K-SCORE: 79
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Writer: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dykhovichnaya
Spoiler Level: Major. You can read the first paragraph for spoiler-free summary.
“Look at that hyper-generic, pretentious title.”
My buddy Willard is always pissed off whenever a film pretends like it knows the science behind its subject matter and then screws it up. His favorite part of Mad Max: Fury Road was the medical accuracy. I’m not going to say that this is a good criterion for evaluating films, but at the same time, I kind of get it. As it’s easier to like a stupid person who accepts his or her stupidity than it is to like a stupid person who thinks he or she is brilliant, so too is it with movies. I was concerned with Life. Look at that hyper-generic, pretentious title. Watch a trailer and you’ll say, that looks like Gravity but worse. It’s not really. It’s not that brilliant. There’s an alien lifeform that’s all brain and muscle and malevolent gray face and it attacks six astronauts on the international space station. Were you to decide you cared about the NASA procedures, the fine details of life on the ISS, and the potential viability/realism of such an alien existing (on Mars no less), you’d probably think Life is a shitty film. If you’re easily grossed out - the same - shitty film. If you’re looking to vicariously experience the horrors of being hunted in the highly delicate, highly claustrophobic confines of the space station that orbits Earth, Life is enjoyable.
The most essential scene in the film is when the alien first breaks out of its cage, breaks the hand of humanity’s sole xenobiologist (tough market) and battles Ryan Reynolds’s character, Rory. In that scene, the xenobiologist announces that the alien is a carbon-based lifeform and Rory plucks a flamethrower off the wall and torches the thing from close range, accurately, to no meaningful effect. My head was reeling. To quote Andy Weir, the biggest nightmare scenario for astronauts is a fire in space and the most likely result, “death by fire.” You know why? Humans are carbon based lifeforms. So fire burns us up. It should have burned up the alien. Then again, they never should have had the flamethrower on hand and no trained astronaut should have recklessly torched the international space station! But moments later the alien squirms into the biggest star on the cast list’s mouth. You see it happen slowly, watch him collapse, watch him vomit blood for a long time, die horribly from within, and then float in zero gravity. After that, I firmly decided: who cares? Who cares that these astronauts have a quarantine officer as one of their six essential crewmembers and fail in the most obvious and irresponsible ways to quarantine the one thing they need to quarantine? Who cares that there are obvious issues with concepts like pressure and momentum. Who cares that a few minutes of screen time is devoted to Jake Gyllenhaal reading Goodnight Moon? Who cares? Can you imagine the fear of being trapped in your sleeping pod as that thing squeezes the glass with the same force that crushed your friends’ bones? Can you imagine it being on your spacesuit as your vision blurs and you crawl towards an airlock? Can you imagine it making to Earth’s surface?
That’s Life’s best work by far. (It sure as hell isn’t the title.) There’s really only two jump scares in the whole movie. More often you can see what the threat is and it’s terrifying enough that it doesn’t need to hide in the shadows and hope you don’t square a weapon on it. The alien climbs on its victim, it breaks them, eats them, and does it while the victim’s companions watch. They say things like “run” but they can’t run in zero gravity environments! And even if they could, where could they go? At no point do the characters gather enough strength to suddenly out-muscle it. At no point does it waver in its resolve to attack the astronauts. The threat you know can sometimes be more terrifying than the one you don’t, but it’s rare and that rarity is achieved here.
“walks a bit of a line between wanting to be smart and innovative science fiction and accepting its place as space creature horror with Van Wilder and a gay cowboy”
Sure, Life walks a bit of a line between wanting to be smart and innovative science fiction and accepting its place as space creature horror with Van Wilder and a gay cowboy, but the ending proves that ultimately the filmmakers understood what it does best. And even if the characters are very often suicidal, at least none of them literally blow themselves up. Lately all I’m looking for from my movies is for them to only be ripping off the first Alien film and not the second.