"Scary Thrill Ride But Flawed"
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What You Need To Know:
For sheer excitement level, ALIEN: ROMULUS is right up there with the first two ALIEN movies. It’s truly a bonafide spine-chilling thrill ride. The movie also has some nice heartfelt scenes. For example, it has elements of heroism, compassion and sacrifice. However, the characters in ALIEN: ROMULUS are not as fascinating as they should have been. Also, the movie has an extreme level of ultraviolence, lots of strong foul language and an immoral pro-abortion subtext at the end. Ultimately, ALIEN: ROMULUS is excessive and unacceptable.
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More Detail:
The original ALIEN movie took science fiction horror movies to a new level of scary intensity in 1979. Buoyed by one of the all-time great taglines, “In space, no one can hear you scream,” it featured a breakout performance by Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, who, unlike the rest of her crewmates on the ill-fated spaceship, Nostromo, was neither coldly intellectual nor emotionally hysterical. She was smart, cool, tough, compassionate, vulnerable, and wholly feminine all at the same time. That’s why she survives in the end.
However, the first ALIEN also took ultraviolence to a new level with an infamous stomach busting scene when a baby alien monster burst out of one crewman’s body and skirted away down a corridor. Legend has it that the actors in that scene were not told what to expect, and the shock on their faces was totally real. Worse than this ultraviolence, perhaps, the original ALIEN had a definite pro-abortion subtext with Freudian undertones that turned the idea of pregnancy into a horror show.
ALIEN: ROMULUS, an ALIEN franchise movie, picks up on all these things. Its story features a group of five young adults and an android trying to escape a mining planet controlled by a powerful, onerous galactic company. They land on a derelict space station only to find out its occupants have been devastated by an infestation of the infamous alien monsters from the first movie. ALIEN: ROMULUS is admittedly a riveting thrill ride, with some elements of heroism, compassion and sacrifice, but it has the same level of scary ultraviolence, lots of strong and extreme foul language, and a horrific subtext against having children and giving birth.
The movie’s central hero is a young woman named Rain. She’s friendly to her damaged robot friend, Andy, a robot her family got when she was younger. Rain treats Andy like a brother. She’s very protective, though, because Andy’s brain mechanism has been damaged somehow. So, he often gets into trouble when dealing with humans.
Rain and Andy are about to leave the awful mining planet where they live and work. However, the heartless company running the mining facilities suddenly and capriciously decides to increase quotas for all its workers, including Rain. This means she’d have to stay there for another five or six years in a job that can kill her before the company even deigns to give her transport off the planet.
However, Tyler, a friend with whom Rain shares a mutual attraction, offers her and Andy a chance to escape the mining planet. Tyler and his other friends, a young man named Bjorn, and two young women, Navarro and Kay, have found a derelict spaceship floating nearby in space. If they take a flying machine to that ship, they all can take that ship to the nice Earthlike planet they all want to go.
Rain agrees. Since Andy’s prime directive is to help Rain, he can go too.
However, when they get to the nearby ship, they find it’s actually a mid-size to large derelict space station called Romulus and Remus, after the twin brothers who founded Ancient Rome. Things are still working in their favor, though. They find that there’s five sleep chambers they can use to make the lengthy trip to that paradise planet.
Hope turns into a real-life nightmare when they find that the space station is infested with the alien monsters from the other ALIEN movies, the most terrifying and dangerous species in the galaxy.
For sheer excitement level, ALIEN: ROMULUS is right up there with the first two ALIEN movies, which are considered the best made movies in the franchise. ALIEN: ROMULUS is truly a bonafide spine-chilling thrill ride. The scary suspense and thrills are constant and well done. The movie also has some nice heartfelt scenes, especially between Rain and Andy the android/robot. There are also some well-written twists to their relationship that increase the personal stakes in the story. As a result, ALIEN: ROMULUS has elements of heroism, compassion and sacrifice.
That said, the characters in ALIEN: ROMULUS are not as fascinating as the ones in the first two ALIEN movies. They’re kind of ciphers. There’s certainly no one as fascinating as Ripley in this movie. Also, only one character, the character of Andy the Robot, is given any real shadow and depth. Consequently, David Jonsson, the actor who plays Andy, is the only one who really gets a chance to deliver a well-rounded performance. He succeeds.
Finally, as noted above, ALIEN: ROMULUS has an extreme level of ultraviolence. It also has lots of strong and scary violence as the humans battle the alien monsters. In addition, it has lots of strong foul language, including more than 25 “f” words and two strong profanities. Furthermore, ALIEN: ROMULUS has an immoral, pagan, antihuman pro-abortion subtext at the end. This is slightly mitigated by some heroic aspects. Ultimately, however, ALIEN: ROMULUS is excessive and unacceptable.