Life movie review8/12/2023 And as the novelty of Calvin’s appearance and behavior wears off, it starts to look more and more ridiculous, especially as it stops developing into something increasingly frightening, and just becomes a free-floating CGI effect. A development allowing them to track Calvin through the ship is abruptly forgotten. The story loses any sense of its characters as individual people, and turns them into generic horror-movie stooges lining up to die. One of the most crucial action scenes is rushed, visually muddled, and hard to follow. There’s no sense of a safe haven where the characters can retreat.Īnd the closer Life gets to the climax, the more balls its story drops. The station is a sterile, claustrophobic place to begin with, and with so little warmth in Espinosa’s chilly visual aesthetic, and no clear up-or-down orientation, the ISS lacks any sense of comfort or familiarity. It also makes things scarier when Calvin starts posing a significant threat. That sense of “there’s no up in space” is particularly strong in Life, and with Espinosa’s camera swirling around the cast in long, dizzying takes, the disorientation makes for a solid thrill-ride experience. But he does set up plenty of extremely convincing zero-gravity action, with his cast casually buzzing around the ISS like bees in a hive, steering themselves with hand-and-footholds, or working upside-down relative to the audience. Director Daniel Espinosa ( Safe House) can’t top Gravity’s terrifying spacewalk scenes, with the sense of Earth looming over astronauts like an immense, inimical shadow. But too often, its reasons for doing absolutely anything amount to “because this is the way Alien did it.”įor someone who’s never seen Alien - or Alfonso Cuarón’s terrifying 2013 space-survival thriller Gravity, which Life also mimics a fair bit - Life could largely be a dramatic, satisfying experience. Life is a sleek, effective thriller, sometimes scary and often visually impressive. But Life lacks that satisfying next step, where it adds the background that makes the unlikely seem reasonable. The new space-thriller Life borrows a lot of its broad ideas and narrow story beats from Alien, to the point where it feels like a cover version of Scott’s film, and one of the elements it most prominently borrows is the idea of an alien that grows physically larger and more deadly as the action builds. It’s standard for the creatures in creature-features to get scarier as the movie goes along, but Alien writers Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett came up with a particularly plausible reason for their xenomorph antagonist to keep evolving into more threatening forms: its species has a life cycle, with stages inspired by insects. One of the great gifts Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror classic Alien brought to the world was a space monster that felt like it had a little science behind it.
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