life

Life was released in 2017 to a mostly collective shrug and hasn’t garnered much enthusiasm in the years since. It’s not entirely difficult to see why. The story is a pretty basic riff on the shopworn Alien formula - a confined haunted house nerve jangler specially retrofitted for deep space. In this case, the six-man crew aboard the International Space Station (Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya, and Ryan Reynolds) manage to pluck a solitary cell from the Martian soil and watch in awe as it rapidly evolves into a complex organism dubbed “Calvin.” Scientific amazement quickly gives way to consternation and then outright terror, however, as Calvin’s formidable survival instincts are triggered (it latches onto the hand of Bakare’s exobiologist and leaves it looking as if it got mangled in a hydraulic press), eventually leading to a breach of the laboratory firewall. Xenomorphic chaos ensues.

Life offers only nominal punch in terms of character, but it has a serious vicious streak - the sort that comes with serrated teeth. Director Daniel Espinosa deliberately keeps the film as lean and propulsive as possible (Reynolds falls back on his usual brand of snark, while Gyllenhaal’s lead performance is curiously slight, never quite asserting itself; Ferguson, not surprisingly, leaves the strongest stamp). Calvin is quite marvelous in conception. Alien’s iconic HR Giger creation was like something straight out of biomechanical nightmare, but Life’s antagonistic organism begins as a cousin of sorts to the delicately undulating woodsprites in Avatar, eventually evolving into more of a gelatinous, squid-like entity… terrifying in its biological efficiency. Some might argue it lacks personality, but that’s precisely the point. This is creature/creator myth at its most primal… scientists revive a single dormant cell that, with a swift and ruthless inevitability, becomes the architect of their destruction. There’s a layer of plausibility here that’s uncommon for a subgenre that typically traffics in baroque fantasy. Calvin feels uncomfortably tethered to our own cosmos.    ​

As with many science-fiction films of this nature, Espinosa does an effective job juxtaposing the existential vastness of outer space with the punishing claustrophobia of the sort of vessels required to inhabit it. He can’t transcend the more familiar beats of the genre, however - there’s a spacewalk sequence (because there’s always a spacewalk sequence) and the usual calamities involving malfunctioning life support systems and misaligned orbits. The ISS is a striking setting, with its maze of tubular corridors and angled solar arrays, but it’s also a limited one. There’s only so many places for Espinosa’s camera to go, only so many ways to dramatize bodies propelling themselves from one end of the station to the other in zero-g. Perhaps that’s why the movie struggled to capture the imagination (remember when people were initially convinced that it was a stealth Venom origin pic? It was a fun theory, if nothing else). Nonetheless, the savagely nihilistic ending absolutely rips - it stands alongside the likes of The Thing and The Mist in terms of sheer apocalyptic despair. The title may seem generic, yet it’s absolutely fitting. Life begets death and death begets life.