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ALIEN: ROMULUS

What You Need To Know:

The central hero in ALIEN: ROMULUS is a young woman named Rain working on a horrible mining planet. She treats her deceased family’s robot, Andy, like a brother. However, his brain mechanism has been damaged, so she protects him. Meanwhile, Andy’s prime directive is to serve and help Rain survive. Four of Rain’s friends, two young men and two young women, have found a derelict spaceship nearby in space. If they can get to the ship, they may be able to leave for greener pastures. However, the abandoned spaceship turns out to be infested with alien monsters.

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.

Content:

(BB, H, C, PaPa, AbAb, LLL, VVV, S, N, D, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Strong moral worldview in a tale of survival as humans try to survive against heartless alien monsters and against a cold humanist machine intelligence that admires the monsters while humans show some compassion and examples of sacrifice with one another, but marred by a pagan, immoral pro-abortion, anti-human subtext at the end despite the movie’s somewhat heroic resolution;

Foul Language:
41 obscenities (more than 25 are “f” words), two profanities using the name of Jesus Christ (one is said slightly in a pleading prayer kind of manner) and three OMG profanities;

Violence:
Some graphic and extreme scary violence such as a face-hugging crab alien monster plants a seed in one young woman’s body and the seed grows into an alien baby that soon bursts out of the woman’s body, large alien monster uses the teeth extension in its mouth to bash one man’s face, another bloody birthing scene, a shot of alien cannibalism, and one or two people are injured by alien blood which is actually acid, a few images of human blood splatter and smears from previous alien encounters in a space station overrun with alien monsters, and aliens have cocooned some human beings to feed on them later, plus lots of scary intense strong action violence such as multiple face-hugging crab aliens chase after humans in multiple scenes and try to attach themselves to their faces, humans run away and try to escape those smaller aliens and the larger aliens in multiple scenes, humans use guns to try to kill the alien monsters but have to be careful because their acid blood could eat through the spaceships and out into space and this depressurize the ships (the humans find an interesting way around this in one lengthy action sequence), woman in spacesuit outside a spaceship hangs from a rope and tries to climb back into the ship;

Sex:
No sex scenes but the designs of the alien creatures have sexual connotations, and one smaller creatures plants an alien seed inside one of the three young women’s bodies through her mouth, plus another one of the three young women’s bodies is pregnant from one of the two young men, her brother (a third “male” character is a robot with human features whom the third young woman, the movie’s heroine, treats as a brother);

Nudity:
A bizarre-looking humanoid male creature is nude but the camera avoids images of its genitals;

Alcohol Use:
No alcohol use;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
Some cigarette smoking but no apparent drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:
The “heroes” find a heartless machine intelligence with an evil agenda that’s often condescending and sarcastic toward them.

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.