Life (2017) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Let’s get Mikey to try it. He’ll eat anything.

We’ve been told that in space, no one can hear you scream. That’s never any truer than in Life, an existential roller coaster of a horror film, where the audience is as trapped in the moment as the protagonists are.

First Impressions

During a routine mission on the International Space Station, a group of astronauts discovers a new organism. They study it, believing it to be “cute,” until it attacks one scientist. Suddenly, everything changes, and emergency procedures are put in place. Astronauts are segregated from the group. Parts of the ship break off and float away. Danger is coming. It’s some new form of Life, and everyone is gonna die!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Onboard the International Space Station, the crew of the Mars Pilgrim 7 mission is awaiting the flyby of their satellite with soil samples, fresh from the red planet. Rory (Ryan Reynolds) performs an EVA to operate the ISS robotic arm and catches the satellite as it passes the station. The next day, exobiologist Hugh (Ariyon Bakare) examines dirt samples and discovers a single cell. He alters the temperature and chemical composition of the air, awakening the amoeba-like cell. A group of school children asks questions of the astronauts on a live TV show, which ends with a girl being allowed to name the alien life form after her school, calling it Calvin.

Twelve days later, the cells have multiplied and are grouping together. Hugh informs the others that each cell is a muscle, nerve, and photoreceptor all in one. Hugh is fascinated by the activity in this small creature, which reacts to his near-touch. Sho (Hiroyuki Sanada) watches his wife give birth via a video feed. After three weeks of constant experiments on Calvin, a clamp fails in the lab, prompting quarantine officer Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson) to re-explain the rules and urge Hugh to get some sleep. He’s excited about exploring the organism, believing it may someday replace stem cells and also help restore the use of his crippled legs. The lab accident changes the atmosphere in Calvin’s habitat, sending the starfish-sized creature into hibernation.

Hugh uses a shock wand to awaken Calvin, which works too well as the muscular alien breaks the wand and crushes his hand. It uses the broken wand to puncture the glove and escapes into the lab, which, like the rest of the ship, is at zero-G. The creature consumes a lab rat in a matter of seconds as Rory enters to attempt to extricate the unconscious Hugh. Rory becomes trapped inside the lab after getting Hugh out and tries to burn the alien, but it has little to no effect on Calvin. The organism enters Rory’s mouth and eats him from the inside out, eventually escaping through a ceiling vent before it can be automatically closed.

The crew attempts to send a distress call to NASA, but the comm array has failed. The Russian mission commander, Kat (Olga Dihovichnaya), goes outside to fix the array and realizes the coolant tank reads as empty. When she opens in, Calvin leaps onto her suit, crushing her internal coolant system. She begins to drown in zero-G as the fluid fills her helmet. Medical Officer David (Jake Gyllenhaal) attempts to get her inside, but she sacrifices herself by pushing off with Calvin still attached to her. Before she drifts too far away, the alien organism leaps back on the station and heads toward the thrusters. Sho and Miranda fire the trusters to prevent Calvin from re-entering the station, but to no avail. They have only managed to decay the station’s orbit.

The crew waits as the movie audience gets a view from Calvin’s point of view within the ship. Hugh passes out from lack of blood because, as the crew finds out, Calvin has attached itself to his paralyzed leg, slowly feeding off him. Sho hides from the larger alien creature in a sleep pod. Realizing they can track the organism, due to it swallowing a tracker from Hugh’s leg, Miranda uses Hugh’s body to draw Calvin into an airlock in an attempt to jettison him. A Soyuz space capsule docks with the ISS, not to save them as first believed, but to push them further into space as a quarantine measure, as Miranda explains to David. Not realizing this, Sho opens the hatch for the Russian astronauts, allowing Calvin to kill both of them, and Sho as well.

These violent actions create a leak that blows the capsule into the station. With only limited resources, Miranda and David make a plan to ensure Calvin never reaches Earth. David will draw Calvin into lifeboat A and manually fly them into space, while Miranda takes pod B back to Earth. The unstable orbit of the ISS, along with the damage from the capsule explosion, causes a debris field to be in their way as they eject the life pods. Calvin fights David’s attempt at maneuvering the joystick, forcing the pilot to hold him back. One pod jettisons into space, while the second lands in an ocean, where it’s approached by a pair of Asian fishermen. Looking inside, they see David, pinned under Calvin’s tendrils, screaming at them not to open the door. Elsewhere, Miranda is seen tumbling off into space. The last shot is the clueless fishermen, not understanding, and turning the handle to the hatch.

