THE FACTS OF LIFE
Can-hunk Reynolds’ trip to space won’t blow you away
I was of two minds going to see Life. On the one hand, I love the look of space: the slender blue line that delineates our planet when the sun shines through its razor-thin atmosphere; the absolute black of the unfiltered cosmos; the way Earth’s weather looks from the outside. But I’m not a big horror fan. Nevertheless, the film had me when Hugh (Ariyon Bakare), says of a newly discovered Martian life form: “Its curiosity outweighs its fear.” I get that.
Hugh is one of two British members of a six-person crew aboard the International Space Station in the near future. His countryperson is Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson) and they’re joined by Kat (Olga Dihovichnaya) from Russia, Sho (Hiroyuki Sanada) of Japan, David (Jake Gyllenhaal) from America, and Rory (Ryan Reynolds) from ... America. The filmmakers should really have let the Vancouver native play a Canadian, especially since you can’t spell SPACE without an “eh.”
Nationalist griping aside, there’s solid science behind the film’s plot, which imagines that a robot-collected sample of Martian soil might be dropped off at the space station for study. NASA is already deep into planning how to prevent possible terrestrial contamination by a Mars sample return mission in the 2020s.
But this is still science fiction. So when the sample is given something to eat and breathe, it quickly morphs from a single cell into a squishy blob, and then a creature that looks like Groot and Jell-O had a baby. As it grows, it next resembles a starfish, then an octopus, and finally a more repulsive creature that suggests that someone — or something — has been watching old Alien movies.
There’s a lot of Alien DNA in the script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland, Deadpool). It starts with the simple white sans-serif title font, kerned out so there’s about a parsec between each letter and the next. There’s the way some characters are more keen than others to kill the life form — Reynolds’ suggestion is unprintable in its enthusiasm. There’s motion tracking, as seen in Aliens, and the sleeping pods resemble hibernation chambers. And for variety, there’s a lift from 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which faulty comms require one of the astronauts to venture outside for repairs.
But there’s enough originality to keep things moving along, at least until a final-act whammy. (More on that in a moment.) Gyllenhaal, whose dedication to the craft is unparalleled, plays his character as someone who has been off-world so long — a record-setting 400-plus days — that he’s starting to feel eerily at home there. Ferguson acts as a more logical bulwark. Reynolds brings a touch of that Deadpool insouciance. And Dihovichnaya delivers maxims — “slow is fast” — that ring true in cinema as well as space exploration. Jon Ekstrand ties everything together with a suitably creepy score.
It’s nail-biting fun when the alien critter, nicknamed Calvin, starts tearing up the ship, and everyone scrambles to respond. (Among other things, it turns out that in space, no one can hear you drown.) Swedish director Daniel Espinosa manages an effective mix of horror and character development, and never stoops to the easy jumpscare. Fighting inimical alien life is frightening enough without it sneaking up on you.
Ah, but that ending. It’s problematic in that it breaks several of the unwritten rules of cinema, the kind that tell you that if a character looks out a window, the next cut will be of what she sees. I won’t say what it amounts to except that it feels cheap, and easy. Life is a good sciencefiction horror blend, but it falls short of greatness because its fear outweighs its curiosity.