Nail-biting and entertainingly trashy tale of peril in space
The first touch in Daniel Espinosa’s Earth-orbiting suspense flick may remind you of Ridley Scott’s Alien. It’s also far from the last.
The International Space Station comprising Life’s entire setting is manned by six humans. In time, there’s a stowaway – it starts as a single-celled organism, collected from the surface of Mars, which twitches, and causes everyone great scientific excitement. An hour of screen-time later, it’s causing them to fly in terror down the ship’s zerogravity corridors, mainly to avoid having their innards crunched.
Conceit-wise, Life feels like a B-movie on an A-budget and has a pleasingly motley multinational cast, with a greatly concerned Jake Gyllenhaal, as the ISS’s in-house medic, up at the starry end. Guessing the order of their despatch is half the game; but it’s the methods that really get the pulse racing.
Taken on its entertainingly trashy terms, Espinosa’s film does most of the things you want from it quite well.
Its baseline job is get you chewing your nails off - and that, it certainly achieves.