“You’re in there, and you’re playing around with it like it’s your buddy.” – Rory

History in the Making

Life would normally be reserved as an article in my 31 Days of Horror series every October, but felt like an appropriate film to showcase the start of 2017. It’s an extremely existential horror film wrapped in the guise of science-fiction. As with so many films before it, it creates a new level of tension for this type of mashup. Written by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, two writers responsible for both the Zombieland and Deadpool franchises, Life is a constant meditation on the meaning of that word. What defines life, and what is most important about maintaining it, are two major themes of the work. The film does a lot to make the best use of a confined setting as it delivers a better type of horror film. A film that forces audiences along on a very dark ride.

Genre-fication

Life is both a return to the classic style of sci-fi/horror from previous years as well as something wholly new. It plays equally in both genres, allowing each to elicit its best attributes. But unlike classic science-fiction/horror films, Life chooses a different resolution. One that’s pretty adventurous, especially based on the history of the genre. Audiences probably recognize many of the genre films that Wernick and Reese, along with director Daniel Espinosa, chose to reference in this film. The Blob (both versions), The Thing from Another World (or more accurately, John Carpenter’s The Thing), and certainly Alien are all sci-fi/horror films that inform the style and audience expectations of Life. Instead of taking place in a small town, a remote Antarctic facility, or even a futuristic long-haul mining tug, Life takes over the International Space Station. An 8-minute oner opens the film, giving the audience a great idea about the layout of the relatively small space station. The confined space becomes a perfect setting for the horror that is about to come. And make no mistake, Life is absolutely a horror film. It follows the conventions of the protagonists being killed off by the killer one by one. In this case, a strange aquatically-inspired Martian creature. What really sets this apart from other sci-fi films of this type is the absolutely bleak ending. In The Blob and Alien, the protagonists suffered devastating losses but wind up surviving at the film’s end–somehow managing to defeat the creature and master their own fates. Life is more akin to the ambiguous ending of The Thing. In that film, one of the two final characters is most likely the creature, disguised as a human. Whichever one is the real person has little to no hope of survival. What’s left is a guessing game (and a great one). Life unambiguously creates the most primal terror as two fishermen, who do not understand English, prepare to open the space capsule, releasing Calvin into the world at large. Just how long do you think it will be until humanity goes extinct? It’s a tragically depressing ending, but one that fits the modern times so apropos. In reality, life does not often have a happy ending, and modern audiences know it.

Director Espinosa also went on record, citing noir as an influential genre in his creation of the look of the film. Films like Double Indemnity, Touch of Evil, or The Killing (which is about making a killing at a horse track robbery, not an actual homicide). Espinosa also mentions Psycho as an influence in his choice to cast popular and beloved actor Ryan Reynolds as the first casualty of Calvin. There is a certain disappointment with Reynolds being the first to die, but it’s not as if the rest of the cast were completely unknowns. Rebecca Ferguson, who is more popular now than 8 years ago, had a large part in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and Jake Gyllenhaal has been in dozens of lead roles, including Donnie Darko and The Day After Tomorrow (as well as many non-genre films). I’m not sure I believe in the influence of the noir genre in this film. It’s certainly a dark film, with a downer ending, but that’s not something indicative of noir itself. Perhaps it was an off-the-cuff remark to provide a little more credibility for a younger director.

Societal Commentary

Life is all about life, and death. It takes a fascinating look at the extremes humans go to to survive, and all the ways that living is trying to kill us. Horror films, by nature, are about death. And as many know, living is the leading cause of death among individuals. So far, everyone who has ever lived, has ended up dying–in the end. But audiences love to be entertained by characters escaping horrible situations by the skin of their noses. That adrenaline rush from the tension leads to a better appreciation of our own lives. Unfortunately, there are no survivors to root for in this film. The title of the film can be seen as a reference to the new organism found in the soil sample, or to the fight against death that the characters are forced to endure. These individuals have survived incredible odds just to get to the opening of the film. Just think about the many ways humans have engineered to launch our delicate bodies into space and keep them alive while floating around in a cold, airless void. Any mistakes on board a space station can lead to immediate and irreparable loss of life, as seen in dozens of other films about space travel. Yet, all of these massive milestones mean nothing, as it is a single reanimated cell, which grows into a killer organism, that manages to kill over six people and threatens all life on our planet.

