Life (2017)
Sci-Fi, Horror
Directed By: Daniel Espinosa
It's fine to "rip-off" another movie or movies, it really is. Every film is pulling from something that came before it in some way or another, but if you are going to go so far as to market your film with the clear indication that you are going to do so at least have something new to offer the audience. The newest piece of sci-fi horror from filmmaker Daniel Espinosa Life wears its influences on its sleeve like a badge of honor and then fails to bring us anything more than lesser versions of those very ideas.
To the film's credit, they waste no time getting into the main plot and what we all care about. It opens on the crew of the Internation Space Station (ISS) as they attempt to intercept a capsule returning from Mars carrying a soil sample that could be life-shattering. Within minutes of the movie, the crew is already examining the sample and discovering the first official proof of life beyond our own. It's a creature composed of cells that are both muscle and nerves, it's all muscle and all brain making it the "perfect organism", sound familiar?
This creature grows at a rapid rate and as you can probably guess, finds a way to escape the quarantine and hunt them throughout the station. It's one perfect organism against the crew but unfortunately for this movie, they never take the time to build the characters or the atmosphere and in turn, it's hard to really care who lives or dies or to ever feel any real suspense. The most character building we get is the information that one of the crewmembers wives has just had a baby, that's about as deep as it gets.
Life brings one new wrinkle to the story, that they are in a zero gravity environment at all times in the space station. This is a cool visual gag that makes for some clever moments, but it's not enough to elevate this film to anything more. The story moves too fast for its own good so even though they are bringing a fairly cool new creature to the table we never get the time to grow scared of it, they take it from cute to deadly with the flip of a switch and expect us to go along with it.
Centering a movie around an alien means the look of it is crucial and for the most part, the design works here with its weird tentacles giving it the appearance of swimming through the zero-g. The abilities they form out of its design also work well and make for the tensest moments of the film, but once the best gag is used they bring it back repeatedly making it lose its impact. They rush through the discovery of the organism to get us into the action faster but we need that build up to set us on edge.
The cast of this movie is too impressive for its own good and with little characterization for any of them they don't have many opportunities to "wow" us. The film was sold on Jake Gyllenhall, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds, and they are all certainly in this film. They are each quite good but when the most you get to build off of your character is that he has been in space for too long there is little they can do to just sell this on their presence alone.
Despite its many shortcomings, I do believe this is a step in the right direction for studio horror. The film uses the R rating to its advantage and clearly lets the filmmaker do what he wants. There are some seriously cool ideas in here but they never grab one and focus in on it. It felt like the writers, Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (Deadpool), kept coming up with clever ideas and then needing to find ways to bring the story back to its center after executing that idea instead of building it into the next step.
A few years back this may have been one of my favorite new horror films. It moves at a mile a minute and features some great effects work, especially the limited practical stuff they did. With the horror landscape the way it is these days, however, this just feels like an uninspired regurgitation of a handful of ideas we have seen done better in recent memory. If all you are looking for is an action packed alien horror film, Life may be just what you want, but don't expect to be given anything new. For me, let's just say I'm happy the new Alien movie comes out in two months.
As always, thanks for reading and I am Zach Who Watches Movies. You can find me anytime on Twitter @ZachWWMovies, smell ya later!
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