By This week’s “Alien: Romulus” film is set in the years between “Alien” and “Aliens” and adopts the retro sci-fi tech aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s original 1979 film.
As a result, there have been some obvious comparisons to arguably the greatest “Alien” video game made to date – “Alien: Isolation”.
That 2014 title is set 15 years after the events of “Alien” and follows engineer Amanda Ripley as she explores the dilapidated space station Sevastopol in search of her missing mother Ellen Ripley – only to discover a xenomorph onboard.
Turns out those comparisons were spot on with ‘Romulus’ director Fede Alvarez, speaking on the Total Film podcast, explaining that he carefully placed a telephone in select scenes of the film as a direct homage to the game.
In the game, telephones are used as save points but also serve as warnings that something nasty is about to go down. Alvarez adopted that for the film:
“The movie is set up in a way [that] every time something bad is about to happen, you will see a phone. In the game, every time you knew there’s a phone you’d go ‘f—, I’m about to go into some bad set-piece’. It’s the same thing here. You’ll see they’re planted strategically throughout the film. When you see the phone, it’s like, brace for impact.”
Álvarez also credits the game for providing a way for him to realise how you could make an “Alien” film scary in the present day and ultimately led to him making the film:
“Alien: Isolation was kind of what made me see that Alien could truly be terrifying and done well [today]. 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, ‘f—, 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.”
“Alien: Romulus” is set to release in cinemas on Friday.
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