If there’s one thing that Daniel Espinosa’s Life makes clear, it’s how thin the line between fear and hope is. For the six astronauts on the International Space Station who have the task of assessing a sample of material from Mars, there is the hope that they will discover that life exists away from Earth. For us, the viewer, that same hope is amplified to the point where it is represented as fear – fear of the unknown, fear of the other, fear of the never ending void that is space. The hope of discovery still remains, but all the bundled nerve anxiety of hyped up anticipation and uncertainty muddles the hope into an unsettled pool of unease.
Unfairly shafted on its initial release, Life is a horrifically entertaining sci-fi horror film that ekes out every possible moment of tension from a deceptively simple premise. While audiences appear to cry out for more original content as the overwhelming sea of Disneyfication storms on like an angry Veruca Salt demanding that they ‘want it all’, Lifesomehow managed to find itself without an audience. Look, I’m partially to blame for this, as for some reason, I scoffed at the notion of seeing (what I unfairly assumed to be) another Alienknockoff.
While Life does carry some of those genre staples that Ridley Scott’s classic helped establish, it presents them with a wealth of care and complexity. Under the initial guidance of Exobiologist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare), the Martian microbe is coaxed from a dormant state into life. Gradually, it grows into a multi-celled organism which – thanks to schoolchildren on Earth – is named ‘Calvin’. As the crew on the ISS monitor its rapid growth, a mishap occurs which requires Calvin to be ‘shocked’ back to life with the assistance of a mini-cattle rod like device. Before you can say ‘oh, that’s a bad idea’, Calvin manages to escape its secure containment box, and starts to do what every threatened creature would try and do – survive.
With thanks to the superb script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, Life is full of a cast of competent and career driven characters, with each one clearly outlining their position on the ISS, and each one prioritising their core objectives over base human emotions. The cast is diverse, reflecting the true nature of what the ISS would look like. Great performances from Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Kiroyuki Sanada, Olga Dykhovichnaya, Ariyon Bakare, and Ryan Reynolds, help create the feeling that this is a team that has been isolated in space for an extended period of time. There’s no manufactured tension, or out of character idiocy (here’s looking at you Prometheus), just a team of talented people thrust into a horrible situation and forced to try and survive. As Calvin grows, and the threat amplifies, the realisation that the surviving members need to do whatever they can to stop this being from getting to Earth becomes paramount.
Life operates in much the same way as the growth pattern of Calvin – at first, it’s small and innocuous, then it grows into overwhelming chaos and gore, managing to surprise and shock in unsettling ways. What makes Lifework as well as it does is the way that logic is implemented into the narrative. There’s a clear ‘if this, then that’ at work that is clearly thought out, with the narrative being allowed to play out to its natural conclusion. So often you can feel the hand of the filmmaker forcing a story to a conclusion that they want to see, rather than allowing the narrative to unfurl in a natural way, but that’s not the case here.
The next part of the review will stumble into spoiler territory. I want to stress, Life is a film that is definitely worth watching, and it’s certainly a film that’s best going into not knowing the conclusion.
Still here? Fantastic.
While the horror and fear that Life generates works in isolation, creating a genuinely unsettling film experience, it’s humanities real life endeavours into space that make this even more disturbing. Space exploration is an endeavour that is out of reach for the majority of mankind, with billionaire wannabe space cowboys who jettison electric cars into space just because they can being at the pinnacle of modern explorers. If you have enough dollars in your bank account, you can even possibly secure yourself a seat on the first expedition to Mars.
For everyone else, we’re simply spectators to this main event of privilege in the skies above. While Life purports that united countries will help with scientific exploration in space, the reality is much more different. Sure, the inhabitants of this fictionalised version of the ISS have the safety of Earth in mind, and while Life is a big ‘what if’ of a story, it’s clear how easily things can get out of hand, with every horrific death a brutal reminder of how outclassed we are as a (supposed) civilisation. When we can’t even unite to combat the climate emergency that we find ourselves in, and when the risk of long dead diseases is heightened thanks to moronic anti-vaccination folks, it is a film like Lifethat manages to remind us how extremely outclassed we would be if an ecological or biological disaster came to Earth.
Sure, the chances of this occurring are slim to non-existent, but that’s what makes the internal reality of Life even more terrifying. With renegade yeehaws who have enough bucks to do whatever they please, paired with the arrogant drive to be the ‘first’ at anything, it’s conceivably inevitable that the events of Life could happen. This is catastrophizing applied to fiction, but that’s the power of great stories – we can’t help but apply them to our reality. Out of our control, and because of one man’s arrogance, the world could be thrown into jeopardy because of some extra-terrestrial entity that is dragged out of its home planet and into a foreign world, and because of natural instincts, it simply wants to survive.
Life’s conclusion presents a doomed Earth. By supreme misfortune, a jettisoned escape capsule that contains Calvin that was intended to be shot into the void of space lands in the waters of Thailand. Oblivious to the horrors inside, fishermen approach the floating vessel and open the door, only to find Jake Gyllenhaal’s terrified David Jordan. It’s a startling ending that grips you – making it difficult to shake off the spine tingling sensation you’re left with.
For me, I’ve found myself pondering the events of Life over the days after viewing it. There is so much in our lives that is left up to the will of others. While the ISS is an entity that is funded and run by different countries, there is that pertinent reminder that thanks to the wealth of a select few, it doesn’t take much for someone like Elon Musk to possibly throw us into a state of disaster.
I couldn’t help but consider the episode of Reply All titled “The Silence in the Sky”, where the team look at the community of scientists searching for extra-terrestrial life from different corners of the planet. In it, the reality of what goes into searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence looks like, and with a Doritos ad about corn chips coming to life being beamed into space, well, it’s a frightening reality. With the news that a Russian tycoon announced a $100 million initiative to help fund the search for extra-terrestrials, the concern of the ethics behind exploring space for extra-terrestrial life is brought into the spotlight. Half of the group think that we should be doing more to find life in space, while the other half believe it could be the thing that hastens the end of humanity.
What’s clear at the end of the episode is that it doesn’t take much to engage with space and to send a message out into the void in the hope that something sends a message back. The actions of few could have irreparable consequences for the many of us. Is the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence ethical? Is it something we should be doing as a whole? It’s clear that people are already doing it – and have been for years –, but does that make it right? While it’s cute to see the Mars Rover trundling around on a different planet, what happens if they find life? Well, of course humanity will send someone or something to retrieve that and to assess it. It’s out of the hands of the majority of the people on Earth to stop it occurring, so we can’t help but just await the inevitable. And, if Life is any suggestion, that inevitability is going to be the end of us all.
Again, this is the power of great fiction. It forces us to look at our own lives and conceive of a possible reality where these events take place. It forces us to ask ‘what if’ questions of ourselves, making us question what we would do in these situations. In the case of Life, it suggests that the situation we already find ourselves in – helpless and watching on from afar – is one that will afford us no hope if the worst case scenario unfurls. We are doomed, and regardless of what happens in the future, we will always have been doomed to begin with. After all, this is the nature of life itself – we exist, until we do not. What happens in between is not up to us.
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada
Writers: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick