Life

After the laudable artistic accomplishment and box-office success of last year’s Arrival, I was hopeful that thoughtfully crafted, high-concept science fiction was becoming a larger part of mainstream cinematic culture. I was therefore cautiously optimistic at the prospect of a film like Life, a production with a phenomenal cast, strong writers and all the potential to be an excellent piece of filmmaking. So imagine my disappointment upon finding that much of this potential is squandered by a weak script, shallow characterization and an unfortunately derivative visual aesthetic. The film is not without its merits, and it does boast a few moments of ingenuity — these moments just happened to be too few and far between to resuscitate this pallid corpse of a B-thriller in A-movie trappings.

There is no question that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey left an indelible mark on the way science fiction films are conceived and executed, and Ridley Scott’s Alien contributed an unmistakable prototype that can be seen to some extent in almost every space-based horror film made in its wake. While these influences are excusable — and to some extent, unavoidable — in Life, they’re far too blatant and poorly executed to overlook. The film focuses on the crew members of the International Space Station as they retrieve soil samples from a damaged Mars probe. The samples contain evidence of extraterrestrial life (hence the title), with predictably disastrous results for the crew. If that setup sounds familiar, don’t expect things to get more original as the bodies start piling up.

In general, the cast performed admirably, although their screen time and therefore their potential for development is limited by the narrative necessity of their deaths. Hollywood leading-men du jour Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal are effectively relegated to supporting roles, although they both turn in the solid performances one might expect. Rebecca Ferguson is tasked with holding together the proceedings as the crew’s captain, although her role is somewhat underwritten, given its narrative centrality. Hiroyuki Sanada and Ariyon Bakare do their best to make something out of characters that are defined by traits rather than development, but as with the rest of the performers, the script fails them utterly. I expected better from writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, considering their exceptional ability to reconceptualize genre tropes informs movies like Zombieland and Deadpool, but I guess you can’t win ’em all.

Swedish-born director Daniel Espinosa (Safe House, Child 44) certainly never attains the level of sophistication of Kubrick’s 2001, but also never comes close to the cost-effective scares of Scott’s Alien films. While H.R. Giger and Dan O’Bannon constructed a world of genitally inspired monstrosities with Aliens, the effects team for Life is falling back on the amorphous eldritch horrors of H.P. Lovecraft. The problem in this film, as with most direct adaptations of the author’s work, is that his chthonic creatures are scary precisely because they are left to the imagination of the reader. As such, no visual adaptation can ever truly do them justice, and Life falls particularly short in this regard. The creature in this film looks something like a translucent plant that eventually evolves into some sort of cosmic cephalopod, failing to convey anything close to the menace of Giger’s obsidian-skinned, steel-toothed monstrosity. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but the concept of a leafy octopus that looks like it’s made out of the rice paper on a Vietnamese spring roll doesn’t strike me as all that threatening.

Espinosa does make a few inspired directorial choices — the trailer for the film executed a solid bait-and-switch with a significant character death, and he refuses to pull his narrative punches with a significantly downbeat ending that I’m sure produced a significant uphill battle with studio executives. While Life‘s ending is highly predictable in many ways, it still offers something to distinguish an otherwise unremarkable genre outing. Although it doesn’t breathe new life into the space-horror subgenre, it’s a reasonably passable diversion that avoids the nadir of awfulness even if it never attains the zenith of greatness to which it aspires. Rated R for language throughout, some sci-fi violence and terror.

Now Playing at Carmike 10, Carolina Cinemark, Regal Biltmore Grande, Epic of Hendersonville.