☆☆
Put a handful of people in an enclosed space and throw in an indestructible monster and you've got a can't-miss movie, right? It must have seemed that easy to the filmmakers behind Life. After all, it's been nearly 40 years since Ridley Scott made Alien, and Life follows the same basic premise.
There are a half-dozen astronauts (all right, so that's one less than Alien had) who discover a strange organism that comes aboard their spaceship, which in this case is the International Space Station. It grows, as did the Alien, into a ravaging, bloodthirsty creature that won't stop until it kills them all.
Life hews so closely to the Alien structure that it's never surprising or particularly exciting, neither hardcore enough to work as science-fiction or suspenseful enough to work as a horror film. Most disappointing is the creature at the heart of the story, a gelatinous, squid-like blob that jiggles and bounces across the screen without a sense of menace.
The creature begins as a hibernating single-cell organism found in soil samples from Mars, which, as the movie begins, are blown terribly off course and might be lost forever except that the space station crew is on hand to retrieve them. The resident biologist (Ariyon Bakare) pokes and prods at the tiny, sleeping microbe, lo and behold, it stirs. Word gets around fast that the ISS has found proof of life beyond Earth, and a little girl in Times Square announces that the thing shall henceforth be known as Calvin.
What the giddy folks down on terra firma don't realize is that Calvin quickly morphs into an angry little thing, one that the astronauts theorize might have once lived in abundance on the red planet, though the movie never really builds on that theory at all. Instead, it focuses on Calvin's only obsession: killing everyone it meets.
As Calvin grows, it becomes intent on survival, and the movie becomes merely a cat-and-mouse chase in a claustrophobic environment. That's all well and good, except that Life doesn't clearly establish the rules of engagement, so Calvin takes on any survival ability that will push the plot forward. He can survive in the vacuum of space, he can shove his tentacles down the throats of unsuspecting astronauts, he can wriggle his way into tiny spaces, he can even think and reason -- he can do pretty much anything, which means that Life bluffs its way along.
That would be fine if Life were really suspenseful, but too often it's just a visual and narrative jumble, even as it narrows down the crew to just two -- a scientist from the Centers for Disease Control (Rebecca Ferguson), who has shockingly little awareness of how to contain a deadly organism, and a pilot (Jake Gyllenhaal) who has been on the ISS for more than a year.
Neither they nor the movie has a clear idea of how to proceed. Their final inspiration comes from, of all places, the children's book "Goodnight Moon," and leads to a climactic plot twist that is not only easy to predict, but that feels as contrived as the rest of the movie. It's a last-ditch effort to inject some life into Life, which is by no means a terrible film just a lackluster one, especially because it mostly -- and unintentionally -- serves as a reminder of a better, more exciting, more fulfilling and stylish movie about a spaceship and a really mean alien.
Viewed March 24, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1945
There are a half-dozen astronauts (all right, so that's one less than Alien had) who discover a strange organism that comes aboard their spaceship, which in this case is the International Space Station. It grows, as did the Alien, into a ravaging, bloodthirsty creature that won't stop until it kills them all.
Life hews so closely to the Alien structure that it's never surprising or particularly exciting, neither hardcore enough to work as science-fiction or suspenseful enough to work as a horror film. Most disappointing is the creature at the heart of the story, a gelatinous, squid-like blob that jiggles and bounces across the screen without a sense of menace.
The creature begins as a hibernating single-cell organism found in soil samples from Mars, which, as the movie begins, are blown terribly off course and might be lost forever except that the space station crew is on hand to retrieve them. The resident biologist (Ariyon Bakare) pokes and prods at the tiny, sleeping microbe, lo and behold, it stirs. Word gets around fast that the ISS has found proof of life beyond Earth, and a little girl in Times Square announces that the thing shall henceforth be known as Calvin.
What the giddy folks down on terra firma don't realize is that Calvin quickly morphs into an angry little thing, one that the astronauts theorize might have once lived in abundance on the red planet, though the movie never really builds on that theory at all. Instead, it focuses on Calvin's only obsession: killing everyone it meets.
As Calvin grows, it becomes intent on survival, and the movie becomes merely a cat-and-mouse chase in a claustrophobic environment. That's all well and good, except that Life doesn't clearly establish the rules of engagement, so Calvin takes on any survival ability that will push the plot forward. He can survive in the vacuum of space, he can shove his tentacles down the throats of unsuspecting astronauts, he can wriggle his way into tiny spaces, he can even think and reason -- he can do pretty much anything, which means that Life bluffs its way along.
That would be fine if Life were really suspenseful, but too often it's just a visual and narrative jumble, even as it narrows down the crew to just two -- a scientist from the Centers for Disease Control (Rebecca Ferguson), who has shockingly little awareness of how to contain a deadly organism, and a pilot (Jake Gyllenhaal) who has been on the ISS for more than a year.
Neither they nor the movie has a clear idea of how to proceed. Their final inspiration comes from, of all places, the children's book "Goodnight Moon," and leads to a climactic plot twist that is not only easy to predict, but that feels as contrived as the rest of the movie. It's a last-ditch effort to inject some life into Life, which is by no means a terrible film just a lackluster one, especially because it mostly -- and unintentionally -- serves as a reminder of a better, more exciting, more fulfilling and stylish movie about a spaceship and a really mean alien.
Viewed March 24, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1945
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