Film review: ‘Life’

‘Life' aboard a space station proves ‘alien' to viewers|

Let’s consider the alien. The new interstellar thriller “Life” features some prominent Hollywood actors, but the real star is a Martian called Calvin. Though an extraterrestrial, plucked from a red planet soil sample, he has a very American life story. He is referred to as a “pilgrim” landing on the “Plymouth Rock” of an International Space Station and his name is crowdsourced from a live television broadcast beamed from Times Square to the astronauts in orbit.

The pod carrying proto-Calvin is plucked from space in a high stakes claw game by Rory (Ryan Reynolds) an American pilot and handyman at the station. The kernel that will become Calvin is pulled from the red dirt with an eyedropper by the British biologist Huge Derry (Ariyon Bakare), as overseen by Russian crew commander Katerina Golovkina (Olga Dihovichnaya).

Calvin is first a single cell of superior to those we have. He is described, in perhaps the only memorable line in the film, as “All brain, all muscle, and all eye.” He grows from that cell to a rhizome-y mushroom to a floating fish fin to a smallish cephalopod to his final state: a classic, “Alien”-looking alien - at once floral and amphibious, fast and flame resistant. Really though he should not be anthropomorphized - he is not, strictly speaking, even male. He races sinuously around the ship supping with a savage appetite.

To watch most alien movies is to wish you were watching “Alien” again instead of whatever is on screen and “Life” is no exception. As Calvin develops exponentially and torments the dull human cast (where have you gone John Hurt and Yaphet Kotto??), we have to wonder anew why we ever wanted to generate “Life on Mars” (in anything other than the David Bowie sense).

It’s frustrating, the ease with which Calvin colonizes the humans, who are always shouting about what protocols to follow at the critical moment instead of fleeing for the escape pods. The alien is blessedly unconcerned with the rote backstories, like the 400 straight days spent in space by Dr. David Jordan (a radioactively boring Jake Gyllenhaal) or the new fatherhood of Japanese system engineer Sho Murakami (Hiroyuki Sanada).

Despite the best efforts of quarantine officer Dr. Miranda North (Rebecca Ferguson), the main narrative events of the film involve Calvin evading firewall after firewall. He outfights us, he out-last-ditch-efforts us - he dispenses fresh hells better than us. Dr. North is the most systematic of the crew, the coldest, and yet there’s panic in her shaking voice, saying, “What I feel is not rational,” in regards to hatred for the beast they’ve made.

Calvin eschews our baser notion toward heroism - he doesn’t have friends so he is not inclined to try to save them at the risk of letting a deadly alien out of containment for the 50th time. Taking advantage of the crewmates’ brave, doomed gestures, Calvin gets to feed on the astronauts in ever more inventive ways, enjoying not just their succulent flesh but also absorbing the content of their tender brains.

At his best, director Daniel Espinosa makes us feel the zero gravity of the space station, with dreamy shots of blood droplets expelled by bodies collapsed from the inside out. At his worst, Espinosa relies on repetitive sequences with low light close ups of furrowed brows and tracking shots of astronauts hauling themselves through airlocks with little spatial coherence. The film is so dreary and pitiless we only realize - with a final turn of the screw - that while we know how one film breeds another, we don’t yet know how Calvin reproduces.

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