Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson, and Jake Gyllenhaal headline an otherwise multiethnic cast (shades of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine) of astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The film starts as the Mars capsule returns, the crew scrambling to catch it with one of the ISS’s docking arms. DP Seamus McGarvey (We Need to Talk About Kevin) shoots the crew’s frantic coordination in one long take; a touch of welcome, if utilitarian, stylistic brio that gradually fades as the film goes on.
It is no spoiler to tell you that something has hitchhiked all the way from Mars to Earth. That something begins as a unicellular organism and gradually grows … and grows … and grows. It kills off most of the crew as the survivors do their best to fight back. The plot is barebones, and the film gets going with blessedly little fuss. Even as the creature grows into a devious little starfish and things are clearly, predictably about to go to shit, Espinosa takes his time to build tension.
The scene in which that tension explodes is a tightly composed, excruciatingly violent setpiece: Life’s chestburster moment, if you will, with Ryan Reynolds doing John Hurt. After that, there is another brutal kill scene, complete with some light Gravity worship, before the pace settles. The film doesn’t get that nasty again, and it’s a letdown. Instead it starts throwing in leadfooted emotional beats, asking us to care about Jake Gyllenhaal’s absurdly conceived “Syria vet who doesn’t want to go back to earth because people are mean” character. At one point Gyllenhaal tries to wring pathos out of drippily reading Goodnight Moon. Maybe it’ll work for you.
It shifts from tight space slasher to confused space slasher, and then it ends. I almost want to recommend Life on the basis of its hilariously busted twist ending, which visually lies to the audience for the sake of a cheap shock. I will not spoil this for you because holy fuck is it stupid.
That said, without an original bone in its body (the score, especially, is naggingly familiar) Life manages to be entertaining. Any ideas it posits in its early going about the necessity of life to devour in order to survive are left by the wayside as the script loses itself in silly convolutions. Until yet another official Alien sequel hits in May, Life is a serviceable timewaster.
Life
2.5 out of 5 stars
Directed by Daniel Espinosa
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Ariyon Bakare
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This article appears in Mar 23-30, 2017.