Life

UK Release Date. 24 March 2017
Certification. 15
Running Time. 1 hour 44 mins
Director. Daniel Espinosa
Cast. Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dykhovichnaya, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada.
Rating. 58%

Review.

In an equally improbable scene - eliciting comparisons with similar deep space couplings in The Martian and Gravity - the crew of the International Space Station retrieve a wounded probe containing samples from the planet Mars using the International Space Station's robotic arm. The soil samples contain a dormant single-celled organism - definitive proof of life on Mars - however, the organism soon begins growing and eventually displays hostility toward the human crew. Almost inevitably, the crew are then picked off one by one by the rapid-evolving extraterrestrial life form. If this premise sounds more than a little familiar, that's because Daniel Espinosa's Life shares a narrative DNA with everything from Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris to Danny Boyle's Sunshine. To most glaringly of all, Ridley Scott's Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing.  

But the most glaring issues with Life concern the film's pacing and scant development of characters. Ridley Scott took more than 50 minutes to introduce us to the crew of the Nostromo before the alien creature so memorably burst out of Kane's (John Hurt) chest. In Life, all hell breaks loose in under half an hour. It means certain characters are thinly sketched, commander Ekaterina Golovkin (Olga Dykhovichnaya) suffers most. 

Visually, Life is impressive. The astronauts’ eye views of Earth are some of the most gorgeous since Emmanuel Lubezki's Academy Award-winning work on Gravity. But equally, Life is formulaic; an unremarkable science fiction horror film burdened by the weight of the genre's back catalogue.