Originality is overrated.
While many bemoan Hollywood’s lack of originality while awash in a sea of
reboots, remakes, sequels and franchise building, they forget that everyone has
to get their ideas from somewhere. Everything is a remix, nothing is original
anymore, and every new idea is just the culmination of ideas from the past. Or
as Pablo Picasso once put it, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” The
thing that separates the inspired ideas from the uninspired ones, however, is
what they do with their plunder. Life
is a terrific example of this. It may not have a single original bone in its
body, but it at least knows how to use its stolen ideas effectively.
Our story follows a team
of researchers (Jake Gylenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon
Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya, and Ryan Reynolds) aboard the International Space
Station after a mission collecting soil samples from Mars. One of the samples
contains a revolutionary discovery: a dormant bacterium that they were
successfully able to revive, giving definitive proof that Mars was once able to
sustain life. They kept experimenting with this new lifeform (which they name
Calvin), and the things they discovered became more and more unsettling: it grows
at a substantial rate, it’s strong, smart, hostile, carnivorous, it can survive
in the vacuum of space, and it grows bigger and stronger with each new kill. Now
it’s on the loose, and the scientists must do everything they can to figure out
how to kill it and escape with their lives.
Life
is basically a B movie on an A-list budget. It doesn’t really have much to say
beyond “Hey, what if we combined Alien
and The Thing with the budget and
filmmaking skill of Gravity?”, but
what saves this from being just another Alien
clone is the execution. This is a technically gorgeous film. While it does
steal a couple tricks from Alfonso Cuaron and Ridley Scott, they at least
remember to steal the best ones. This is all evident in the opening scene,
which is a one shot take of the astronauts floating through the narrow
corridors of the space station, the camera twisting and spiraling around them
weightlessly.
The CGI is also
spectacular. Watching Calvin’s evolution from a microscopic organism to a symbiotic
mass of fractals to a translucent starfish/orchid hybrid to a tentacled
monstrosity is both awe-inspiring and horrifying, especially when his bloodlust
starts to kick in. Both the zero-gravity cinematography and the nightmarish
alien design are combined for maximum effect during a series of grizzly yet
mesmerizing kills. Although most of the astronauts get their turn to be
executed in increasingly gruesome fashion, the most upsetting one has to be
when Calvin gets ahold of a lab rat. Animal lovers beware: it ain’t pretty.
The movie also has a
great sense of suspense. There’s a good reason a lot of suspense thrillers are about
killer aliens: it’s an isolated, claustrophobic area million, or even billions
of miles away from help with a monster that we know nothing about. What makes
Calvin different from the Xenomorphs or the Thing is just how fast it adapts
and how strong it gets. Even when it’s a little starfish it’s able to figure
out how to break out of its prison with a level of intelligence and problem
solving skills of a chimpanzee. Every cell of its body is simultaneously a muscle,
a brain, and an eye. No matter what our crew tries to do to get rid of him, he
always seems to be one step ahead, all the way to the very end, from messing
with the airlocks to even sabotaging their spacesuits. It’s even hypothesized that
this species lead to the extinction of all life on Mars, and the planet’s lack
of atmosphere was all that was keeping it from thriving. Eventually things get
so bad that the captain, who up to this point has held science and logic above
all else, to throw science to the wind and declare that this thing needs to
die.
Of course, these murders
are meaningless without a reason to care about the victims, and as it turns
out, space was originally a sanctuary for most of our cast. Gylenhaal is a jaded
military doctor who’s seen up close what kind of cruelty humans can inflict on
each other, Ferguson is a disease control specialist who’s the first to realize
that Calvin needs to die, Bakare is a biologist who becomes attached to Calvin at
first and who’s also paralyzed from the waist down, so space is one of the only
places where he can move around freely without any assistance, Sanada has a
family back home and Reynolds may not have a tragic backstory but is still the
most likable member of the crew. These conflicting personalities lead to some
bad decisions, which is bad for them but good for the movie. Screenwriters Paul
Wernick and Rhett Reese (who are also responsible for the brilliant script for Deadpool) tend to fall into the familiar
trappings of this sub-genre a lot, with the crew locking themselves in airlocks
nanoseconds before the monster can get in and contending malfunctioning
equipment. Aside from a rather shocking twist, the plot’s predictability is
probably what will be the film’s undoing for some.
Overall, Life is a fun
little suspense thriller that makes up in skill and polish what it lacks in
originality. There are better and worse things out in theaters right now, but
it’s still worth checking out, even if it’s just for a late-night rental.
7/10
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