LIFE (2017)

Studio:       Columbia Pictures
Director:    Daniel Espinosa
Writer:       Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Producer:  David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Bonnie Curtis, Julie Lynn
Stars:     Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya

Review Score:

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Summary:

Six astronauts recover a parasitic alien organism that threatens to destroy everyone aboard the International Space Station.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

International Space Station – Pilgrim 7 Mars Mission – Day 1 – CDC quarantine officer Dr. Miranda North, flight engineer Rory Adams, medical officer Dr. David Jordan, systems engineer Sho Murakami, mission commander Ekaterina Golovkina, and biologist Dr. Hugh Derry prepare to receive soil samples from the Pilgrim 7 capsule following its eight-month mission to Mars. After the capsule is hit by debris and knocked off course, Rory spacewalks and operates a mechanical arm to retrieve the capsule.

Day 2 – Hugh discovers a living organism inside a soil sample, proving the existence of life beyond Earth. As part of an educational initiative, an American school votes to name the organism Calvin.

Day 12 – Sho watches via satellite video as his wife Kazumi gives birth. Calvin begins growing.

Day 15 – Calvin goes into hibernation following a brief lab malfunction. Hugh revives Calvin with an electric shock and the organism attaches to Hugh’s hand. Calvin crushes Hugh’s hand, escapes its containment chamber, and envelops a lab rat.

Rory pulls Hugh out of the lab and stays behind to contain the organism. Rory is unsuccessful in his attempts to incinerate Calvin with a flamethrower. Calvin forces its way into Rory’s mouth and kills Rory from inside. Calvin emerges even larger from Rory’s body and escapes through a vent.

Ekaterina spacewalks to repair the communications antenna. Calvin emerges from a coolant valve and ruptures Kat’s suit. Water leaks into the suit, slowly drowning Kat. David pleads with Kat to release the hatch and return inside for rescue, but Kat deliberately dies to keep Calvin outside the space station.

Sho repeatedly fires thrusters in a failed attempt to force Calvin off of the station’s exterior, but ends up putting the station into an orbit that will take them into Earth’s atmosphere. When Sho moves the station back into a stable orbit, Calvin is able to get back inside.

After theorizing that they can render Calvin dormant again by denying it atmosphere, Hugh goes into cardiac arrest and eventually dies. In the process of trying to revive Hugh, the three remaining ISS crewmembers find Calvin attached to Hugh’s leg, feeding from it. Sho locks himself inside a stasis pod to hide from Calvin when the organism attacks. David and Miranda track Calvin through Hugh’s biometric scanner that the organism ingested and manage to contain it to another chamber.

A Soyuz capsule responding to an earlier distress call docks with the station and begins pushing it. Miranda confesses to David that she initiated a firewall protocol to push the entire station into deep space to prevent Calvin from reaching Earth.

Thinking that the Soyuz is there for a rescue, Sho leaves his pod and makes his way to the docking port. Calvin attacks and kills Sho. A docking breach created by the commotion causes the Soyuz to detach and crash into the station.

With the station knocked back into a trajectory with Earth’s orbit, David sacrifices himself by jettisoning in an escape pod with Calvin aboard, hoping to pilot his pod into deep space. Miranda escapes the station in a second pod.

Miranda’s pod malfunctions and spirals into space. David’s pod ends up crashing into the Pacific Ocean. Two fishermen row toward the pod and David, with Calvin attached to his suit, futilely pleads with them to not open the hatch. The fishermen open the escape pod door as more boats arrive at the crash site.

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Review:

‘Boring,’ ‘bland,’ ‘by-the-book,’ or any other unflattering B-word descriptors that can illustrate a film’s underwhelming qualities don’t necessarily equal ‘bad.’  They generally aren’t indicators of something being ‘good’ either, though the distinction is nevertheless relevant to “Life.”  Because even though star power, sharp visuals, and cinematic competency disqualify “Life” from being ‘bad,’ its formulaic flatness assures indifference as a likely audience response.

For eight months, a six-person crew aboard the International Space Station has patiently awaited the return of the Pilgrim 7 probe from Mars.  A rocky retrieval poses an early problem, but the astronauts safely recover the probe’s precious soil samples and dig through the dirt, uncovering evidence of life beyond Earth.

Named ‘Calvin’ as part of an educational initiative with voting schoolkids back home (if this were true to life, it would have been named Alien McAlienFace), a droplet-sized organism responds to a biologist’s poke and gradually begins growing like a seed into a small sapling.  Calvin’s exponential expansion comes with alarming adaptability to its environment, suggesting it possesses a kind of sentience, at least as far as survival instincts are concerned.

I’m tempted to sarcastically say, “guess what happens next?” and assume basic knowledge of “Alien” and every related riff under Alpha Centauri can safely summarize the rest.  Suffice to say, Calvin’s behavior goes from passive to aggressive, with the ISS crew caught in the crossfire of having to corral the evolving creature while it consumes every carbon-based construct it can.

With scant substance to its scenario aside from a pat predator versus prey motif, “Life” is left to mince minutes using a great deal of science-speak.  Unless you’re filling a journal with notes on the creature’s biology or independently verifying capsule trajectory calculations, the film’s first third offers nearly nothing essential.

Dialogue is disposable blather about the rapidity of Calvin’s glucose intake, operation of photoreceptor cells in its neural network, proto-appendage growth rates, and other yawn-making yada yada.  It’s like sitting through the Senate scenes of “The Phantom Menace” hoping, wishing, and praying Darth Maul might Kool-Aid Man into the room with his dual lightsaber and start cutting up delegates, simply so some sort of action might mercifully liven up the lethargy.

By the time Calvin, easily in the running for dopiest alien name in cinema history, does the equivalent, protagonists are taken out of the development oven and turned into cardboard cannon fodder before the preheat cycle even warms up.  Not that “Life” expends effort putting personality into its people before that.

Scripting is satisfied to let actors carry characters on their own charisma, like a community theater production has its cast provide their own wardrobe.  Ryan Reynolds plays the only part, a motormouth jokester (what else?), where adjectives can be used in his description.  The rest of the roles are interchangeable lumps that don’t require a Jake Gyllenhaal or a Rebecca Ferguson, yet add high caliber actors to the arsenal anyway and never pull the trigger on their talents.

With so many words wasted on setup, there isn’t enough time left to play a good game once all of the pieces are finally on the board.  Following in the footsteps of films like “Gravity” (review here) and “The Martian,” spacewalks, pressure losses, ripped suits, and suffocations no longer have the suspense to sustain satisfying outer space intrigue.  And instead of a killer-looking creature, “Life” has an amorphous airborne jellyfish as its antagonist, making for a villain that is literally a gelatinous blob while the humans compose the same figuratively.

Straddling the hyphen between science and fiction, “Life” is overly immersed in the former and so “Natural Geographic” about that latter that it rarely engages through excitement.  Sci-fi fans fervent for something fresh, in production year only but certainly not in content, may still have an adequate alternative on hand.  The bigger budget spectacle of top-name talent and high-def cinematics make a modest case for giving this movie a one-time go in any case.  It’s just that faced with the prospect of returning to “Life” a second time, those fans are virtually certain to be content revisiting their favorite space horror sagas once again.  After all, why listen to an echo when you can go straight to the source instead?

Review Score:  50

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