Spooktober II Review #26 - Life

Life (2017)
Daniel Espinosa

"Goodnight, nobody."

Have you ever seen the movie Alien? Yeah? Cool. Then you've seen Life.

Well, sorta.

Before I get into spoilers, Life is a pretty good sci-fi/horror flick set in space that apes a lot of what Alien (and a hundred other movies) have already done, but manages to avoid feeling like a complete waste of time. It's carried by some solid performances by the cast, good special effects (despite being mostly CGI), and a few dark twists that keep it interesting.

The plot is simple enough. Astronauts on the International Space Station analyze some martian soil samples brought back by an unmanned probe and find a single cellular lifeform. The team's resident microbiologist revives the martian cell with some TLC, and everyone's obviously excited. But of course things go horribly wrong.

From here on out, I'm going to discuss spoilers, so skip to the summary if you plan on seeing it.

----------------SPOILERS BELOW HERE-----------------

Life is probably best described as a combination of Alien and Gravity. There's a lot of running from and fighting a space monster, but their environment is just as much of an enemy. Systems break down, characters have to travel outside the spacecraft, and there's a lot of plate-spinning with things like orbit degradation and life support necessities.

I'll admit, there was a lot of shouting at the screen at the beginning of the movie, because there's no mystery to what's about to happen. When the microbiologist starts touching the small, but growing, martian blob you're waiting for it to lash out and take over his brain or something. It doesn't happen right away, which is fine, but the thrill is lost when it finally does make its move. Still, instead of biting him or spraying him with space acid, it wraps itself around his hand and crushes it like a pop can, snapping his fingers backward in a delightfully disgusting scene.

There's an understanding of quarantine and protocol among the characters, which is nice. All of them are pulling in the same direction. There's no android saboteur to gum up the works, and nobody makes a staggeringly stupid decision. It's a fairly realistic take on the genre.

The martian monster is pretty cool, for being a CGI blob. The CGI use, especially at the beginning of the film, is understated and well done. It gets a little cartoony near the end, but by that point, we're more interested in the characters trying to find a solution to the problem than the monster itself. Still, give me a slimy rubber alien any day.

I also enjoy that the blob monster has a name. The children of Earth voted on naming the cell once the news broke that life was discoverd in martian soil, and came up with the name Calvin after an elementary school where the winning name was thought up. It's the sort of dopey thing that would happen if a real martian cellular organism was discovered. It also lends a certain goofiness to the monster, since they can refer to it by name.

After Calvin attacks the microbiologist and gets loose, Ryan Reynolds has the idea to try and burn it to death with an improvised flamethrower (like Alien), but it's not super effective (like Alien), and Reynolds gets eaten from the inside out (like Alien).

The fire does trigger the suppression system, which creates little openings Calvin tries to get out through. There's a race to close the fire suppression vents before Calvin can slip out (which is really just the acid-melting-through-the-spaceship scene in Alien). Calvin manages to worm out through the final vent.

Conveniently for tension and plot, Calvin feeds on coolant, which ruins their ability to communicate with Earth. The commander of the mission makes a trip outside of the space station to try and repair it, but Calvin busts the coolant system in her suit, causing it to fill with fluid in zero gravity. She ends up drowning in outer space. It would suck to die that way, but if you're going to die, it might as well be totally unique!

As the surviving crew try to figure out what to do, NASA gets nervous and sends a ship to the space station to shove it into deep space, preventing Calvin from wreaking havoc on terra firma. This is probably a good idea. While it's never explicitly stated, my assumption is that Calvin's species somehow got on Mars, and consumed all of the organic matter, going dormant once they'd ruined the planet completely. 

NASA's quarantine plan isn't successful because Calvin does what he does, and ruins everything. The film flips back and forth between the conceit that Calvin is just an animal trying to survive, and that it has some level of higher intelligence to solve problems (just like...well, you know). The NASA plan ends up crippling the space station, sending it into a decaying orbit. Neither of the two surviving astronauts know if Calvin can survive reentry, but they don't want to risk it. The plan is to lure Calvin into one of the lifeboats, and fly the ship into deep space to save humanity, while the other astronaut travels back to Earth to tell their tale.

The dark twist at the end is that Calvin is on the ship that makes it back to Earth, while the other astronaut floats helplessly into deep space, knowing that Earth is likely doomed. Even though the twist becomes a little obvious as the editing gets more and more confusing between the two lifeboats flying around, I'm a fan any time a movie is ballsy enough to suggest humanity's extinction as the credits roll.

Summary:

Despite being a clone of Alien, Life is still worth checking out. It's a tight little space thriller, and there's always room for those. It could have done more with practical effects, but the CGI isn't too annoying. The space effects are cool, and the characters are likeable. It's a pretty solid movie, and I'm sorry I didn't see it in the theater when it came out.

It's free on demand if you have the premium channels, so if you're a fan of sci-fi horror, check it out.