In the Flesh: Life

That Daniel Espinosa’s Life is aping Alien hardly qualifies as an insight. Quarantine breaches, a terrifyingly efficient lifeform tearing through the crew of a claustrophobic spaceship, human dramas and institutional betrayals taking place in an environment a knife’s edge away from the obliterating emptiness of space — it clearly knows what it’s doing; the question is, does it do it well enough to justify retreading one of horror’s most iconic films? And the answer? Yeah, pretty much! Life is a tight, mean little film, a hardscrabble hour and forty minutes of likable, interesting characters locked in a desperate struggle for survival with a beautifully designed extraterrestrial horror. Ariyon Bakare and sci-fi mainstay Rebecca Fergusion are particular standouts here, but Ryan Reynolds is surprisingly endearing as an everyman mechanic and Jake Gylenhaal makes excellent use of his large, expressive features to convey animal terror.

And speaking of animals, the film’s monster, a Martian organism dubbed ‘Calvin’ by an enthusiastic class of grade schoolers after its discovery, is a genuine work of art. Where Geiger’s famous design for the titular alien plays on psychosexual and primordial anxieties (fear of rape, fear of insects, fear of reptiles), Calvin’s taps into our instinctual terror of the abyss. His design consciously echoes oceangoing lifeforms, especially deep-sea bioluminescent fish and invertebrates, as well as nudibranchs and sea stars, using an echo of the marine void we know to evoke the horror of deep space, an environment equally hostile to the human body. It dovetails nicely with Dr. Jordan’s (Gylenhaal) affinity for space, which has led him to stay in orbit longer than any person before him, saturating his body with radiation and atrophying his muscles, that he then inadvertently brings the horrors of the void back to Earth with him. You know what they say about gazing into abysses.

Jon Ekstrand’s soundtrack is an unexpected delight as well, a throwback to the operatic tensions of John Williams and the dawn of the modern big-budget science fiction film. Special effects studio Double Negative lives up to that pedigree; the film’s CGI is right at the peak of the 2010s era, aided by gorgeous cinematography and seamless zero-gravity wire work. Its scenes of characters propelling themselves at breakneck speed through the space station’s claustrophobic decks and cabins have a wonderfully real sense of kinetic danger, and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey takes care to frame everything with a close, intimate feel which gradually becomes suffocating as disasters cascade through the station. Life may not have the thematic richness or class analysis present in Alien, but it makes good use of its famous template without copying too closely.