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Life, the Alien meets Gravity horror-fest aboard the International Space Station, got a raw deal upon its initial release.
Since the release of Alien nearly half a century go, Hollywood has never failed to churn out a steady parade of clones in an attempt to recapture the game-changing cosmic horror unleashed aboard the Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s perennial science fiction classic.
The results, which are often more miss than hit, ironically bring to mind the numerous foolhardy attempts of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation to obtain, study, and reverse engineer the Xenomorph without fully understanding the subject in question. Even the Alien franchise itself (post-Aliens, of course) is guilty of indulging humanity’s never-ending desire to disregard logic and reason in the race to turn a quick profit.
While a film made in the vein of Alien can definitely take inspiration from the ’79 original (after all, it’s hard to outrun such lasting impact), the audience still needs something new, or else you end up with the entertainment industry equivalent of trying to pass off last month’s leftovers as a fresh meal. One movie that does succeed in rising above the noise of subpar rip-offs, however, is 2017’s Life (now streaming on Peacock), which got a very raw deal upon its initial release. Come on, the cast had Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Hiroyuki Sanada. How did it just come and go with very little fanfare?
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On the surface, Life (co-written by future Twisted Metal producers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) has all the trappings of warmed-over Alien hash: a strange life-form from another planet gets loose on a sophisticated space vessel, grows bigger by the hour, and gruesomely kills a bunch of humans. You’ve heard it all before, right? Well, that’s merely the skeleton of the story — it’s the little tweaks to the well-worn formula that make Life a worthwhile addition to the genre.
For one thing, the movie takes place not on some futuristic ship in the far-flung future, but aboard the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting above the Earth, thus killing two birds with one meteor. The inevitable danger posed by the extraterrestrial feels that much closer to home, and the viewer gets a litany of unique situations that can only happen in a zero-g environment.
“When Alien was made, it was the post-atomic age. When people looked to the future, it was this dystopian neo-punk view, and that was something people liked to speculate about and make movies about,” Life director Daniel Espinosa (Safe House, Child 44) remarked during a 2017 interview with Deadline . “If you ask a young person today what happens in a hundred years, he doesn’t have a clue. He couldn’t even take a picture even in his imagination of what will happen in 20 years. The world is so chaotic. If you ask him well what do you fear the most, he will say what happens tomorrow. This movie is what happens tomorrow, not in a hundred years.”
And then we have the circumstances surrounding the alien’s arrival on the ISS. The unknown specimen (innocently dubbed “Calvin” by school children) is not some unforeseen hitchhiker from the deepest reaches of the cosmos, but a welcome guest, willingly brought aboard in a soil sample from Mars. Rather than groping in the dark like the Nostromo crew, the astronauts in Life know exactly what the score is — at least initially — and set up a number of safety and quarantine measures to keep Calvin contained should anything go awry. The most terrifying part, however, is the way in which our most complex safeguards mean almost nothing to the creature. These characters do everything right scientifically and still end up paying the ultimate price for their curiosity.
Next, we have Calvin himself. The creature design is actually pretty great, bringing to mind the majestic, agile, and highly unsettling fauna one might come across in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean. Unlike the Xenomorph, which takes on the attributes of its incubating host, Calvin has no humanoid attributes. He is an alien through and through, with his various forms more akin to that of a sea star, hydra, manta ray, or any one of the many tentacled horrors found throughout the Cthulhu Mythos.
“I decided to not go into the design process in the same way that you usually do, because I think that most creatures tend to look the same,” Espinosa told Interview Magazine. “I went in a scientific way instead. I hired a brilliant geneticist, and, the same way they build up the dinosaurs by just having one bone, I had him go through that reverse process. If you have a one-cell being that has these kind of traits and is capable of doing these kind of things, as we see in the script, and is raised and created in zero gravity, which assumptions would you make of how it would look?”
Finally, we have the finale, which savagely pulls the rug out from under the audience by flying in the face of traditional feel-good endings. Dr. David Jordan (Gyllenhaal) attempts a noble sacrifice by flying the creature away from Earth in one of the decaying space station’s escape pods. Dr. Miranda North (Ferguson), on the other hand, is to head for home and recount all that happened to the astronauts’ superiors.
Until the very last moments, we’re led to believe the plan was successful… until we see that Jordan has unintentionally brought the alien to our planet’s surface, wrapped up in cocoon-like goo. North spends her last moments onscreen screaming helplessly (a chilling nod to Alien‘s famous marketing tagline) as her malfunctioning pod careens off into space. It’s the old switcheroo, and it works spectacularly, capping off Life with a nihilistic flourish more in line with John Carpenter’s The Thing than the bittersweet optimism found at the end of Alien.
So what are you waiting for? Go give Life another chance. Stream it on Peacock now!
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