lines — to compensate.

The result is often faceless and bland. Jess’ downward spiral has little of the vividness of a similar trajectory in Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” another opera about a crazed soldier. Some ferocity should have been visible and even a little intimidating in her from the start; there has to be some reason she doesn’t just go work for Delta if she loves flying so much. But despite some powerful high notes and roiling orchestral booms, Jess comes across as pretty mild throughout, her moments of crisis like the checking of plot boxes; Tesori and Brant seem not to want her to be anything but sympathetic.

They have given her a soprano double named, yes, Also Jess (the lucid-toned Ellie Dehn) to make her mental dissociation crushingly obvious. But Dehn and D’Angelo’s duets are so dully poised that they don’t make us fear Jess, or fear for her.

And after a neat first act, the second, marked by Jess’ growing obsession with one of her targets, feels diffuse. The climax, in which she crashes her drone rather than obey orders that would kill a young girl as collateral damage, comes suddenly, not building to any real impact. The final scene, with Jess a court-martialed prisoner, peters out.

While Tesori’s previous opera, “Blue” (2019), about police violence, felt movingly reserved, “Grounded” is merely timid. It’s clear that D’Angelo would have been able to anchor a wilder piece, if Tesori and Brant had written it.

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‘Grounded’: Through Oct. 19 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.