LIFE (2017) ✭✭✭✩✩
… finds a way… to eat you.
There isn’t much that’s original about Daniel Espinosa’s sci-fi horror Life, with its key influences being Ridley Scott’s Alien and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. It’s exactly what one imagines a hybrid of those two films to be, and I was fine with that level of ambition. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best, just make sure you do a good job of it.
A crew aboard the International Space Station discover a single-celled organism taken from a Martian soil sample, which proceeds to grow inordinately fast in their lab, before breaking free and attacking them. The imperilled astronauts are American medical officer Dr. David Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), British quarantine officer Dr. Miranda North (Rebecca Ferguson), American flight engineer Rory Adams (Ryan Reynolds), Japanese systems engineer Sho Murakami (Hiroyuki Sanada), British exobiologist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare), and Russian Mission Commander Ekaterina Golovkina (Olga Dihovichnaya). The alien critter, named Calvin by school children in a live-chat, begins life as an inquisitive translucent wisp before becoming a fearsome snake-headed squid.
Life has a rather terrific opening 40-minutes or so, as we meet the cosmopolitan crew and see them living and working together aboard the ISS. The special effects used to recreate a zero-gravity environment have now been perfected, so it’s very easy to buy into the reality of their claustrophobic environment. There are cliches in terms of how the crew joke around with each other, which I’m never convinced real-life astronauts behave like in private, and a few shortcuts to getting us invested in their characters (Sho has just become father, having Skype’d the birth of his child), but it’s generally a good start that provides a solid emotional grounding for when things go south.
And the first moment Calvin begins to turn aggressive is a masterful sequence of shock and tension, that manages to get you to the edge of your seat very promptly. This scene played in isolation before another movie I saw earlier this year, and it’s easy to see why. Once it happens, Life becomes unexpectedly nasty, and you’re both excited and afraid for what might result from a young alien intelligence that exists purely to stay alive with access to oxygen, warmth, and food.
It’s not long before Life gets down to business and becomes a string of set-pieces, punctuated by moments where the crew rethink their strategy and come up with another idea to kill this hostile entity. There’s a great cast assembled here, with no real weak links in terms of performance, but it’s fair to say Life loses some of its momentum in the second hour. This is because the characters become less interesting the more their number reduces, and the script struggles to think up some new and inventive ways to keep Calvin menacing. But the movie does manage to get back on-track with a solid final act, which includes some good action and a memorable final scene.
The script was written by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, the men behind Zombieland and Deadpool¹, which are movies that knew their respective genres inside-out. They bring a lot of that same insight to Life, only foregoing their signature humour. It’s just a shame there isn’t anything very different to the films it’s inspired by, even in terms of aesthetic and shooting style, although I did like the creature design for Calvin.
Espinosa is the Swedish² director who gave us Safe House (2012) before making his Hollywood debut with Child 44 (2015), the latter of which was produced by Ridley Scott, so maybe there’s some Alien connection there. He was close to directing Assassin’s Creed at one point, but opted to make Life instead. It was a wise move, if not financially. It certainly looks like the film crew sneaked onto Gravity’s sound stages when nobody was looking, but Espinosa does achieve a solid level of tension and moments of body horror that are increasingly rare in mainstream cinema these days.
¹ Possibly why Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds joined the project?
² Possibly why Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson was cast?
I had a good time watching Life. It’s Friday night movie boilerplate, done well. I almost regret not seeing it at the cinema, because the big screen always helps stop your attention from wandering.
I’m just very surprised to discover it only made $100 million at the worldwide box-office, so it’s technically only just “a blockbuster”. Having cost $60m to make (not including the marketing) my guess is it barely made its money back for Columbia Pictures. I’m sure it eventually will, thanks to its afterlife on video and TV, but it’s a shame more people didn’t give this a chance as a pre-summer appetiser. I can only imagine audiences were turned off by the unavoidable fact it seems like an Alien rip-off (which it basically is), and most people decided to save their money for Alien: Covenant a few months later.
Still, the theatrical success is an important but relatively small part of any film’s history. Life didn’t need to be a big success to get a sequel made because it barely asks for one, and I’m sure a lot of sci-fi fans will enjoy watching something that’s a fun throwback to the body horror classics of the ’80s and ‘90s. There’s room for improvement and a few missteps along the way, but Life is an efficient movie with a sadistic streak that gives it some welcome edge in a marketplace increasingly overwhelmed by family-friendly superheroes and animations.
Cast & Crew
director: Daniel Espinosa.
writers: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick.
starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare & Olga Dihovichnaya.
