Two stars. Rated R, for violence, gore and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.24.17
Director Daniel Espinosa opens his
sci-fi chiller with an absolutely stunning sequence: a vertigo-inducing montage
that tracks through the narrow, weightless chambers of an orbiting International
Space Station, showing each of its six astronaut crewmembers at work.
 |
| With a rapidly growing and ferociously hostile alien whatzit close behind, David (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson) "swim" through the corridors of the International Space Station, hoping to trap their pursuer in a single compartment. |
The verisimilitude is uncanny,
with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey heightening the cramped, claustrophobic
environment while tilting this way and that, his camera completing full
360-degree turns as the crew members drift and pull themselves, weightlessly,
through every wholly realistic detail of production designer Nigel Phelps’
meticulously constructed corridors and modules.
This is golly-gee-whiz filmmaking
at its finest: a prologue clearly intended to one-up Alfonso Cuarón’s equally
mesmerizing opening sequence in 2013’s Gravity.
This one runs at least five spellbinding minutes, and it’s all — even more
amazingly — a single shot, with no cutaways. (Or let’s put it this way: If
camera trickery somehow feigned the single shot, the effect is seamless.)
This spectacular preface
complete, the action ceases briefly in order to present the film’s title — L – I – F – E — in a somber, sinister
font.
At which point, you should get up
and leave, because things go downhill from there.
Quite rapidly.
Scripters Rhett Reese and Paul
Wernick have delivered another textbook example of the so-called “idiot plot,”
which lurches from one crisis to the next solely because each and every
character behaves like a complete idiot at all times. Our real-world ISS
astronauts should sue for character assassination.
Although at its core a shameless
rip-off of Alien — with superior,
up-to-the-nanosecond special effects — there’s a major difference between this
film and that 1979 classic. Sigourney Weaver and her comrades weren’t
blithering idiots, and — important distinction — the biologically fascinating
critter they faced may have been powerful and dangerous, but it was mortal.
The whatzit foolishly unleashed
in Life has the unstoppable fantasy omnipotence
of Jason Voorhees or Freddie Krueger. Much worse, these supposedly intelligent,
vigorously trained scientist-astronauts are just as foolish, foolhardy and
emotionally immature as the slasher fodder in those doomed teenager flicks.
It’s therefore impossible to root
for them, or care about them, because Espinosa and his writers treat them like
disposable meat-bags. And, given the extraordinary production detail against
which this imbecilic story is told, that’s a crushing disappointment.
