Horror in space

The new film Life adds a title to the library of sci-fi flicks that owe their existence to the pioneering 1979 thriller Alien. Borrowing more than a little from the Ridley Scott–directed classic, Life will likely please fans willing to pay to watch an unidentified frightening object stalk astronauts trapped inside a space vessel.

A six-person crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has quarantined a single-cell organism unearthed, so to speak, during an earlier mission to Mars. Not content to examine the new life-form under a microscope, scientist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) stimulates “Calvin” with glucose, oxygen, and electricity. Growing rapidly in size and intelligence, Calvin escapes the lab and begins to hunt his former captors.

“Calvin doesn’t hate us,” Hugh reckons, “but he has to kill us in order to survive.” (The creature’s name has no obvious doctrinal ramifications in this thoroughly irreligious film.)

Calvin’s horrifying method for slaughtering crew members resembles those of Ripley’s foe in Alien and also of the creature in the 1982 hit The Thing, but Life (rated R for language throughout, along with some sci-fi violence and terror) remains relatively restrained in its goriness. The film’s spotty intensity and inability to replace Sigourney Weaver’s memorable Alien character, though, should keep Life from reaching cult status.

Still, director Daniel Espinosa does many things right. He masters creating the appearance of a weightless environment: The astronauts swim glitch-free through the space station’s zero-gravity chambers. The haunting soundtrack complements the corridors’ narrowness, producing claustrophobic desperation inside the slowly collapsing structure. Espinosa doesn’t take Hollywood bait, eschewing devolving the film into a gun battle against Calvin. But two brief, visually distorted shots from Calvin’s perspective seem puzzling inclusions.

As the astronauts (Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson, and others), parked just outside Earth’s atmosphere, dwindle in number, the survivors shift their focus from saving themselves to protecting the billions of people spinning a capsule’s drop beneath them. The end of Life is not death for the story but the seed for a possible sequel.