Review: 'Life’ is worth living for two freaky hours
Looking for intelligent life in the universe always seems like an OK plan until a savvy malevolent alien organism goes berserk on your space vessel.
Starring a couple of A-listers in Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal, the new sci-fi film Life (**½ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) navigates very familiar terrain and unleashed creature terror. And while it shares more than a few commonalities with Ridley Scott’s seminal Alien, director Daniel Espinosa’s thriller gives audiences a seriously cool monster and a sinister twist on a survival-of-the-fittest theme.
The six-person crew aboard the International Space Station is wrapping up an eight-month mission to bring back soil samples and possible organic matter from Mars. Things are hairy right from the start, as mission specialist Rory Adams (Reynolds) has to use a crane arm to catch the out-of-control capsule, which was damaged on the way back from the red planet.
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Luckily (or so it seems at the time), the astronauts dig in and find a microscopic life form far beyond anything they’ve ever seen on a cellular level. The evolutionary process is speedy and within a few weeks, Calvin — the name given to this cute, transparent starfish-y beastie — grows bigger and more intelligent, using surprising smarts to worm his way out of his confines and into the station’s nooks and crannies. The team and Calvin engage in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with the alien turning into a shockingly adept predator ruling this enclosed food chain.
“Life’s very existence requires destruction,” says paraplegic scientist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) in a quiet moment before more chaos and carnage caused by a crafty Calvin. Much of the cosmic claustrophobia, body invasion and other genre elements create a palpable tension but are pretty standard stuff for sci-fi fans, and it’s not until the very end where the true horror satisfyingly presents itself.
The characters are mostly thin and act as fodder for Calvin’s increasingly devious nature, though Gyllenhaal’s role, veteran spaceman David Jordan, is at least nuanced in showcasing a guy who’s spent so much time in orbit he’d rather be there than on Earth. Also of note: Rebecca Ferguson’s microbiologist Miranda North, who has to weigh her and her colleagues' lives vs. the greater good of keeping Calvin far away from human civilization.
The screenplay (by Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) unsurprisingly gives all its one-liners to Reynolds, who’s ostensibly the film’s resident comic relief, and is well paced in pitting its primary villain vs. a bunch of space nerds. But it also goes further than just scare tactics: An underlying aspect of the narrative is how, in the wild (or among the stars), wonder and awe with the unknown takes a back seat to getting out alive for each life form on board, whether you have hands or tentacles.
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When fully developed, Calvin is a vicious dose of visual-effects nightmare fuel, otherworldly but also oddly realistic in the primal way it moves and acts. Just as effective is composer Jon Ekstrand’s fabulous score, which combines majestic power chords connoting the majesty of space with the dissonance of what lies waiting for us out there.
It’s far from perfect, but Life’s worth living for two freaky hours.