Martian Monsters Just Want to Live, Live, Live!
Life / directed by Daniel Espinosa
Life combines a traditional sci-fi warning tale about the dangers of toying with forces humankind doesn’t understand with the lesser-known storyline of characters making catastrophically dumb choices, resulting in what I like to call a “double-trouble” morality tale. These two narratives can be complementary, but in Life they exist in some tension — the high moral purpose of the first (this is a movie with a BIG IDEA that you should take seriously) is somewhat at odds with the more popcorn flick thrill of watching a close-knit team get picked off by a baddie. The film’s heart is in the harum-scarum direction, which means its attempts at seriousness end up feeling a little silly and pretentious.
Life’s opening scene is an exercise in disorientation and control. We are with the small crew of a space station that’s in the midst of an important and dangerous recovery operation. It’s not entirely clear where we are - near Mars? Deep space? A capsule is approaching the station with Martian soil samples, only it’s off course or going too fast or some such — it’s all happening so fast! The station is in danger; precious cargo may be lost! But space-walkin’ crew member Rory (Ryan Reynolds) managers to snatch the thing with a massive robotic arm as it’s about to pass the station by, bringing all the tension and danger to a technologically-enabled resting point.
Though never clearly identified, high stakes surround this Martian special delivery. The crew, orbiting Earth, hopes the samples contain extraterrestrial life that might help out with challenges faced by our planet in the not-too-distant future. The team’s biologist, Hugh (Ariyon Bakare), finds a microbe among the samples they’ve received, and manages to rouse it from its dormant state into a quickly-growing organism. As the creature moves from microscopic to visible in its plastic quarantine box, Hugh begins to treat it as a pet, or even a child; he has clear affection for the little protoplasm. In a nice thematic touch, he literally can’t stop manhandling the critter, fetishistically tapping and sifting the thing. Hugh’s not the only one with intense feelings towards this mysterious life form in their midst; the whole crew seems to wait with baited breath for what secrets it might yield. The air is tinged with an almost erotic longing; upon learning that the creature consists of undifferentiated cells, astronaut Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson) murmurs, “All muscle and all brain,” as if she’s just discovered the perfect man. Meanwhile, a contest on Earth to name the creature yields it the name Calvin, a cutesie name the movie uses to ironic effect before too long.
Cultivation of the creature comes to a stop when a lab accident causes the bitty thing to enter the equivalent of a coma. Hugh eventually employs a jolt of electricity to wake it back up, a Frankensteinian impulse that provides the spark for all hell to break loose. Some might say the creature at this point looks like a four-legged starfish; others might say it looks more as if a ghostly Gumby had lain with a jellyfish. In a sequence both creepy and absurd, the revivified creature latches on to Hugh’s hand and proceeds to squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze — all that muscle and all that brain have apparently decided it’s had enough of the poking and prodding. You see, all along, Hugh has been interacting with the creature using rubber gloves inserted into the creature’s holding box, in what must be counted as one of the greatest failures of scientific safety; and now the laxness returns to bite him in the ass by breaking his bones.
The mayhem that ensues is predictable but occasionally mesmerizing. A rat inexplicably secured in a harness is the first to expire, like a rodential S&M customer getting way more than he bargained for. Calvin proves a nimble mover on his cartwheeling appendages, and ups his murderous streak by cleaning out Rory’s inner cavity like an extraterrestrial roto-rooter. As with much of the film (and many others), this trapped-in-the-lab sequence is heavily indebted to Alien, from the scampering alien that seems too small to be a threat, to its tendency to commit rape-like acts of violence on its victims.
But the set-up in Life feels too engineered, with the captive crew, the malignant creature (who everyone keeps insisting just wants to live, live, live!), and the cascading series of failures that handily keep the plot humming along. As our doomed protagonists are whittled down to gloomy doctor David (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ferguson’s Miranda, the claustrophobic setting and high-end special effects keep the film’s shredded credibility patched together; even as it feels like a weak tea version of its inspirations, the craftsmanship keeps it whole. By the end, Life is better served when it goes all-in on its horror tropes, leaving the namby-pamby philosophizing about the nature of life on the proverbial cutting room floor.
