Alien: Romulus has turned Alien: Isolation's savegame mechanic into a way of spoiling its own scares
Among the many, Gigery beauties of 2014's Alien: Isolation is that you save using an in-game, wall-mounted Emergency Phone - a maddeningly analog process of slotting a keycard into the machine and waiting for three beeps. Doing this requires you to stand upright in full view, with your back turned upon an entire space station's worth of shiny domed technology and guttural industrial noises. Delightful!
Amongst the players harrowed and compelled by this fixture is Fede Álvarez, director of the 2013 Evil Dead remake, 2016's Don't Breathe and, most recently Alien: Romulus - the seventh and avowedly "back to basics" Alien movie. Isolation is the Alien experience that convinced Álvarez the Alien could still be scary, after decades of milking the creature's dugs for spin-off movies and making it share a screen with the Predator, the Pepsi Max to Alien's Dom Pérignon 1921. In possibly self-defeating homage to Creative Assembly's work, he's filled the movie with Emergency Telephones, turning them into a straightforward-sounding form of foreshadowing.
"Alien: Isolation was kind of what made me see that Alien could truly be terrifying and done well [today]," Álvarez told Total Film in an interview passed along by Gamesradar. "I played a few years after it came out. Don't Breathe was coming out. Or was I waiting for Don't Breathe to come out, and I was playing the game. That's why, at the time, I was like, 'fuck, if I could do anything, I would love to do Alien and scare the audience again with that creature and those environments'. I was playing, and realising how terrifying Alien could be if you take it back to that tone."
It's not clear how much Romulus borrows from Isolation, but the premise is certainly redolent: the film sees a cast of foolhardy young colonists scavenging from a derelict space station, which proves to be a nest of slithering horrors. And telephones. "The movie is set up in a way [that] every time something bad is about to happen, you will see a phone,"
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