The counterpoint to all this death is the birth of Sho’s daughter, as seen in the first 30 minutes of the film. Both she and Calvin start as the smallest of lifeforms, just a few cells. These cells eventually grow and divide into what becomes either a human or an alien creature. Oftentimes, there’s no telling what those cells will turn into. Each baby has the potential for greatness or mediocrity. They can become a brilliant scientist or a sociopathic killer. No one knows for certain. In the same way, none of the scientists could have foreseen the actual dangers of exploring the galaxy (even if filmgoers knew exactly what was going to happen). Science is about asking questions and studying life. Sometimes those questions lead to answers, and sometimes they present less favorable options. As an example, Marie Curie famously succumbed to radiation poisoning for her experiments with radium. There’s just no way of knowing for certain at the outset how an experiment may pan out.

The Science in The Fiction

For all of its tension and scariness, Life features some less-than-stellar science. It’s unfair to expect that every science-fiction film will adhere to a faithful physics model. It’s just not going to happen. However, films that take place in a more realistic version of our world should at least try to adhere to these rules. You can forgive a movie with ships that travel faster-than-light and fire laser beams for forgetting that such things are impossible. But set your film in Earth orbit, on the International Space Station, and suddenly things feel like they should follow more conventional rules. The film opens with Rory taking an EVA to operate the station’s robotic arm. The plan is to catch the Pilgrim 7 probe as it flies past. It doesn’t appear to be going that fast, but speed can be deceptive in space with minimal reference points. If watching The Martian the other week taught me anything, it’s that Newton’s third law is real: any force provides an equal and opposite reaction. The probe slams into the arm near Rory as both are moved away from the narrow field of vision provided by one of the windows, yet the station doesn’t suffer any backlash from the maneuver. No one appeared to be manning the controls either, or providing an opposing thrust. It’s a jarring moment as it feels like something more should have happened with the station. After that, I stopped paying attention to the bad physics due to the bad science.

Saying that the science is bad in the film is disingenuous. It’s more than the lead scientist lacks proper procedures for dealing with unknown life forms. Miranda, who is the station’s quarantine officer, makes a big deal about the plans she and a committee made about safety and firewalls, but doesn’t share this with anyone until after half the crew has died. Safety protocols can only be followed if they’re understood. Granted, Hugh is enamored with Calvin. He basically created life (or brought it back from the dead), and sees it as a potential solution to his crippled legs. The fact that each cell of Calvin is a muscle, nerve, and photoreceptor all in one, and can be used to replace stem cells, gives him hope. And that optimism makes him excited, so he doesn’t sleep, which leads to sloppiness and accidents. In reality, the firewall plans are relatively smart, deciding that if the station becomes infected, pushing it into deep space is the best option. It’s that the knowledge of this contingency is used as a surprise plot twist in the third act. If Hugh had known this in advance, maybe he wouldn’t have rushed to open the hatch, thinking that he was rescued.

The Final Frontier

The design of Calvin is a unique creature in the pantheon of space monsters. It’s smart like a predator, even though the scientists say it’s only reacting to stimuli. It feels more like a lion or a shark hunting its prey, waiting until the right time to strike. It looks like an octopus, a manta ray, and an eel rolled into one creepy monster. It’s even given a rudimentary face in its final form, made up of various flaps of skin around its head that look like eyes and a mouth. Calvin is animated in such a way that it appears to be swimming through the zero-G air, like a sea creature, but in space. Its advantageous navigation amps up the fright factor, since like an octopus, it can squeeze into tight spaces where no human may think to check–until it’s too late.

Life was released by Sony Pictures the year before the Spider-Man spin-off film Venom was released. That character is an alien symbiote who falls to Earth and can alter its shape, becoming essentially a costume on a human host. There was a lot of chatter online in 2017 when, weeks before this film was released, news that Sony was releasing Venom the following year hit the news outlets. The trailer for Life also happened to include an outtake from a previous Sony film, Spider-Man 3, that included a crowd of people looking upwards and gasping (a shot not in the final film). Spider-Man 3 included the first on-screen version of the Venom character, and fans (such as myself) have adopted the head canon that Life is secretly a prequel to Venom. Calvin comes to Earth, escapes, and then finds Eddie Brock, who becomes his host. That’s not really the case, as Life is an existential nightmare scenario, while Venom is a superhero action film, and neither of them shares any relation except for the company that produced them. Still, with the rise of the shared universes of so many franchises, one might ask What If…?

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