A team of astronauts find new life, and face certain death in this fun alien horror flick.
It’s hard not to think about Ridley Scott’s upcoming Alien: Covenant when watching the trailers and promotional footage for Life. With a similar basic story and genre elements, it might even be easier to write off Life as nothing more than a rip off of the original Alien, as a team of astronauts and scientists are forced to fight for their lives against an evolving alien lifeform wreaking havoc on their spaceship. Nonetheless, while Life isn’t nearly as inventive, scary, or gloriously moody as that 1979 classic, it does manage to carve out a suitable space for itself in the sci-fi genre as a fun, often grotesque story about what men and women of this profession will do to protect life at all costs.
Directed by Daniel Espinosa, Life follows a group of astronauts stationed on the International Space Station (ISS), who are charged with analyzing a recovered sample of dirt from Mars for any signs of life or vegetation. What they discover is a single cell organism unlike any they’ve encountered before, which when fed with oxygen and glucose, begins to grow more and more with each passing day. Named Calvin, the creature - made of equal parts muscle and brain - does eventually begin lashing out against its human surveyors, proceeding to target and kill each members of the team in often spectacularly gory, stomach-churning fashion. Just like with the Xenomorph in the original Alien, seeing the creature grow and evolve throughout the film is one of Life’s more memorable pleasures.
While comparisons to the Alien series are unavoidable, Life is noticeably different from its supposed inspirations and genre predecessors because it doesn’t really have a lead character. While that might make it sound like it lacks focus or may try too hard to bite off more than it can chew in terms of character development, it actually lends an extra level of unpredictability to the whole film. As the titular alien life form begins to grow more and more dangerous, there is no obvious Ripley-like character to emerge so that the audience can figure out right away who is going to make it to the end of the film.
Credit should then be given to screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick - best known for their work on last year’s Deadpool - for crafting a believable, mostly well-developed cast of characters here. All of them are given different roles on the ship itself, their own unique backstories, and even are given an equal amount of screen time. That’s not something most other ensemble films like this are able to pull off, and it helps to give Life its own identity and dynamic, even when its first act slightly drags from time to time, and its third begins to devolve into a more predictable series of events.
The fact that Life feels constantly watchable at the very least, though, is no doubt thanks to the talents of its impressive cast. The film, of course, allows for stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds to each turn in respectable, charismatic performances once again. But it also shines a spotlight on more underappreciated, international stars like Hiroyuki Sanada, Olga Dihovichnaya, and Ariyon Bakare, the latter of whom turns in a particularly nuanced performance as a scientist who, after spending most of his life on Earth crippled below the waist, revels in the anti-gravity lifestyle aboard the ISS.
In addition, after breaking into movie stardom with her work in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Rebecca Ferguson gets a chance to continue to prove herself as an on screen presence to be reckoned with. Her Miranda North is very much the kind of stock character that the sci-fi genre has seen plenty of times before, and yet Ferguson brings a humanity and intelligence to her role that few other actresses might have.
Reese and Wernick aren’t afraid to play with an audience’s preconceived expectations based on their knowledge of a cast member’s star power. Their approach to the film features their signature wit and banter that made previous efforts like Deadpool and Zombieland stand out, but they bring an edge of ruthlessness to the material that elevates it above other, Alien-inspired sci-fi horror films throughout the years. It’s honestly hard to determine what’s more shocking, that this is the first horror movie they’ve ever written or that it took them this long to make one in the first place.
But even for all of these advantages and attempts at keeping the audience on their toes, Life can’t help but fall into the same genre cliches that have damaged past films like it. The third act, in particular, feels noticeably less intelligent or dramatic than the previous two, as the dread of Calvin possibly waiting around the corner for his next victim is taken away in favor of unnecessary plot machinations. After a while, when two of the astronauts find a way to physically track Calvin on the ship, it’s hard not to think that Reese, Wernick, and Espinosa are just trying to make the film’s run time meet theirs or the studio’s requirements. As a result, Life is less intense and scary in its final thirty minutes, which just makes its ending land with significantly less weight.
It should be said that despite being less than three full months into the year also, 2017 has already given us a number of exceptional blockbuster films, like John Wick: Chapter 2, Logan, Kong: Skull Island, Beauty and the Beast, and The LEGO Batman Movie. So compared to all of those, there’s no denying that Life lands somewhere in the lower half of the spectrum, even despite the immense talent of its cast and creative team. But still, for what it sets out to do, Life is a unique and fun new entry to the sci-fi horror subgenre that will more than just satiate the thirst of diehard fans counting down the days until Alien: Covenant hits theaters.
The Verdict
Life brings a lot of interesting, memorable elements to the table, but isn’t quite able to sustain the magic and horror of its first two thirds for its entire run time. However, for those coming into it hoping to see at least a handful of genuinely terrifying moments and kill scenes, along with a new cinematic monster to add to their nightmare fuel, Life should almost certainly do the trick.
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