Commander Kat (Olga Dykhovichnaya) locks herself out of the ISS to keep Calvin outside, only for the alien to jump onboard at the last moment.Dead Rory even floats with his arms out, like Jesus on the cross. Or for him, if you appreciate your religious connections. Rory enters the lab to save Hugh (Ariyon Bakare), only to die instead of him.The rest of the crew are also willing to die for others. Miranda is lost in space, while David becomes a suitcase for the alien entity. And so they do … just not in the way they expect. Miranda and David are both willing to die to save the human race. This is particularly true of films that send people into outer space for the good of humanity, though we also see it in films with space-like environments (i.e., ocean-floor movies). More than any other cinema profession (…probably), sacrifice is hard-coded into the astronaut job description. There’s a parallel in the film’s ending with David the android becoming “death, the destroyer of worlds” in Alien: Covenant (also 2017). Sometimes that allows for sequels, sometimes it’s just about lingering dread. If we were to extend the film’s linear progression of death and genre subversion, it almost certainly ends in planet-wide devastation.Īgain, this is a common horror device, whereby the story’s trajectory continues after the movie ends, independently of us, the audience. The kicker? David is carrying the ultimate weapon of annihilation. More to the point, he doesn’t want to come back because humans only know how to kill, hurt and destroy. Of all the people on the ISS, David is the one who doesn’t want to come back. There’s a hefty bit of irony in this ending. Miranda’s pod is the one hurtling into space, while David – and Calvin – makes it back to Earth. While this looks exactly like David’s plan, it’s the complete opposite. This lets Miranda escape in the other pod and raise the alarm back on Earth.Īfter the two pods launch, one is hit by debris that sends it careering into space. He means to manually override the auto-pilot for as long possible, marooning himself – and the killer creature – in deep space. With the rest of the crew dead, Miranda and medical officer David (Jake Gyllenhaal) have one last chance to save the planet.ĭavid lures Calvin into an escape pod. As such, its reversal of fortune is both gruesome joke and right on the money. However, Life is also a horror film, a genre often defined by ambiguity and endless endings. Life subverts this, showing us humanity’s good side (sacrifice – see below), only to leave us with annihilation. It’s jarring because sci-fi is broadly redemptive: if the genre shows us the worst of times, it’s usually balanced by hope. Certainly, it introduces a bigger story – the destruction of humanity – only to leave it hanging. Now, depending on your tastes, the final twist is either bold storytelling or cop-out. When the Soyuz spacecraft shows up, it’s not there to save the crew, but to push the ISS away. But her secret mission is to protect Earth at all costs. Quarantine officer Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson) follows protocol to keep the ISS safe.Not only does this shake up the narrative but, like the death of the Soyuz crew later on, it removes the easy escape route. He’s the obvious hero … so the movie bumps him off first. Space cowboy Rory (Ryan Reynolds) comes complete with balls of steel and endless quips.Rather than revealing the secret of life, the alien organism brings death. Calvin evolves from amoeba to super-intelligent predator.This pay-off relies on a number of earlier twists: Instead, the film kills off all its characters … and then the planet. Rather than a series of deaths followed by triumph or the suggestion of hope, Life bends the rules of story resolution. Sounds derivative? Actually, that familiarity is a red herring. Priming the big revealįor the most part, this story runs on a well-worn groove: astronauts pick up an alien entity, and the alien picks off the astronauts, one by one. Stick around either way – there’s often crossover. That’s the 2017 sci-fi horror film, rather than solutions to existential angst. But as the alien entity matures, it gets very smart, very fast … and it’s primed to survive at all costs. “Calvin”, as the organism is soon known, evolves rapidly. Onboard the ISS, biologist Hugh Derry reanimates a dormant microbe from the probe’s soil sample. The crew of the International Space Station intercept a Mars probe that may hold the biggest scientific discovery to date: evidence of life beyond Earth. How sci-fi horror Life swaps little green men for red herrings – and why sacrifice is key to tales of space and survival.
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