Life
4 starts
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds
Duration: 103 minutes
Class: 15
KRS Releasing Ltd

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to glean that Life’s biggest influence is a rather momentous 1979 film called Alien, what with its six astronauts trapped in space at the mercy of a creature hell-bent on killing them all. Yet, this effective little chiller has enough going for it to come across as more homage than rip-off.

A crew on board the International Space Station led by Russian cosmonaut Ekaterina Golovkina (Olga Dihovichnaya) has just recovered a pod containing a living organism that was retrieved from Mars. The excitement on board – and on Earth – is palpable: after all, this is the first proof available of the existence of life on the Red Planet.

However, as scientist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) examines the life form, the creature begins to evolve alarmingly, rapidly causing havoc – and eventually death – to the abject horror of those on board whose triumphant mission transforms into a race for survival.

If Life fails the originality test in terms of plotline, it certainly ratchets up the fear factor, resulting in a tautly-directed sci-fi horror/thriller that rips along at consistently rapid pace, with no extraneous moments, just being exactly what it says on the tin.

Also working in its favour are the performances. Yes, the characters are pretty stock ones – the aforementioned by-the-book commander and geeky scientist; the reclusive David Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), who’s been on the ISS for 473 days and seems quite content there; cocky space-walking astronaut Rory Adams (Ryan Reynolds, being his charming and charismatic self, but also the protagonist of one of the film’s most horrifying and ‘ewww’-inducing moments; intense microbiologist Dr Miranda North (Rebecca Ferguson); and engineer Sho Murakami (Hiroyuki Sanada).

Enough going for it to come across as more homage than rip-off

Although director Daniel Espinosa takes very little time to introduce them, the ensemble cast members inject enough commitment and gravitas to their individual roles for the audience to engage fully with them to the point where we do care about their fate.

The real star, however, is the creature itself. Nicknamed Calvin – after the high school that won the ‘name the creature’ competition – never has such an innocuous sounding thing been so brutal. It starts off as a miniscule and harmless life form, yet as Hugh ooohs and aaahs at it in the lab, neither he nor his colleagues imagine the horrors to come.

When Hugh touches it, it reacts by crushing his hand in a death-grip. In the first of many breath-taking sequences, it ultimately breaks out of its incubator, adapting to its environment, impervious to any attempts at destroying it and growing significantly larger by the minute, morphing into a petrifying strong, slimy, squid/ octopus/other hybrid.

“Calvin doesn’t hate us,” Hugh opines. “He has to kill us in order to survive.” And that is what makes it so scary – this creature, clearly of remarkable intelligence, has one sole, deathly purpose. In carrying out that purpose, it does not so much hug faces (and limbs and various other body parts) as suck them lifeless; and Espinosa does not shy away from the grim, gory gruesomeness of it all. He keeps the tension factor ratcheted up high enough to warrant many mo­ments that had me watching proceedings through my fingers.

The production design is also an added bonus, the claustrophobic interiors of the space station the perfect setting for the horrors unfolding within with the zero-gravity atmosphere has the crew often desperately floating away from the creature – being, of course, unable to run for their lives.

If Life doesn’t exactly break new ground, at least it treads familiar ground with energy and gusto. It wraps it up with an unexpected twist and serves its purpose well enough, as we wait for the next instalment in the Alien saga, Covenant, scheduled to hit our screens in a few weeks’ time.

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