Developer Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation is, of course, a stone-cold horror classic, so it only seems right the movie series it’s based on would finally get around to paying it some dues. Which is exactly what Fede Álvarez, the director of new movie Alien: Romulus, has done by sneaking in a whole bunch of Isolation-inspired phones.
As fans of the sci-fi horror masterpiece will already know, telephones play a prominent role in Alien: Isolation, serving as save points scattered intermittently throughout the nail-biting, Xenomorph-dodging adventure. “In the game,” Álvarez told Total Film (via VGC), “every time you knew there’s a phone you’d go, ‘Fuck, I’m about to go into some bad set-piece.'”
And it’s in that spirit Álvarez, tipping his hat to Alien: Isolation, elected to plaster emergency telephones all over his new movie, sneaking them into frame like an omen of imminent horrors to come. “It’s the same thing here,” he continued. “You’ll see they’re planted strategically throughout the film. When you see the phone, it’s like: brace for impact… The movie is set up in a way [that] every time something bad is about to happen, you will see a phone.”
