[rating=2.00]
There’s something so wholly unnecessary about director Daniel Espinosa’s Life, a flaccid attempt at a horror movie set aboard an international space station. It’s not that it’s entirely derivative of Alien, or that it’s been basking in the rumors that it’s some kind of prequel to Sony’s upcoming Venom solo movie. It’s just that it’s so bland and uninspired it baffles the mind as to how it even got made.
The premise is unavoidably comparable to Ridley Scott’s Alien: a small crew discovers another organism not of our world, then gets trapped with it. In Alien, as we all know by now, the crew descends on an inhospitable world, John Hurt gets face-hugged, then the baby xenomorph bursts from his chest, and havoc ensues.
In Life, the alien (named Calvin for reasons too trite to get into here) comes aboard via a satellite that has excavated soil samples from Mars. It starts as a single-celled organism, which is prodded to life by the resident scientist Hugh (Ariyon Bakare), who 23-skidoos some idyllic atmospheric conditions by fiddling with a few knobs.
The cell then comes to life, begins to multiply, and grows big enough it can be seen in a petri dish without a microscope. Then, suddenly, it stops moving. The crew’s relieved, given it’s an alien and no one has any idea what it’s capable of, so they decide to let everything be.
But, given that a movie can’t end in the first act, Hugh gets the idea to electrocute it, which not only brings it to life, but seems to anger it a great deal. (Duh.) What follows is an entire hour of the crew trying to kill it, during exchanges like this:
“FIRE!”
“You’re running low on fuel.”
“FIRE AGAIN!”
It’s worth noting that a mindlessly fun horror movie patterned after Alien wouldn’t have been bad in and of itself, but the script (which is at least 35% words like “firewall,” “diagnostic” and “protocol”) gives the audience absolutely nothing to grab onto in terms of characters — who’d be more accurately described as group of stereotypes with the most generic roles to fill.
Rory (Ryan Reynolds) is a hot-shot that misses his dog. David (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a misanthropic medical expert/pilot who doesn’t miss Earth. Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson) is the newest member of the crew who may or may not be hiding something. Sho (Hiroyuki Sanada) is Japanese, so he gets to explain how the toilet works to a bunch of schoolchildren via video chat. It’s as uncomfortable (and unnecessary) as it sounds.
That’s not to say Life doesn’t subvert some expectations along the way. The lone black character does not die first (he does, however, die the most times), and… well, that’s about it, I guess. Okay, I suppose the ending was designed to come as a poorly-edited surprise, but if you’ve seen more than three films in your life, it won’t.
Life is now playing in theaters everywhere.
